'Guido Fawkes' has been making a big splash over the last year or so with his Blog of Plots, Rumours and Conspiracy. It was voted the best political commentary weblog of the year in the Backbencher's political weblog awards.
All I can say is... if this is the best political commentary weblog of the past year, please show me the worst one.
It's not all bad... the 'Propeller-Head Wonk Watch' section has a very nice picture of a monkey with a hard-hat on it. But for the most part this is a mixture of very insular Westminster village gossip and right wing (or more precisely, anti-left wing) politics which I have seen done better elsewhere.
Case in point: a recent post criticising Zac Goldsmith's Ecologist magazine for criticising ex-Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson, who criticised the Stern report on climate change as, among other things, a "battery of essentially spurious statistics based on theoretical models and conjectural worst cases." (Sounds a bit like the justification for Lawson's [and Geoffrey Howe's] 1980s monetarist policies which helped put the 'giro' in giroscope, but we'll let that pass...) Guido reckons he's got this green lark sussed:
Scratch the surface of even the most harmless cuddly Green and you find an agenda which is a totalitarian and based on "Gaia" mysticism cloaking an essentially anti-human tendency which values "Gaia" as more important than humanity.
Funny that... I thought the Greens were trying to save the planet (and the humans on it), rather than multinational corporate power, which, to use a crude but accurate phrase, puts "profits before people"? And if reducing greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change means tough government action, and if you want to mislabel that 'totalitarian', then go right ahead, mate. And I have to say that there is very little 'mysticism', Gaia or otherwise, in the thought processes of the environmentalists I know... just an appreciation of scientific evidence, and the realisation that, unless we act very quickly, we are f***ed. A realisation that, under David Cameron's leadership, is now spreading though the Conservative party... leaving Guido Fawkes and chums as the only people still trying to deny reality.
One thing you can say in defence of the Guido Fawkes blog is that it does get a lot of comments. Unfortunately, many (not all!) of the contributors make Guido look like Noam Chomsky in terms of sheer asininity. Some of them are just plain nasty, too: for example, on a recent post where Guido featured the story that Madeleine Bunting had left Demos, one of the comments was:
I like the look of Madeline. Unlike other ladies at the Guardian, I'd like to give her a good Bunting.
Now I'm no particular fan of Madeleine Bunting's work but she (and indeed any of the other women mentioned in the blog from time to time) deserves a damn sight better than to have a bunch of right-wing morons making sexist remarks about her. Some will no doubt defend this kind of shite on the grounds that the whole thing is only meant to be "a bit of a laugh". But that's just it. The site is only a bit of a laugh. Whereas given its status as political commentary blog of the year, you'd expect it to be a fucking riot. Or at least a source of incisive conservative thought. Instead, it seems to be where Westminster lobby hacks go to jack off when the alcohol poisons their last remaining braincells. Come on the hard right, you know you can do better than this... even Iain Duncan Smith's novel was a better read.
2 comments:
N.B. the blog is for entertainment purposes. And I'm not a Conservative or conservative.
It's a fair cop guv... libertarian rather than conservative then? I wouldn't dream of accusing anybody of being a Tory at the moment - we'll probably find out Arthur Scargill is a Cameronite soon, the way Dave seems to be going.
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