New blogging MP - 2 comments

Don't know why this one has evaded my spies (you think I'm joking) for so long, but the main thing is that we've found them.

The blog in question is that of Julie Morgan, Labour MP for Cardiff North.

Julie's been posting assiduously since she was re-elected on May 5th, having been MP for said constituency since 1997, and there's plenty of good stuff there.

I make the new total 5 blogging Labour MPs.

Weekend picks / The Game - 9 comments

Just a few posts I bookmarked over the weekend:

David Nishimura at Cronaca, via Socialism in an Age of Waiting, on abuse of the term gulag by Amnesty International (and many others), plus the Americans' response to the charge (1300 Korans in 13 languages!). The Wikipedia gives a more balanced definition of the term:

Gulag (from the Russian "Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-trudovykh Lagerey") ... The total documentable deaths in the corrective-labour system from 1934 to 1953 amount to 1,054,000, including political and common prisoners; note that this does not include nearly 800,000 executions of "counterrevolutionaries", as they were generally conducted outside the camp system. From 1932 to 1940, at least 390,000 peasants died in places of labor settlements; this figure may overlap with the above, but, on the other hand, it does not include deaths outside the 1932-1940 period, or deaths among non-peasant internal exiles.

Slightly out of Bush's league, I think.

Just spotted this article about Tax Freedom Day at Stephen Pollard's blog. You won't find many on the Left arguing that we can enjoy a happy, liberal, social democratic life under a capitalist system without "creating wealth", or rather, allowing people to create wealth. All the same, to completely ignore the importance of public services and public goods, which can make us happy over and above any diminution of productivity, and which the private sector may never provide, relegates Stephen's articles from a decent undergraduate essay to a partisan rant. The "crowding out" (of the private sector) argument is pure Uni textbook.

Hamish's account of his wander around the Imperial War Museum, was also very interesting.

I haven't really decided about the whole Euro referendum business. There seem to be pretty good reasons - from a point of view of consolidation - for voting Yes if one is interested in the European project, though the poor performance of the French and German economies, which is by no means entirely the result of their close association with Europe, seems to have hijacked the issue. How can you separate, even among the French Socialists: (a) those who voted Non because they object to a 'big business'/corporate Europe, (b) those who voted Non because they see the need for economic reform as being incompatible with an even more 'organised' Europe, (c) those who did so because of a desire to thwart the scheme the political elite had 'cooked-up', and (d) those who, as Paul Anderson reports, didn't vote Yes for the reason "... that it doesn't create a European super-state"?

It seems to me that the leadership of France and Germany ought to be trying to decouple the issues of European integration and economic reform if the former isn't to be so easily portrayed as a straitjacket, arch-enemy of pan-Atlantic free-marketeers and Conservatives alike.

If you take the view that capitalism is a game with certain rules, and is currently the only game in town, then one ought to be playing it as intelligently as possible in order to maximise one's winnings and minimise one's losses (these being inevitable), rather than clinging to a discredited strategy that makes it even more costly for players to pool their resources. Of course this logic also applies to the 'left of Labour' parties (should have mentioned this before May 5th), whose position is that they will participate in the game, but will either play with a blindfold on, or blow their stake in the first few moments and go down in a 'blaze of glory'.

Calling all guest editors - no comments

I'm looking out for people - ideally other Labour-supporting bloggers - to act as guest editors. Not that I'm boring or anything.

Specifically, if someone fancied doing a weekly roundup of the best of the web, a selection of their favourite politics-oriented posts, or an editorial on a particular theme (e.g. ID cards, housing policy), full of links to useful posts, then it would be just what I'm looking for.

Drop me a line if you're interested and want to know more. Hopefully we'll get someone on board in the next few days so that they can entertain us all on Friday 3rd June with their handiwork. If two people get in touch, the second person can do next week, or else work on something different to the first person. I'm afraid I reserve the right to give preference to well-established bloggers with a track record of great posts, if any of these people fancy blackening their reputation by association with us!

It'll be fairly free and easy. I think gaps of a week should give people enough time to come up with something, and people can help out weekly or just once.

As regards tone, I'd prefer something thoughtful rather than scurrilous. Ad hominem doesn't work well for me, especially if it's one of those very boring anti-Bliar pieces that every other blog seems to have nowadays.

