Liberal Conspiracy is going nowhere fast
Dear Sunny Hundal,
It was interesting to read your 2009 in statistics and popular blogposts article on Liberal Conspiracy yesterday, as it showed a doubling of your unique visitors over the past 12 months. However, my overall impression from your stats was that, despite doubling your readership, your site hasn’t really gone anywhere. Allow me to explain.
Let’s start with your list of the 25 most popular blog posts of 2009 (by pageviews) at Liberal Conspiracy:
1. Sunny H: Is Michael Jackson still alive? (mostly just Google juice)
2. Martin Robbins: Legalising drugs: Lessons from Portugal
3. Stuart White: The Seige of Climate Camp
4. J Clive Matthews: UK v USA – the basic healthcare facts
5. Claude Carpentieri: Jan Moir in the Daily Mail: Sicking homophobia
6. Sunny H: Daniel Hannan – the new Tory saviour!
7. Publicansdecoy: Why don’t men wear skirts?
8 Unity: A few facts about teenage pregnancy
9. Laurie Penny: Little Lolitas
10. Unity: Pseudoscience is not a valid educational choice
11. Unity: Blogging and the PCC: A collective response
12. Sunny H: The Nadine Dorries legal action: Something odd
13. Sunder Katwala: So who does the Mail think is British?
14. Cath Elliott: Betraying sex workers
15. Conor Foley: Anti-semitism, the left and human rights
16. Sunny H: An attempt to smear Mehdi Hasan from New Statesman
17. Cath Elliott: The BNP’s lies in Norwich North
18. Anton Vowl: Blame for the BNP ‘protest’ vote
19. Unity: The Inconvenient Truth about David Rose’s ‘Special Investigation’
20. Left Outside: Against the ban on minarets
21. Jamie Sport: Daniel Hannan is a national disgrace
22. Sarah Ditum: How churnalists become friends to the BNP
23. Sunny H: We hereby resign from PoliticsHome…
24. Martin Robbins: Is the Green Party anti-science?
25. Chris Dillow: Towards a police state
At a conservative estimate (with a small ‘c’), I reckon at least 15 of those 25 are ‘negative’ articles – what does that say about the tone and content of Liberal Conspiracy? The clear majority of your most popular articles are just attacks on other people and other parties. While there is certainly nothing wrong with calling people and parties on their screw-ups, as any politician talking crap deserves to be called on it regardless of what party they’re from, where is the discussion of the future? Where is the debate over the future of the Labour Party, or the Liberal Democrats for that matter? Where is the battle of ideas? Where is the new wave of policies and ideologies that will solve the Labour Party’s ills both now and in the coming years? Do your readers even care? It’s all very well telling everyone that the Daily Mail and the BNP get it wrong all the time (shock horror) but that’s not exactly going to set the blogosphere on fire or turn heads in Westminster.
Next, you presented your list of top blog referrers: pickledpolitics.com, hurryupharry.org, septicisle.info, bloggerheads.com, stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com, labourlist.org, ministryoftruth.me.uk, order-order.com, enemiesofreason.blogspot.com, chickyog.net, pennyred.blogspot.com, layscience.net. Oh dear. This doesn’t exactly speak highly about the breadth of readership on Liberal Conspiracy. Only two of these sites (Guido and possibly Lay Science) could be considered anything other than left-of-centre. Compare this to Guido’s top five referrers: Iain Dale (Conservative), Spectator (broadly Conservative), PoliticsHome (neutral, despite what you might think), the BBC (liberal bias) and Political Betting (run by a Lib Dem). Guido has things to say that interest people from all political affiliations – can you really say the same? If memory serves me correctly, over a third of Iain Dale’s readers are not Conservative voters. Judging by your referral list, I seriously doubt that your site would even get close to this level of interaction with readers from other parties. If your readership has indeed doubled, I’m willing to hazard a guess that your new readers are of pretty much exactly the same ilk as your regular visitors.
