Tory blogs, and Labour strategy - 7 comments

There's been a fair bit of debate, over the past few days, concerning the extent to which Labour blog/bloggers should engage with Tory blogs.

The case Labour Matters makes over at Labourhome, and elsewhere, is quite simple. When it comes to Conservative blogs, read them and thus know your enemy, but avoid linking to the larger, mainstream media (MSM)-favoured ones because this boosts their authority with Google and other search engines, and makes their opinions appear more respectable. That means avoiding playing along with their memes and surveys, and giving up the naive dream that they will link back to you and drive vast amounts of traffic to your own site.

There are a few wider points:

• If the MSM are lazy enough to crib from a small pool of supersized right-wing blogs, while that might be preferable to them inventing stories off the top of their heads, we ought to aim to supplant them as our source of news. The only MSM outlets I regularly consult are the BBC News site, and The Economist. I'm sure I could give up the former easily enough. The latter would be harder to give up, but this would still be a start.
• Labour types should read non-Labour-supporting blogs more, and assimilate what they are saying:
  
  • For starters, the more evidence there is that public opinion is shifting to the right, the more important it is to be able to refute arguments that originate from the right, and to expose your own to scrutiny.
    
  • Those whose standard fare is to criticise the "left" or the "right" of the Labour Party must treat such critiques as purely intellectual exercises. Some people are rightly concerned with resolving arguments, not simply supporting the Labour Party, and who are we to tell anyone what they can and cannot post? But still...
    
  • If it isn't possible to honestly refute a hostile argument from a standard Labour position, that's a problem. One solution is to consult the blogs of our cousins from the non-Labour left for intellectual help.
  • Recognise that references to "Thatcherite" and "right-wing" are threadbare terms, and unlikely to carry much weight with intelligent people (as "Fascist" or "imperialist" have been for about the last six decades). See the next point for more.
    
• Blogs that display hostility to those from other political persuasions, or that make absurd generalisations about their opponents, are intellectual graveyards. Bloggers make mistakes when they first start out, but who in their right mind enters into a debate with someone who has already demonstrated a refusal to acknowledge the arguments of their opponents, and who is too wrapped up in themselves, or their own politics, to adapt their position? These bigots might think they do the work of their preferred political party, but they delude themselves doubly, restrict their own traffic/popularity, and are unlikely to be of much help to that party in the long term. My advice:
  • Don't become one of these unhappy bloggers.
    
  • Attempt to convert any such blogger you find. One approach is a "good blogger, bad blogger" combination: eviscerate their arguments, but follow-up with friendliness. This is the Labour Way.
    
• Pro-Labour bloggers should join - and participate fully in - Bloggers4Labour and any other similar blogging network, to increase their exposure, disseminate their news stories, to learn what other bloggers are saying, and to challenge their opinions and those of others.

Update (10/09): slight rewording.