Whether you consider yourself a 'liberal interventionist', a 'social democrat', a 'middle-class leftie', a 'working-class stalwart', a 'centre/left progressive', or 'high-minded philosopher type', these positions are all perfectly acceptable.

Hope to hear from some of you!

Statistics - no comments

If statistics are your thing, here are some (live) figures about the number of blogs and feeds on our system, together with the number of posts and links we have picked up over the last 24 or 48 hours.

At the last count, we knew about an incredible 104 pro-Labour blogs, 82 of whom have working RSS/Atom news feeds. So, no excuses for not covering all the bases!

The biggest ID fraud of them all? - 3 comments

The Register, characteristically (though, I fear, correctly) lays into the Government on the issue of ID cards.

The claim that ID theft costs the UK over £1.3 billion a year comes in for close scrutiny, and particular scorn:

So, of the numbers making up the "£1.3 billion" (actually £1.364 billion in the study), only that £35 million from the DWP could be said to bear some linkage to an ID card scheme, and the number itself is pretty much a guess...

They also make the point that figures that appear to show the general public backing the policy, in order to protect themselves from identity fraud, really highlight ignorance about the issues, of how people can be affected, and about what the ID cards can actually achieve, especially in an age of Internet purchasing.

I don't think anyone's suggesting that ID cards cannot work, but if it's the case that the level of success increases with the level of compulsion, it may well be that the level of success we demand can only be achieved with a level of compulsion/intrusion that we may not be at all comfortable with, or else would require enhancements (e.g. biometric readers at every ATM) that the current proposals don't allow for.

I haven't come across many people who support the policy having looked at it in any depth, but I'll keep my ear open for all contrary views - you know how to get in touch. In the meantime, I'll conclude this post by saying that I don't have the slightest faith in the Government's ability to deliver a robust and successful ID card platform, or a solution to the issue of identity fraud - at least not on the basis of what's being proposed now.

Update on Tags - no comments

More improvements to the tags facility, which lets you view a summary of how Bloggers4Labour members have categorised their posts over the past week.

We've just added links to all the categories used, so you can click to see all those posts that were, say, tagged as Politics.

Idealogs and Zenophobes / Forward, not Back - no comments

A few eccentric emails have made their way to our mailbox in recent months, though none so peculiar as the ones Oliver Kamm is receiving from defenders (one in particular) of George Galloway. One is quoted verbatim in his post, Hords of zenophobes.

It's pretty easy to criticise, and indeed fall about laughing, at the unnamed writer's haphazard use of the English language, but it's worrying that they would probably describe themselves as "real Labour" or "a lifelong Socialist", when the brain is so clearly filled with a tangled web of paranoia, exaggeration, contradiction, half-baked theory, and factual error.

No doubt everyone's political views are made up of these components, to a greater or lesser degree, but I think this guy is an extreme case. This is why it's especially concerning that so many of his points and his weaselled phrases:

'nasty bunch' ... 'infest the body politic' ... 'Christian coalition' ... 'strident views' ... 'feudal economic slavery' ... 'political thugs' ... 'authoritarian selfish-individualism' ... 'oldest and dirtiest rightwing ploy' ...

(to quote a few) can be found again and again in the 'intelligent' press, and are clung to by people who call themselves liberal or left-wing.

The problem with lazy and vacuous political thought like this is that when it comes up against something that has been developed, mulled-over, scrutinised, and which people actually believe in, it doesn't stand a chance, and political parties who have committed to it are blown away. This, for me, is the key to what happened to the Labour Party during the 1970s and 1980s. Stuck with policies it couldn't defend, and which it didn't entirely believe in, how could it come up with a message it could sell to the electorate? For all the inconsistencies in Thatcherism, the underlying neoliberal agenda drove all before it, sweeping not just the electorate, but a fair crop of 'thinkers' who would once have described themselves as "of the Left" (Marxists, even), accepted the status quo of ideas, but found themselves carried by the Thatcherite wave over to the Right, having engaged their minds for the first time in years.

The Blair period has seen this "brain drain" halted (I wouldn't go so far as to say it had been reversed, since intellectual activity "to the left of Labour" seems to have entirely stopped), but the Right in Britain is not going to be out of ideas forever. If, having ditched Blair, Labour found itself drifting back into the sort of territory where it would have to courts activists with "traditional" policies and rhetoric, anti-Americanism, and talk of nationalisation, it's likely that a reinvigorated Right - on a robust and consistent (though highly unpleasant) platform of a flat tax, dropping all legal protection for Trade Unions, spreading opt-out vouchers throughout education, the NHS, and local authority services - could roll over the Left once again.