You finish your stats roundup with the following comment: “Postscript: A note about right-wingers complaining about our editorial policy (other posts) of exposing the vacuousness Conservative Party can take heart from these figures and stop trying to dictate what we should be publishing.” Fair enough. Expose whatever vacuousness you want. In fact, I’d be delighted if you keep spending all your time taking shots at the Conservative Party because it means that you’re not doing anything constructive or beneficial to the Conservative’s opponents. The biggest (and longstanding) problem that you face is that Liberal Conspiracy continues to react to the political agenda rather than set it, unlike other blogs such as ConservativeHome and Guido who continually ‘make things happen’. They claim huge scalps, they literally change party policy (both Conservative and otherwise), they heap pressure on politicians, they demand action and often get it - they are, quite simply, leading from the front. If you want to spend all your time preaching to the converted about why they must resist the evil Conservatives, be my guest – really!
As Guido pointed out recently, you made some lofty claims when you launched Liberal Conspiracy in 2007: “It will become ‘the hub’ of a revitalised left-wing blogosphere,” you declared. You might be right, but if the left-wing blogosphere consists of nothing more than a bunch of navel-gazing, inward-looking, short-sighted lefties who don’t feel like their day is truly complete until they’ve shouted at David Cameron a few times then I don’t think a Conservative government has much to worry about. You may claim to be unmoved by Iain Dale slating you or Devil’s Kitchen tearing your arguments apart, and you might think it’s very mature to cut yourself adrift from PoliticsHome, but the trend is clear enough: you would rather engage in personal attacks, throw tantrums and promote spiteful politics than even attempt to drive forward the left-wing blogosphere towards becoming a more useful outfit – and for that, every Conservative voter in the country should be eternally grateful. From the bottom of my cold Tory heart, thank you, and keep up the good work.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
“Oh dear. This doesn’t exactly speak highly about the breadth of readership on Liberal Conspiracy…”
Well, given their moderation policy, where you’ll be deleted at the whim of the owners (something that rarely, if ever, happens on more honest left-wing blogs like Harry’s Place or Stumbling and Mumbling) are you surprised?
Yet another reason to think that the left-wing blogosphere has got a long way to go before it can claim to be leading from the front.
Whilst I applaud your sentiment and generally agree with your points, LFAT, I do worry about the inherent danger in writing a blog post attacking another blog for always attacking other blogs…
Also, what JuliaM said.
Stu, you’ve got me there. As I said in the letter, writing posts attacking other people/parties/blogs is fine with me, but it is clear that Lib Con doesn’t really spend much time doing anything else. In fact, looking at their site this morning I find that the most recent two articles are just attacking the Conservatives.
*yawn*
Leopards and spots, eh.
All very true, and written with not a hint of the aggressive invective that Mr. Hundal hurls at those who disagree with his views.
You must remember that Progressive Liberals (ie. those tending towards extremist authoritarianism), believe that the political debate is over, they have won it, and there is no point in intellectual engagement with other political movements. (notice the similarity with the AGW Task-force?) Why bother with rational argument when hurling playground insults is so much more fun?
I feel that Mr. Hundals’ vanity may overcome his well-developed sense of self preservation and you may be lucky enough to be treated to a “do I not bleed?” missive. More likely though, there will be a sub-Tourrets’ rant shouted over the wall of his own playground.
As Sunny’s site shills for New Labour, it’s really more of a socialist-authoritarian conspiracy AGAINST liberals (in the classical, liberty-loving sense and the crypto-commie sense used by American wingnuts).
Is the ‘conspiracy’ that it claims to be something to do with true liberalism?
“Is the ‘conspiracy’ that it claims to be something to do with true liberalism?”
Heh..!
Shaun, whatever Liberal Conspiracy’s manifold faults, I don’t think they can be accused of shilling for New Labour. Credit where credit is due, the site is generally anti-Brown, anti-Blair and anti *New* Labour all round. On the other hand, the tend to attack Brown by saying he should be more socialist and more left-wing ‘liberal’.
