BEWARE THE INTERNET

Via. Political Penguin (who discusses the pitfalls of parenting and the net)

Reply to PragueTory

On my recent interview with Paul Burgin, PragueTory challenged me to explain why I felt “disgusted by the treatment of Bob Piper back in December.” Well, some readers may or may not have been aware of a gaff that Bob Piper made before Christmas. Bob reproduced an image of a blacked-up David Cameron. It was created by Unity of Ministry of Truth and supposedly spoofed the Tory ‘Sort-it’ campaign.

It was neither Unity’s nor Bob’s finest hour because, if you ask me, it wasn’t particularly funny. Unity can of course get away with whatever he pleases, his veil of anonymity protecting him, but Bob is a councillor and has a position of responsibility within the party. For the record Bob apologised profusely and spent a couple of weeks in a blogger-gulag. Bob is commited blogger and has always played the game with the Tory bloggers: reading their sites and posting teasing comments. Yet when he reproduced Unity’s picture PragueTory went for the <a href="http://praguetory.blogspot.com/2006/12/desperate-labour-bloggers-going-too.html
“>throat, no doubt aware of what Bob had to lose. While PT claimed that he himself wasn’t offened (isn’t that always the way?), he claimed others were: –

However, Kaz who is a BME councillor in Birmingham has found them to be offensive and insulting and asked in the comments for Piper and Ministry of Truth to take the posts down. On reflection, I agree. It is not acceptable to use “Yo Niggars”, “them thar ethnics” or a blacked up face as part of political campaigning no matter how “satirical” or “ironic” you are being.

Now, the picture may have been in ‘bad taste’ but was it all really nessesary? Many of the other Tory bloggers jumped <a href="http://dizzythinks.blogspot.com/2006/12/if-tory-did-this-what-would-people-say.html
“>onboard, and the issue blew up out of all proportion. As PT proudly states; both blink and the chief executive of Race Equality Sandwell were outraged, but why did this become <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/6166593.stm
“>national news? How did a councillor-blogger become such a <a href="http://dizzythinks.blogspot.com/2006/12/bob-piper-makes-bbc.html
“>big story? I wonder.

Bob learn’t a valuable political lesson about the danger of political correctness, but I also expect he learn’t a little something about the Tory bloggers he had teased and joked with. The Tories, and especially their bloggers, always make a big deal about free speach and political correctness, and as a libertarian I have simpathy with this position, but if you claim that political correctness is a bane on society, you then can’t go and exploit it to stuff a fellow blogger can you? It’s just not cricket.

Of course this is not cricket, it’s politics. PragueTory did the Tories a service and I don’t blame him for running with the story. But Bob was on good terms with the Tory bloggers and it was disgusting to see him taken down like that. Had he gunned for Tory bloggers then cool, fair game, but he didn’t. But like I said: It’s Politics.

The irregular quote of the day

From Chicken Yoghurt.

New Labour, it seems, are steaming over the cash for honours investigation. You get the feeling that if Yates of the Yard doesn’t come up with something substantial, the revenge taken by the party high-command will be swift and unpleasant to watch.

Just ask Andrew Gilligan. If you attack NL, you better kill the bloody buggers, because if they get back up, you’re fucked quite frankly.

Radio Blah-Blah and the last days of Blair

This morning I was lying in bed, still unable to sleep due to my chest infection, reading the Observer Review section. Turning the pages (the rustling causing Mrs. tyger to kick me in the shin. Reflex or deliberate, hmm?) I came across Miranda Sawyer’s Radio review. She was frustrated by last week’s rather pointless Today Programme interview with the the PM, Tony Blair.

John Humphrys, Sawyer explained, was asking Blair if the Cash for Peerages enquiry was making his Premiership untenable. ‘We can’t go on like this, can we?’ asked the BBC presenter. Blair’s predictable response was to ask in what sense Humphrys meant? (Read: those police enquires don’t preoccupy me, John, how very trivial. I run the country y’know?)

Sawyer was exasperated: –

He can’t answer those questions! So they’re pointless! And anyway, who cares? Today’s obsession with Westminster-insider blether often ruins the programme. It was thoroughly galling to have it spoil an important interview like this.

She has a point. We’re in a post-Paxman age where all political interviewers are judged, not for their ability to cross-examine policy or expose the person beneath the political mask, but by their capacity to bully the politician into a blithering copy-machine, constantly repeating the same non-answer to the same suicide-pill question.

Now I’m not making excuses for Blair; if he’s guilty of cooking the books, as I suspect he is, then he should do the ‘perp-walk’ as the banal Tory bloggers gleefully demand. But does the daily roasting of the PM and ministers on the Today programme actually make for good radio? And more to the point: is it useful? I don’t think so. If anything the Today programme, and similar attack-dog style programmes such as Newsnight, actually do little more than create a sense of political disconnect between the body-politic and public.

People already suspect that all politicians are lying scumbags and that turning up on election day is utterly pointless (both of which are not entirely true). The Today programme, by asking questions that no sane politician would dare give a straight answer to, is simply feeding this political apathy, not to mention being akin to shooting fish in a barrel. Surely raking ministers over the coals of close scrutiny is the job of Westminster?

The most insightful interview with Blair I have heard or read over the past year, was a conversation with writer Bill Bryson. Bryson met Blair at Ten Downing Street to discuss Higher Education, the Sciences, and the economics of globalisation. It was cordial, even a little friendly, but it gave more of an insight into the workings of Number 10 than a year of Humphrys and Paxman.

What’s the point of wasting an eight-minute interview asking questions you know the PM will not answer? Just a thought.