Which is why "Forward, not Back" - designing new policies, not going back to old ones - isn't such a bad slogan after all.

Making poverty history - no comments

The white bands are everywhere - I should imagine a good proportion of the blogs on our list have them, together with vast numbers of other liberal/leftish blogs.

No sane person would disagree with their message, but is their ("trade justice", "drop the debt" and "more and better aid" - I'm quoting here) strategy sufficient, or even correct? I haven't been able to commit my own blogs to these, or display the banner, if only because of doubts about that. After all, to me, it's by no means a radical departure from past failure, and does depend upon money that was spent badly in the past being spent better in the future, which requires a certain optimism about politicians and about bureaucrats. I was also concerned about how countries that had debts cancelled would be able to obtain credit in the future.

Anyway, Stephen Pollard has an interesting article on this very subject. The celebrity-bashing should get on some people's nerves, but there are some interesting figures, and good points that must at least be worth thinking about. Could it be that we are entrenching subsistence agriculture, rather than giving people the chance to make a proper living?

If my memory serves, Labour was committed to Free Trade in 1906 and has been for most of the period since (in stark contrast to the Conservatives). Were they misguided then, or perhaps it was a principled stance, long before the term 'Fair Trade' was created?

Political blogging / Journalism - no comments

I spotted this excellent cartoon at the irritant.

One of the things I like least about blogging (especially so, having been guilty of a touch of this myself) is the type of blog perpetrated by the person who fancies themselves as a proper journalist: self-righteous, pompous, grandiloquent, and blustering. Irrespective of the political viewpoint and whether or not you actually agree with their point, the style and tone of the articles is guaranteed to get on peoples' nerves and lose them sympathy.

It's even less pleasant to find your own article the target of some self-styled 'crusader for truth' whose main motivation is to make you look like a prat and them an intellectual heavyweight in the eyes of as many people as possible.

I'm not entirely anti-"blogging as journalism", but it's also a place for ordinary people with their own views, with new ideas, and a place for debating. By no means (in my opinion) would I say that journalists and columnists have the right, or even the monopoly on intellect required to steamroller other people, just to fuel their own egos and nurture their coterie of loyal readers.

I won't be mentioning any names, but I can think of a few, as I'm sure can you.

Folksonomy - no comments

The Wikipedia describes a folksonomy as a "neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords." For an alternate form of words, here's Peter Parkes' introduction.

Some of our bloggers are already posting using software that allows them to tag their articles with categories/keywords of their own choice (no such luck if you use Blogger).

I think we've just about got to the stage where there are enough tagged posts on the system to make it worthwhile collecting-up and sorting these categories. Once you've collated that data, it's pretty easy to generate a cool-looking list like the "Folksonomic Zeitgeist" at the Guardian's Election 2005 blog site.

Here's our version if you fancy a look. Obviously it'll look a lot better when more bloggers are able to tag their posts and we have 700 to look at, rather than just 100, but it's a taste of things to come.

http://www.bloggers4labour.org/tags.jsp

Sock it to them - 4 comments

Galloway seems to have elicited a huge amount relatively uncritical media coverage and delight from his supporters (plenty here), following his "barnstorming" performance in front of the US Senate Committee.

I've overheard people saying how impressed they were. However, once we separate out the fuzzy feeling we all get from hearing experienced and eloquent speakers, and from (apparently) dull, grey, American politicians getting a roasting from a Brit (strange how we could feel nationalistic about such a man, and over such an issue), I can't see how Galloway could win over any thinking person (or even a US senator) on any substantial point. Evasion on the key points, but yet more mentions for the highly dubious but endless quoted "100,000 murders" statistic (see Anthony Cox's excellent deconstruction of the figures), and more rhetorical viagra for the US capitalist/Jewish conspiracy brigade.

Why then should we support this man - just because it makes good TV (selectively edited, mind you)?

Things you've never done and I have - 3 comments

Just changing the meme slightly... I've seen some pretty interesting things on other people's lists, so here's the number of things each blogger hasn't done that it turns out I have...

• Andrew at wongaBlog - 5.5
• Jonathan Derbyshire - 5
• Rullsenberg Rules - 4
• Jo Salmon - 2.5
• Norman Geras - 2
• the Thimble - 1 (#7)
• James Hamilton - 1 (#10)

It's like some strange sort of compatibility measurement.