Saying otherwise is, I think, missing the point of the name ‘Liberal Conspiracy’ (it’s supposed to be a sort of joke, you see…)
Personally, my biggest issue with the site is the comments policy – or, more accurately, the contrast between the stated comments policy (removing abusive and off-topic comments in the name of fostering intelligent debate) and their actual comments policy (altering and/or removing stuff wot Sunny doesn’t like). It’s all well and good having whatever comments policy you like – even turning off comments entirely if you so choose – but lying to your readers about how their opinions will be treated is, to me, against the spirit of the blogging endeavour.
The Liberal and to a lesser degree the Labour web/blog efforts are just not interesting enough to capture me. Partisan, maybe, though I do periodically click onto the sites of the foe, yet I’m seldom inspired enough to follow up any articles that are either drab, a love-in or patently dishonest.
As much as LFAT, Fraser Nelson et al annoy the crap out of me with their constant criticism, at least it becomes constructive. They also give the foe credit when credit is due, something that is lacking from the left leaning contributors.
I agree with the socialist-authoritarian point about Liberal Conspiracy, but I too don’t see the link to New Labour. Blairism has never made an appearance on Lib Con as far as I can see, although he certainly had his authoritarian tendencies.
Wight Tory, errr, thanks?!
LFAT, socialist-authoritarianism IS ‘Blairism’.
Think about it. ASBOS, meddling in your home from 160+ council officials, ID cards, RIPA – all these things came under Blair but if you want ’socialist’ and not ‘authoritarian’ examples, I could point at ‘Tax Credits’ (boo hiss!), redistributive taxation, a drive to give money to *self-appointed*
soviets of the workers and peasants‘community groups’ and so on. That doesn’t even touch on the wars, David Kelly or the rest but that’s probably back under ‘authoritarianism’.Blairism is nothing more than a Catholicised Daily Mail social agenda wedded to authoritarianism not seen anywhere in peacetime europe since the Iron Curtain fell.
I’d call Tony Blair many things, but ’socialist’ is not one of them – not in the historical sense, at least.
I suppose it rather depends on what you consider socialism to be – the redistributive utopia socialists make it out to be or the small-minded, finicky, micromanagerial, State-knows-best, distribute money to groups we like (peasants, workers, party aparatchiks, quangocrats, religious groups like the MCB) away from those we don’t (the private sectore, anyone not dependant on the state, inherited wealth).
Sure, it wasn’t balls out Foot Era ‘nationalise everything!’. And yet look at where we’ve ended up, even before Brown took over as PM, the state was perilously close, if not over (if you could private-sector contract dependency), to being 50% of our economy and employment. So if you’re telling me that’s capitalism, I’ll go away and read some more economics to address my obviously flawed education. I’ll just have to stay clear of Rand, Hayek and Friedman, eh?
You give Blairism too much ideological credit. The whole point of New Labour was (to appear) anti-ideological; not ’socialist-authoritarianism’ but ‘giving people what they want’. They didn’t act to take control, they just read the papers and asked what they could fix so that the papers wouldn’t complain any more.
And then every time the papers found something new to complain about, New Labour came up with a new idea on how to fix it. Until one day the reach of the New Labour project had found its reach had exceeded its grasp, Blair, Campbell and Mandelson had all left, and Brown was left with a shell of a party bereft of its desire to fix problems – along with a media (and to a lesser extent electorate) ironically convinced that New Labour are the problem.
It’ll all happen over again with the Tories if they’re lucky enough to scrape a majority, of course. That’s the nature of the beast. But suggesting that New Labour were working with malicious intent is just wearing a tin foil hat.
Sadly not, Stu. It’s to be someone with a working knowledge of 1980s Islington Labour, through which travelled not only Chris Smith and Jeremy Corbyn, but also Margaret Hodge with brief cameos from Blair and Straw. Trust me, the more you know of the *people* in question, the worse it looks.
