Archive for the 'Across The Pond' Category

Peddling Pegler

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on September 16, 2008
in Across The Pond, Media and Politics
. 0 Comments

Daniel Finkelstein is being sensible about the latest Palin furore. The brunt of the story is that Palin quoted some praise of small towns, out of context, written by Westbrook Pegler, who elsewhere called for the murder of Robert Kennedy. As Finkelstein points out,

Palin did not misrepresent Pegler because she didn’t talk about him.

Palin might be inadvised to reference a racist who issued calls for political assination. And simple political intelligence should be a requirement for high government office. But she didn’t endorse his complete oeuvre, or claim him as her inspiration. She just lifted a few pretty lines about standard small town values. Really guys, get over it. There are far more serious things worth attacking her on.

I don’t know much about Pegler, but Buckley seemed to like him…

Breaking news - Iain Dale demands conservative tech revolution

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on August 29, 2008
in Across The Pond, Politics and Technology
. 1 Comment

Iain Dale is the undisputed king of British bloggers. He’s also a committed conservative and has a long career behind him of print publishing, political journalism and activism. So when he failed to be selected for the “A-list” of centrally-approved electoral candidates to be fast tracked into a winnable seat, many were shocked. Did Central Office not realise just how potent internet celebrity can be when fighting a campaign? Or were they warning that a searchable history of independent minded critique is a major bar to promotion under the party standard?

The perfect irony is that the “secret” list of local candidates with this central sanction was leaked to the outside world only thanks to…another leading conservative blog, ConservativeHome - which incidentally, is behind this wonderful campaign against anti-Americanism. ConservativeHome is more successful as a massive source of information on the movement, with a range of different feeds, while Iain Dale has the cult of personality of a star solo commentator and more name recognition outside political circles. That fact that both can thrive, along with Guido Fawkes, a superficially anonymous parliamentary rumormonger, shows that there’s still plenty of space in the market.

That’s the story behind today’s column by Dale in the right-leaning British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. With his usual delicate tact, Dale politely suggests that the Conservative Party has been so suspicious of the independence of bloggers that it has focused on distancing itself from the community rather than integrating within it.

They may be Conservative but they won’t trot out the party line like a robot. So CCHQ views them with suspicion, so much so that they have now deleted any links to Conservative blogs (apart from ConservativeHome and those written by Tory MPs and councillors) on their website. How very short-sighted…[given that] Conservatives.com gets fewer hits than many of the top blogs…and blog readership is increasing by between 30 per cent and 50 per cent each year.

Of course, any organization which views independence as the problem fails to understand the internet. The aesthetic of the internet is defined by its slight distance from ‘real life’, and the accompanying sense of liminality. Any media that can be produced by one guy with an computer draws its identity from its grassroots feel - and you won’t integrate into the online community unless your fellow bloggers feel you are one of them. And a blog depends on the online community with a strange paradox - bloggers compete for market share all the time, but you won’t get anywhere unless people respect you enough to link to you, repay citations with a spot on their blogroll and welcome you as part of a cultural network, rather than a set of pedestals for individuals. The system is based on mutual self-congratulation and hat tipping. Which is why a blog has to have the sociability of an individual, rather than an organization - particularly in this super-cynical age in which retaining a PR officer is enough to make any media bunny distrust an institution. The Dems and the Republicans have official blogs but they’re not picked up much by the rest of the blogosphere - yesterday’s live video feed of the Democratic Convention had only attracted nine comments at the time of writing. Their successes come from their support of independent, personable bloggers, bringing bloggers together at special ‘bloggers briefings’ from major think tanks and policy departments, facilitating live-blogging and minute-by-minute reporting with Twitter feeds of campaign events, and lending approval to new media support centers like Techrepublican.com and the Republican Technology Council.

Dale’s is a timely call for the Conservative Party to embrace the blogosphere.

Once the US election is out of the way, the Tories need to recruit the Republican Party’s best internet brains and use them to drag their web operations into the 21st century.

So maybe that could translate into jobs for Nicky and me?

Chairman Dave’s Little Black Book

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on August 8, 2008
in Across The Pond, Extemporanea, Ladies, Politics and Social Theory
. 2 Comments

Anyone who cares about social decay should be heartened to see Michael Gove, the British Conservative Shadow Secretary for Children, Schools and Families speak out against the endemic pornographication of the female body in “Lads Mags” and “men’s magazines”. David Cameron, the Conservative leader, has dropped in a fair few references to our culture of sexualisation in his time as well. Being a Tory, he hasn’t even made the mistake of advocating censorship, but rather throws around concepts of “commercial responsibility” and “social awareness”.

It’s a shame, then, that “commercial responsibility” hasn’t started a little closer to home. Samantha Cameron, David’s elegant wife, is Creative Director of Smythson of Bond Street, London’s most exclusive stationary shop. It’s not a haunt I usually inhabit, but my sister has expensive tastes, so I recently trotted along, as firmly instructed by a birthday wishlist, to rub shoulders with the Duchesses and design divas gasping over bijou party invitations and business cards. Imagine my shock, in such illustrious surroundings, on seeing a display stack of a very special kind of gentleman’s notebook. For a mere £40.00, you can treat the man of your choice to a little black telephone book divided into three sections: Redheads (A-Z), Brunettes (A-Z), Blondes (A-Z). The shop assistant tells me that it’s one of Smythson’s most popular sellers. Now, I’m all for allowing politician’s spouses to retain an apolitical role, with an independent life. Samantha Cameron has never tried to make herself a public figure. But I’m sure David would agree with me that it’s a sad world in which a man’s record in casual sexual encounters remains a mark of such admirable prowess that it’s worth keeping a record in a beautifully bound Smythson quality leather product.