Perhaps we should try to bring back the glory days of Jim'll Fix It by matching up people who've never met an MP with one who's well up for a bit of media exposure (would Galloway be free to help someone's dream come true?), fixing it for them to use an iPod for the day (you'd have to like the same music as me), or giving them the chance to vote Conservative just to get that funny feeling of being somewhat apart from the rest of the human race (includes cost of day trip to Manchester Central, Rutherglen, or Peckham, on or around May 2009).

10 things I've never done - no comments

First spotted at Norm's, and then at the Thimble.

Well, here are 10 things I've never done (at least I don't remember doing them!):

• owned a car
• owned a (Windows) PC
• bought a National Lottery ticket
• voted Conservative
• read, watched, or listened to any Harry Potter
• been on the radio
• seen The Godfather
• seen The Fall play live
• cooked a curry from scratch (or a pie)
• dated a graduate

It's hardly a life at all, is it?

Notice to Anonymous Commenters - no comments

Seems like every blog is having to write things like this, but I'm going to take a close-to-zero tolerance attitude to commenters who choose to make insulting or personal comments, who have nothing constructive to add to the debate, or who just fancy letting off a bit of steam.

"Play the ball, not the man", Chicken Yoghurt advised me. The fact is, we ought to be judging all opinions and statements entirely on merit, not on the individual, the individual's status within the hierarchy of blogdom, or even on the organisation that makes them.

As liberals we should be looking for pearls of wisdom wherever we can find them, even if we have to cheerfully dig through tons of sand and sludge.

UPDATE: Humorous and light-hearted comments are, of course, always welcome! This isn't a think tank, you know.

New Page options - 3 comments

There are some new display options at the new blog listing page (no, I haven't come up with a proper name for it, yet). Images and image links are also working much better there.

Hope it's useful.

Clarke: back me as leader - 4 comments

According to the Observer, Clarke's:

... recipe for a future Tory government would be to offer a One Nation message of 'free market economics, reform of the public services to encourage more consumerism, more public choice', combined with a less bureaucratic and invasive approach from government that would bring lower taxes and greater personal freedom.

That's "One Nation"? Sounds like Redwood a few years ago.

Incidentally I saw Clarkey on Wednesday afternoon. I was on my way into Liverpool Street Station as he ambled past (totally ignoring me) on his way out - heading towards Appold Street or Primrose Street, I shouldn't wonder. Perhaps he's on the board of some nearby company (of which there are many). Would be curious to know which...

On Fair Voting - 1 comment

I have expressed an interest in electoral reform in the not-so-distant past, specifically the replacement of our First Past the Post (FPP) system for General Elections with some form of PR. This now seems to be all the rage - the hot topic of the moment.

My main motivation, originally, was the kicking-away of one of the main components of the Conservative Party's past electoral success, and generally to "shake things up a bit". I can't say I have any enthusiasm for giving/allowing a greater influence for the Liberal Democrats, nor am I convinced that PR leads to better government (whatever that means).

One thing I've never claimed is that PR is inherently more 'fair' than FPP, just as I don't say that progressive taxation is necessarily fairer than a flat tax, or even a poll tax. If your definition of 'fair' is 'giving people/parties an equal chance / treating them the same way', for example, FPP is perfectly fair. They may have fewer resources but the Lib Dems have the same access to the electoral system as Labour or the Conservatives, and legislation ensures the same rights for each party. Nonetheless, given a free choice and a secret ballot, the great majority of areas/divisions within the UK preferred Labour Party candidates to any other. The old Liberal Party proved itself capable of winning elections under these circumstances - why now is their message rejected? Labour was able to 'break through' from third place, but not our Lib Dems.

In summary, PR might be fairer, but to say so you first have to prove that your definition of fairness is better than mine.

Then we have the issue of 'wasted votes'. We've all seen figures that show that far more Liberal Democrat votes are required per seat than Labour votes, but does this mean anything in practice?

Take a company 'A' that chooses to sell product 'X' for 99 pence: it might be expected to gain 100% market share against company 'B' that sells X for £1.00. That might not look fair, even though the original situation gave the same opportunities to both companies. Why should we intervene in such a situation to compensate 'B', when it was entirely in B's power to change their price and win the market share?

