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Locally, the largest and probably the most impressive political blog presence belongs to the Greens and it’s hard to see how it’s doing them much harm.
Since lonesome, local Green councillor, Charlie Bolton, started blogging within days of his election in 2006 – providing a unique, if unwitting, commentary into what happens when a nice person who thinks everyone else is nice enters politics – the Green share of the vote at local elections has only increased each year.
Over the last few years Charlie’s been joined by Green Party members Glenn “Vowlsie” Vowles and “Stockwood” Pete Goodwin – both local Green Party candidates. While Green socialist Rosso Verde and Tony Dyer, blogging as the unpronounceable Aurea Mediocritas, are both active party members bringing some fresh ideas and perspectives to the brown rice and organic vegetable stew of traditional Green Party thinking.
The Greens can also call on a useful non-party internet hinterland through Chris Hutt’s Green Bristol Blog – for a Thatcherite Green angle on things – and the sly cycling blog, Bristol Traffic.
No other party in the city can match the Greens’ internet presence. The Tories, early adopters through their Bristol West Party Chairman James Barlow and Tory-gal Bristol North West parliamentary candidate, Charlotte Leslie, have – as you might expect of a party led by the ponderous figure of Richard “Bunter” Eddy – rather fizzled out.
To the point where it’s virtually impossible to find out from the internet what the Tories might actually stand for locally less than six months before a general election. Unless, that is, you believe the rather dull, heavily branded, centralised Tory election websites that have started to proliferate.
The Labour Party are similarly lacking a decent web presence. At least they are since Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy more-or-less abandoned any local content on her blog earlier this year in favour of hashtags and the party political point scoring of Twitter.
She’s also joined on the microblogging site by a fair few local Labour councillors who all seem happy enough spouting 140 character-long anti-Tory jibes and self-promoting inanities.
However, in the last month or so Labour’s Bristol West candidate, Paul Smith, has started a blog. So far it’s largely been a repository for party political point-scoring and a lot of uncritical received liberal wisdom on everything from comprehensive schooling to the benefits of multiculturalism.
Last week he even found space for the product placement of a Fairtrade chocolate brand. This was, apparently, his response to the potential loss of 400 jobs at the Cadbury’s Somerfield plant in Keynsham. Such is the thinking in the Labour movement these days … Losing your job? Never mind, buy Fairtrade!
The city’s party in power, the Lib Dems, has a few bloggers too. Councillors Harrison and Comer both run occasional locally focussed pieces on parking, parks, traffic, trees and the like that barely deserve the label ‘political’. While former councillor Bagley still continues to blog in her own strange fashion. Unfortunately all of these three blogs could probably make it into a top five most boring blogs in Bristol list.
So it is the Greens that dominate political blogging in the city. Not especially because of their politics, which is still considerably dafter and more unworkable than their mainstream competitors, nor is it solely because there’s more of them.
No, what they bring to the table are some basic journalistic instincts that the other parties either lack or are withholding. These qualities might be raw but they include natural curiosity; an eye for a story; the desire to dig beneath the surface; a willingness to question authority; disdain for the ‘party line’ and that quality Paxman summed
up as, “why is this lying bastard lying to me?”. All are alive and well on the Green blogs alongside an uninhibited willingness to deal in ideas.
Hence over the last week, while their opponents were promoting chocolate brands, engaging in cheap knockabout criticism of the Tories or just keeping very quiet the Greens were on the case.
No less than three of their bloggers – Charlie Bolton, Vowlsie and Tony Dyer – were on to the proposed new Sainsbury’s at Ashton Gate with variations on the theme of “why the hell is a self-styled ‘green capital’ proposing to demolish a football stadium and a supermarket in order to build a football stadium and a supermarket”? Vowlsie even came up with a decent headline/slogan for whole charade ‘Insainsbury’s’.
Charlie then came forward to challenge the uncritical political consensus on the proposed £43m technically flawed
Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) proposals. A few days later Stockwood Pete waded in to the same debate, once again exposing the so-called ‘South Bristol Link’ BRT/road scheme is in fact a South Bristol ring road in all but name.