This Charming Man

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 30, 2008
in Across The Pond and Arts
. 1 Comment

I am to Maureen Dowd columns as kids with drunkard nursemaids are to whiskey: my grandmother used to clip her columns and mail them to me during the Starr Report years. (I turned 10 years old in 1998, so the politics and sex were every bit as exotic as the snark.) So while I’m sure that my blood ought to be boiling at the faux-intimacy of her column today (and its totally vapid Homer references), I’m instead gushing over the insight she’s given me into New Toryism, as revealed by Barack Obama’s party favors:

The British opposition leader David Cameron gave Obama a copy of Winston Churchill’s “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples” and a box of CDs by British bands, including the Smiths, Radiohead and the Gorillaz.

Radiohead, I concede, is a fairly safe choice in general and for Obama in particular: it’s the sort of act that a man whose passions are for jazz and the Stones would find to be intriguing and worthwhile, though he might admire it more than he liked it in the end. (I’m assuming Cameron chose In Rainbows rather than, say, Hail to the Thief.) But the other two are legitimately inspired choices. I find Gorillaz to be consistently underrated and just plain fun — furthermore, by turning up the bass a bit more than Radiohead does, the songs are probably a bit more likely to hit Obama’s sweet spot.

And the Smiths? That’s just a matter of consciousness-raising, man. Though I’m concerned that Mr. Cameron may be trying unfairly to influence the veepstakes.

Admittedly, Reggie Love is the man responsible both for keeping Obama’s iPod hip and for presenting gifts to foreign dignitaries, so Cameron might have someone equivalent on his side. Still, though, someone out there in Toryland has very good taste — yet another thing major parties here would do well to emulate.

Sticking to one’s principles

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on July 23, 2008
in Across The Pond and Politics
. 0 Comments

This is a particularly ridiculous newsflash from Number 10 Downing Street, that I just had to share:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7520401.stm

Ghosts of Obamas past

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on June 21, 2008
in Across The Pond and Politics
. 2 Comments

I know my duty to my American friends. Name: Kate, Identity: British, Sole purpose: provide olde worlde curios, with a smile and charm (much like a trained monkey dressed as a court jester - that’s what they call being “Greece to America’s Rome”) reminding the audience of the quainter side of the Atlantic. So you can expect me to keep you updated with titbits from the motherland.

Some melodrama almost on a par with student politics. I don’t know if an American congressman or senator has ever resigned his seat because he refused to be a member of a House that could pass a particularly piece of legislation. I’d be interested if anyone could tell me. Yet David Davis, the senior Conservative MP responsible for all internal policy, recently stormed out onto the steps of the Houses of Parliament, and announced that he would be calling a special election in his constituency as a protest against the Labour Government’s bill to increase to 42 days the time terror suspects could be held without access to a lawyer. (Think of it as our own little Patriot Act). It’s a real mark of the realignment of British political ground, as Left becomes authoritarian and the Right more concerned with conserving traditions of privacy and liberty. The government appears to have the support of the public on this issue if nothing else, but didn’t have that of its own MPs who had actually studied the legislation - 36 out of 351 of its MPs voted against its own bill, which meant that it had to rely on promises of pork to the nine Northern Irish MPs from the minority Irish party the DUP. Result? Labour won the vote by exactly nine votes. By forcing a special election, Davis wants to create a media storm over the issue big enough to educate the public on the issue, and, he hopes, change public opinion. The election campaign will be the public debate, the special election will be fought on that one issue alone, and the verdict of the polls will be public statement on the issue.

Obviously, Davis’ vision of a glorious triumph isn’t quite working out as he expected. First, he comes from a fairly solidly Conservative area, so no local Conservative victory can really be spun as a statement of support on this one single issue. Secondly, it’s clearly not representative of the nation as a whole. Thirdly, Labour won’t play ball, and are refusing to put up an opposing candidate.

The really sad thing is how incapable the British public now seems of believing that any politician could act on a point of principle. Leading newspapers and Internet mutterings all suggest that Davis must be in the throws of a nervous breakdown, trying to steal the limelight from his party leader, or in someone’s pay. The cause is a phenomenon that ought to worry Democrats. Ten years ago,  a messianic forty-something man with a young family and more brash wife, the centre of a Cult of Personality whose fervent Christian faith found its expression in calls for social justice, who claimed to be on the Centre-Left but was such a media baby that one was never sure what was spin and what was substance, was swept to power in a wave of national adulation. He vowed that his administration would be the breath of fresh air in the capital city that banished the political elite’s casual corruption and instead would be “whiter than white”. Yet ten years later, the man who made us believe that conviction politicians existed has turned the public into a population to whom the word politician means “corrupt liar”. It’s not just Iraq that has baptised the Prime Minister “Bliar” - it’s still entirely plausible to believe, as I do, that Blair searched his soul and did what he believed right - but the constant allegations that donations to the Labour Party resulted in peerages, contracts and even legal exemptions being granted to the donors.

There is no country now more convinced than America that conviction-politicians can be saints. On the morning of Blair’s victory in 1997 there was no country more convinced than Britain. If Rezko/Auchi proves to be the tip of the iceberg of funding scandals, or if, as is more likely, it is beyond Obama’s powers to do much for the lives of African-Americans in office, the disillusionment will give rise to a cynical backlash not just against Obama, but against all in public life. And that level of public bitterness ain’t fun for anybody.