We have a right to vote, not a right for a vote that has exactly the political impact we want. As soon as your vote is counted, your right has been exerted. So you didn't get the Government you might have had if you were in a different political system?

Adopting PR would mean the Lib Dems need never gain the legitimacy or country-wide appeal of Labour or the Conservatives, whose pursuit of majorities in Parliament requires them to appeal to the entire electorate. Perhaps voters are not rational, choosing to vote by bloc, class, or out of tradition, but this isn't the fault of FPP.

As regards the legitimacy of our current government (something the anti-Blairites find it convenient to pour cold water on), so what if 4/5 electors didn't vote Labour? We all had a free choice; we could have stood for Parliament ourselves; we could even have organised a nationwide 'Spoil Your Ballot' party. The non-voters have deliberately excluded themselves from the democratic process, and speculation about what this means tells us more about the commentator than the non-voter ("what the electorate really said...") Whether non-voters are, as some would have us believed, making a deliberate point (a 'strike', even) against the capitalist/corrupt/sexist/politically-correct 'system' or, as others would have it, a mass of anti-Blair 'Real Labourites', we cannot say. However, we can avoid using turnout to fuel pet political theories that real voters have failed to endorse.

Finally, why is a Labour majority - the clear will of the people - less legitimate than a coalition of parties, none of which may have reached Labour's own 36% themselves, and whose coalition deal was never approved by a popular vote?

Not that I've ever claimed to have a particularly moral reason for supporting PR, but perhaps it's the idea that PR is now a weapon of those whose main desire is to overturn the 'New Labour project', but can't do so using the existing mechanisms, that is dampening my enthusiasm for change.

UPDATE: I've struck out the phrase "the clear will of the people" as I don't think it was necessary for the argument in question and distracts from the key point: namely, the lack of a direct mandate for coalition deals.

Chain Gang - no comments

Boy, the Independent could spin something wicked out of this. To save some time, here's something they could use:

"Tony Blair is to personally spearhead a controversial new plan that could see US-style chain gangs on the streets of Britain. Civil libertarians will probably express outrage at the idea that young offenders, many of whom are black, could conceivably be asked to break rocks for public works projects as baying crowds of Daily Star readers look on."

"No Home Office Minister was available to comment on allegations that the uniforms will feature black, vertical arrows..."

Other phrases to squeeze in at least once: "increasingly authoritarian", "Murdoch press", "Middle England", "downwards spiral towards autocracy", "former advisor close to New York mayor/Republican administration X", "quasi-religious resort to use of shame", "need for PR", etc., etc.

We're back! - 3 comments

Three cheers to everyone who managed to pick themselves up straight away after Thursday and get straight on with the blogging. How do you do it? I haven't been entirely bone-idle though...

I've added a more traditional sort of layout to the site, which will be familiar to all you BlogLines users. Now you can browse through a sorted list of bloggers and read all their posts, rather than just the ones that have been added in the last 48 hours.

Obviously there's a lot that can be done to improve it (please contact me if you have ideas), but it's a start - try it out.

Unfortunately I've temporarily exhausted the advertising budget for Bloggers4Labour. £5 per day might not seem a lot, but it takes a big chunk out of a mere mortal's credit card if it's left on for a month!

It was Corby wot won it - 4 comments

Three cheers to Corby in Northants. for giving Labour its historic third term.

Great stuff. My personal high was Labour's excellent Hove result.

Just spotted: Jim Knight pulled off an amazing win in Dorset South against the Tories' Ed "Photoshop" Matts. Defending a majority of 153 is an incredible performance!

That sanctimonious scumbag, Galloway's win in Bethnal Green is a pretty sickening low point (particularly his odious speech). What a reptile he is. With a fair wind (perhaps he'll fall under a bus), Galloway and his rabble will be utterly swept away next time, and we can get back to mature politics by candidates who have more than their own egos to massage.

At the moment I can't be bothered to make a fuss about a handful of Lib Dem gains - they gain some, they lose some, but the idea that they're on an inevitable journey to power isn't born out by the facts.

I've only come across one person who's expressed any interest in the Conservatives (and I'm not even sure he was serious) or their policies. The lure of "one last heave" seems irresistible to them, just as it did to Labour throughout the later Kinnock period, and that dream was shattered in 1992. Why do the Tories think they're so special? Where's the big idea that'll avoid them being hammered again?

It's a shame they weren't beaten badly enough to make them see the light and reform themselves - it would have been for their own good.