For example, it’s my understanding that in the wake of John Smith’s death, most of Islington (North)’s Labour members DID NOT VOTE FOR BLAIR for leader. They voted for the furthest left fella they could as a way of pissing up a rope before they got swamped with Tony’s New Labour drones who signed up en masse and crushed any remaining dissidents just as bent builders (aka The Murphia) had with O’Halloran in Islington North in the 70s.
Blair was marked as liking two things – acclaim and money. If power came with that, bonus. His messianic tendencies emerged later.
My father was a Lab activist in the 70s/80s in the area so sadly I grew up (born 74! first election recalled is 79!) with a front row seat on the foetid swamp that spawned this new labour mob. I had friends who’s parents were senior labour council officials so heard that gossip too. Seriously, Stu, just ask around the old timers and they’ll tell you.
@Shaun Pilkington – Dear Shaun. i had a similar experience with my Father, but in the early 60’s. By then, dad had his career sorted, the mortgage under control and provision for schooling sorted. He wanted to put something back into the country and went along to a couple of Labour Party meetings. He came back late one night, just as Quatermass finished, and slumped into “his” chair looking utterly dispirited. I asked why and he said” It’s that lot down at Labour. All they want to do is talk Bloody Revolution. I want nothing to do with that”. A couple of weeks later he went and joined the Conservatives, remaining a member until his death in the @90’s.
You’ve got to admit – Labour are steadfast in the long-term aims.
@Shaun Pilkington – Dear Shaun. Have you come across the philosopher David Grey’s book, “The Two Liberalisms” It makes your point beautifully.
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Where is the debate over the future of the Labour Party, or the Liberal Democrats for that matter? Where is the battle of ideas?
Heh. I do find it amusing how many right-wingers spend so much time telling me / us what we should be writing about or publishing.
I have this amazing idea. Why not leave us to write about what we want to write about, and I won’t come to your blog telling you what I think you should write about.
Completely revolutionary, I know, but there it is.
who don’t feel like their day is truly complete until they’ve shouted at David Cameron a few times
You’re completely right – it’s not like I could accuse the right-wing blogosphere of spending all their time attacking Brown.
Thanks for your comments though. I’m sure you, Guido, Dale etc are all concerned about the state of the left and helping us along.
Just one point I forgot to mention earlier LFAT.
The top 25 is not decided by me but is listed by hits. In other words these are not the list of my favourite posts but those popular with readers.
In fact LC has seen a spike in readership since we’ve started attacking the Tories and started to voice the frustration that many lefties feel with their rising star.
Now, I know this is very difficult for you to take – but attack blogging is popular. The stats that you think show that LC is ‘going nowhere fast’ in fact show the opposite – that our more aggressive direction is reaping the benefits of a growing readership.
Although, it is very amusing to hear right-wingers complain about lefties being aggressive towards them. If you don’t like – feel free not to read. I don’t see why I have to be dictated to as to what we should publish.
In the dead of night, when no-one’s about, Sunny sidles in.
As I suggested, it’s the “do I not bleed” approach, combined with an absolute refusal to engage because the Politics are settled, we’ve won the debate and there’s no point in arguing with those too dim to see the Glory of Our Vision. 6th formers giggling behind the bike sheds because ONLY THEY KNOW.
Sunny is a true political son of the incestuous, geeky Left that Shaun and I remember so well from the ’60’s and ’70’s. He actually performs a service in that people in touch with reality can access his blog from time-to-time and keep an eye on the latest romantic delerium-dreams of the extremist authoritarian left.
Actually Sunny, some of us actually ARE concerned.
Now don’t choke on your partisan worldview just yet – listen to my rationale. Governments need sane opposition in order not to do crazy things. Checks and balances and all that. During the Foot/Kinnock years, the poor quality of the opposition gave the Conservatives a free ride and with all that time on their hands, mayhem ensued (internal feuds, mad policies etc). Equally, post 1997, the Tories were a shambolic opposition with Hague, IDS and Howard all seemingly put up purely to make Blair look good.
