Pots, Kettles, Negative Campaigning, and the Left-Right Blog Gap

January 14th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Guido Fawkes has blogged accusing Labour of going negative by picking up on the “grass roots geek campaign” of snide and comic alternatives to the Conservatives’ airbrushed David Cameron advert. He ridiculed Labour Party HQ for being “so devoid of original ideas that they have taken to stealing internet memes again.”

Well, that may be so. The Labour Party should remain aloof of such matters, and let the grass roots take care of such indecorous — if funny — activities, while perhaps providing the occasional bit of inconspicuous encouragement. It really doesn’t do Labour any favours to be seen to be at the front of a snarling, infantile pack. But Guido’s hardly the right person to be moaning about this kind of campaigning. He personally revels in his image of being the Right’s leading gadfly, and his blog was almost certainly the trailblazer for such campaigning, and is still at the vanguard. Nobody did more than Guido to bring this tabloid, viral, populist style into the British political blogosphere — an achievement of which he is openly proud.

And he is right to be proud, says the Parallax Brief. His is still the most entertaining political blog out there, and his perspicacious muckracking is bitchily underrated by a jealous printed media corps. But that also means he’s probably about as qualified to complain about this kind of thing as Kelvin MacKenzie is to decry the dumbing down of the newspaper industry.

Meantime, in the same post, Mr. Fawkes raises a penetrating point about the relative quality of the Right’s electronic presence compared to the Left’s:

The official Labour Party site is usually visited only by the party faithful. You have to push your message out. Look at what the Tories are doing, they are paying to advertise their Cameron videos on YouTube, reaching out to people who are not already signed up supporters. There are no votes to be gained from repeating your message to faithful party supporters on the official website or the party affiliated sites like LabourList and LabourHome.

Ignoring for a moment the merits of advertising on YouTube,  one thing that has always struck the Parallax Brief as odd is how much better the Right’s blogs are. If it were just a case of popularity and page traffic, then one may have been able to conjure all kinds of arguments (perhaps that it’s easier for the right to be sensationalist, or that it’s easier to blog when in opposition, or the right has better networks for promotion, or simply that right wing views are more popular.) But it goes beyond that. ConservativeHome is simply better than LabourList. There simply is no Guido fascimile of the left (thank God, they might touch and send the world supernova, or something). That’s not to say that there are no good left leaning blogs. Hopi Sen and LeftFootForward are both consistently excellent. It’s just that the general standard of content on the right is better than on the left.

If anyone can explain this, please let the Parallax Brief know.

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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Blair’s Neighbour’s Sense of Humour, and Guido’s Mackenzie Moment

November 13th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

A tie break today for the best political laughs, today. The first comes from a letter to the Telegraph, via Benedict Brogan’s blog.

SIR – Last Saturday, I was passing Tony Blair’s house (the one in Connaught Square) on my way to buy your newspaper when I saw – not for the first time – a red Ferrari parked opposite with the registration number 1 RAQ.

On the assumption that it does not belong to the Blairs, I was wondering which of their neighbours had such a sense of irony.

Peter Barlow

London W2

Fan-tas-tic!

Now, Guido Fawkes had to go some to match that, but the Parallax Brief thinks he did, with a line on Brown’s talked-of decision to repeal child care tax credits of which Guido’s hero Kelvin Mackenzie would have been proud:

“This has got to be the least popular childcare policy change by a government since King Herod.”

It’s reassuring that one can always rely on Guido to dive in where angels fear to tread.

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Categories [ Miscellaneous Titbits, UK Politics ]

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Guido Fawkes Defends Bankers’ Free Lunch

October 27th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Guido Fawkes is brilliant as a spiky muckraker and purveyor of parliamentary plots. Less endearing are his efforts to defend the obscene and wholly undeserved bonuses being awarded to bankers. Guido doesn’t seem to get it at all:

“George Osborne is off to Canary Wharf this morning to make anti-Banker noises at the Reuters HQ.   His speech will call for the successful to be penalised as an act of collective punishment for the mistakes of senior management.  No word as to what punishment the Bank of England Governor and Chairman of the FSA will face, Guido suspects none.

[…]

The successful traders who make profits for their firms help the banks re-build their balance sheets, why drive them overseas?   Punishing successful City folk after the event is a displacement activity when they should be punishing those responsible for the crisis – central bankers, regulators and those few bankers who actually had direct responsibility for the crisis.”

Even ignoring the point that at many banks the government is a major shareholder and therefore has every right to have its say on pay, Guido doesn’t seem to realize that these so-called successful traders aren’t successful at all. They’re simply piggybacking of taxpayer largesse and backing.

Pushing to one side the gargantuan equity injections that saved the banks — and the banking system — from collapse, the government’s tacit and explicit support is the only thing allowing the banks to trade at all, let alone make a profit. Let’s repeat that to make sure it’s sunk in: Government money and guarantees and, perhaps more important, the understanding that the government will support the major banks no matter what, are all that keep the banks in profit. Banks would find it far more expensive to raise capital — if they could at all — without government guarantees, while trust in their solvency would evaporate, battering their share prices and likely precipitating the kind of vicious circle that did for Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.

When the banks can operate without a taxpayer funded, trillion dollar zimmerframe, Guido can make his free market pitch — although even then, there are plenty of social, economic, moral, and business reasons for the banks to change their remuneration structures. Meantime, in the absence of a free market, there is no conversation to be had.

The bonuses must be stopped.

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Categories [ Economics and Finance ]

Comments [ 1 ]