Meanwhile Tony Dyer had the unenviable task of promoting a sane and rational approach to civil nuclear policy after his Green colleagues spent an afternoon outside the Council House reliving their 1980s heyday with an embarrassing “no nukes” demo.
And to round a busy week off for the green blogging community Chris Hutt hit upon a bona fide exclusive when he
discovered that Bristol City Council was ripping up trees on the nominally protected Bristol and Bath Railway Path to improve the environment!
Blimey. Local? Politics? Issues? Ideas? This’ll surely never catch on…
Further reading
harryT says:
Friday January 29, 2010 at 9:32 am
All very true, but do they stand a chance in the national elections ? (No) And can they really win anywhere locally other than Southville ? (Unlikely). I say this as someone who now votes green.
Actually, there are a number of seats locally where the Greens get a significant vote, and we have finished second in a number of wards in Bristol West. Ashley is probably still the best bet after Southville. And of course if/when the LibDems stuff up, it sets us up nicely.
Has HarryT considered that the only reason the Greens may not do well in national elections is that eveyone who wants to vote for them thinks they may not do well in national elections?
Just to the north in Stroud District the Greens outpolled Labour & Lib Dems in both County & Euro elections with the Tories way ahead. Yet everyone expects a 2 horse Lab/Tory fight at the general. Tactical (i.e. negative) voting maintains the status quo which everyone is fed up with. Break the mould – Vote for what you want or you will never get it.
Unlike all but one of the other people who left a comment I don’t write a blog that was mentioned in your article.
Do you suppose that perhaps you are over estimating the power of these many blogs?
You do have a bit of a vested interest in saying blogging is great.
The Blogger has a rather parochial view of what constitutes a local issue. The reason I write on my blog about issues such as the Tory take on marriage, or their persistent use of the term Broken Britain, is precisely because I worry about the impact of such policies on the people I represent in east Bristol. I am a national politician after all, not a local councillor, and as a General Election approaches, I think it’s important to highlight just what a Conservative Government would mean for my constituency, rather than trying to think of something to say about First Bus that I haven’t already said a million times! As for Twitter, how about conversations around #gritforbristol?
Final point – I also have a website, as well as a blog – plenty of local stuff on that!
Hello Paul,
Apologies for the missing link – wasn’t a deliberate mistake and happy to include it for you.
Chris
Am sad that I am the only one not to get a link
I wouldn’t accept the description of my blog either although that would be no surprise
http://bristolwestpaul.wordpress.com
All very true, but do they stand a chance in the national elections ? (No) And can they really win anywhere locally other than Southville ? (Unlikely). I say this as someone who now votes green.
Its a great shame as there is no doubt that the three mainstream options are almost identically awful, standing for nothing but election and with no apparent desire to challenge the status quo of rule by corporate influenced over paid bureaucrats.
Thatcherite! Moi!
I know I advocate market solutions, as opposed to state imposed non-solutions, but Thatcherite? I’d be turning in my grave if I was in it. On the other hand the Bristol Blogger has a shrewd eye for these things so maybe I’d better get used to the idea. The trouble is that Thatcherism still arouses such passions (mostly loathing I suspect) that being so labled more or less rules out being able to have any sort of rational debate about issues.
My personal discomfort aside, that’s an excellent piece of journalism by the Bristol Blogger. He’s spotted something very significant that had almost passed unoticed. Environmentalism has emerged as the real ‘challenge’ to the established order. Even mainstream Party bloggers like Paul Smith and Neil Harrison are strongly motivated by environmental issues, perhaps more so than the more traditional ‘isms’ associated with their Parties.
The Bristol Traffic team wish to deny that we are in any way a cycling blog. We exist to document the hardships that drivers in this city experience as a result of an uncaring anti-car council. To imply otherwise would mean that we are some kind of spoof, and by inference so is the Evening Post, as its text is little different from ours.