And what did we get from Labour when there was no real opposition? Just up to Brown’s premiership, we got involved in 3 wars (Kosovo/FYR, Afghanistan, Iraq) with at least one of them based not on evidence but Tony’s *belief* in removing Saddam, we got ID cards and a surveillance state, we got 170 council flunkies who have the right to enter our home on a whim and so on.
Opposition that lacks credibility lacks the ability to keep governments honest.
If Labour do disintegrate and choose to spend the pre and post election period reliving their greates hits on the 80s, then even as a Conservative voter, its easy to see that would do us no favours at all as really, no politician should get a free ride to go crazy. It NEVER EVER works out well for the country.
@Sunny H – “Now, I know this is very difficult for you to take – but attack blogging is popular.”
Only when it’s directed at the right target, as Sunny conveniently forgets to mention. After all, what are the left currently getting their knickers in a twist over, screaming ‘foul!’ and ’sexist!’ at every opportunity? The Twitter campaign #kerryout of course…
They don’t like it up ‘em!
@Shaun Pilkington – Dear Shaun. “Opposition that lacks credibility lacks the ability to keep governments honest.” An excellent point. It would appear that, in the years after the next election, there is a very real chance that Labour will split into 3 or more factions which will be too busy scratching each others’ eyes out to mount a responsible Loyal Opposition to a Conservative government. Some conservative bloggers, such as Tim Montgomery and LFAT have forseen this eventuality and the need for the conservatives to have some form of critical faculty within their own ranks to fulfill the tasks the opposition parties should be carrying out.
Sunny, like I said, feel free to ignore advice from the right-wing blogosphere.
After all, it’s you who will be the loser if you ignore it – not us.
Wow. It makes you wonder why Hundal bothered to write that, given that his reply hardly engaged with any of the points made – and those that he did engage with were deliberately misunderstood so as to allow him the opportunity of tilting at windmills.
Consider: first, he opens with his usual “don’t tell ME what to publish, I’ll write what I like!” tripe. LFAT was not, as far as I can tell, providing Hundal with instructions. Rather, he asked some simple questions: where is the policy debate, why are you not leading from the front and so forth. Questions, note, not imperatives. Of course, Hundal knows that, but he prefers to skew the material in order to espouse his standard issue crud about righties telling lefties what to do. Fail.
Next, he goes on to “educate” us about how the top 25 are based on hits, not his personal preferences. Wow, Hundal, thanks for that, we would never have realised. Once again, he sidesteps the point (that readers of LibCon are only interested in wallowing in their own opponent-directed invective) and pretends that we don’t understand him.
Finally, he ends by assuming that the only reason LFAT wrote his article was because he was angry / offended about lefties attacking righties. Yet again, Hundal deliberately misses the point in order to score his own cheap one. Doubleplus Fail.
I wrote my own blog on this developing some of your observations.
It begins
Examining these blogs reveals much about left-wing thinking. Look at the Top 5! Is Michael Jackson still alive wrote Sunny Hundal? Were you waiting for a plane in Memphis I responded? Then there’s legalizing drugs, the climate camp siege, basic healthcare facts and sicking homophobia.
These are the most important things to liberals. 5 of the top 14 are related to sex while 3 of the next 8 are about the BNP. Only 1 relates to educational choice and 1 to health care; and that’s as close as their top 25 gets to dealing with anything on the economy. Need we wonder why Labour has no real solutions to problems the country faces.
read the whole thing http://tinyurl.com/yz5z673 .
Its interesting that I wound up in Neverland
LFAT,
You won’t find much debate on the future of the Liberal Democrats on LibCon, as most of us left at the point when Sunny and the boys made it clear that the only role for us was as cheerleaders for another Labour redesign.
Check out the number of contributors who are actually liberals (one). And then check out when he last contributed anything…
Not so much liberal-left as left behind.