"Brisk start" - 3 comments

Made it to the polling station for 6.58 am, just pipping an elderly lady to the post. Job done, so that's at least one for our column (yes, I know, postal votes...)

There were a few people outside as I made my exit, and our Lib Dem rival even offered me a "good morning" as he rushed in (I think he may know me via blog comments, though not in person).

Back to the flat. I noticed one of the Boles' acolytes, still wearing that ridiculous t-shirt, over the other side of the road. Meanwhile on our side, an elderly chap stared (apparently incredulously) at the riot of colourful posters in my window as he shuffled past. Obviously doesn't get about much in the ward!

Thanks to the activists - no comments

Eric offers a tribute to

all those putting up signs, posting leaflets, knocking on doors and all the other leg work in an election, regardless of party, thank you for getting off your arses and playing your part in a democracy.

That's nice. These people are usually ridiculed in the press, or made to look foolish on TV. Just to illustrate: when John Prescott visited Hangleton (North Hove) on Tuesday, anyone with a camera would have caught me holding up a "Vote Labour" board, waving a silly flag, and holding two red balloons (passing schoolboys saw these and made a beeline to join us in making 'Two Jabs' welcome).

If it wasn't for the activists, voters might know about the election from TV, but what could they do about it until May 5? How would they get a summary of the party pledges to read, or get the chance to speak to a human being about an issue? The displaying of party posters adds much-needed colour (especially the red and yellow ones) to our boring streets. I think it's great for people to be prepared to identify them with a cause that others may wholly disapprove of: surely better to be part of a party, or tribe, or group, than an amorphous, homogenised mass.

I've delivered hundreds of leaflets and letters over the past week (or is it two weeks, or longer?), and my three street-facing windows each contain something with a vivid red shade, to brighten the (possibly) grey Thursday morning for those people who decide to troop past my window to the polling station.

Like Eric, I have no sympathy for people who decide to opt out of the entire process. Everyone feels a certain satisfaction having cast their vote, expressed their view, and done their duty. People who have lost faith in the main parties can make their point well by marking their ballot papers accordingly - I have no problem with that. But for those who opt out entirely, they can't even feel the satisfaction of having made any sort of point at all.

I posted last week about the problem this causes. There's no end of organisations who will latch onto the fact that (we assume) 40% will not vote, so that they can twist it to suit their own viewpoint ('sterile political culture', 'political correctness', 'no true socialist parties', 'deliberate Strike against the Westminster establishment'). Apathy proves nothing, and anyone who tries to explain it is on shaky ground.

Anyone who's been involved as a party activist will know the many benefits: feeling part of a community; exploring parts of the constituency or ward you've never visited; acquiring local knowledge that most lack; getting exercise, and for canvassers, acquiring a real understanding of the issues that affect people (I would like to quote examples, though obviously can't), and building your social skills.

I'm all for technology, but you lose so much when you vote electronically (even the liberalisation of postal voting breeds detachment). Perhaps Labour's citizenship lessons are the best solution?

So, salute the activist tomorrow. Somehow they'll be up before 7 am, endeavouring to inform the public and make this election a real event. You may not see them, but they'll be around.

For the want of a tie, the campaign was lost - 1 comment

Another great post from Michael Howard MP. So well written, and definitely the funniest thing this Election!

Oh boy have I been busy this weekend! Went back to my own constituency on Saturday so that the media could get some shots of the new 'casual' me. It was Lynton who suggested that I go canvassing without a tie on and with my shirt sleeves rolled-up. "It'll make you look more dynamic," he explained. Guy agreed, "there's nothing that can go wrong with that, short of a heart attack and it's Blair who has the heart trouble."

Blair's visit to Hove - no comments

The full story. No pictures yet - but they're bound to follow.

Latest bloggers - no comments

Here are our latest additions:

• Dadblog - "Look and learn, son. Look and learn."
• Frank Dobson's blog at Channel 4.
• Emily's election blog - Islington South & Finsbury Labour Party's homepage, including a blog by our candidate, Emily Thornberry.
• popsensible - popsensible's ModBlog.
• The Salmon of Doubt
• A General Theory of Rubbish
• Westminster Village - Stories and comment from the British Political Village - the inside-the-beltway of the UK.
• Small Town Scribble - Politics, work, love, health - scribbles from a small town girl.

Let me know if you come across any more Labour support in the blogging world!