I would certainly not be the first to draw parallels between the invention of printing and the invention of the internet. One of the things the invention of printing made possible was the Protestant Reformation. By enabling (relatively) ordinary folk to read the scriptures in their own language at (relatively) low cost and make up their own minds about the "economy of salvation" it gave rise to the idea that there was a "priesthood of all believers" - that there was no immutable law that the individual had to go through some kind of intermediary on earth to deal with the creator and could in fact, do a lot of that for him or herself.

Of course the intermediaries, the priests, and their institutional backers, the Catholic Church, held a monopoly on this power of intercession. And that monopoly had, as all do, made them rich and riddled with corruption such that they had all but abandoned any pretense of the basic tenets of the faith they were set up to help spread in the first place. And they met this threat to their monopoly and comfort with gusto. The Inquisition, the Christian "soldiers" of St Ignatius's Jesuits, the casting out of anyone who sided with or sponsored, for whatever ends, these Protestant individualists, the raft of new, draconian laws intended to cut away some of the fluff of their decadence and return to hard core consolidation of power: the Counter-Reformation.

But the world had irrevocably changed. They couldn't uninvent printing or the burst of knowledge amongst the masses it had given rise to and they couldn't prevent the questioning of their hegemony that reached its peak in the Enlightenment. And slowly those same institutions have struggled to adapt themselves to the modern world. Still at times holding out against it, but slowly, creakingly, crawling towards Enlightenment themselves.

And now we have the internet. Suddenly, those who want to can have access to almost unimaginable reams of collected human knowledge for themselves. We can work out for ourselves how things work and formulate our own ideas of how to make things better. We no longer need the intercession of a few who hold a monopoly of power. We can expose, just as the Reformers did, only this time in ninety-five million theses, the abuses of that power wielded over us and the inequity they create. We might call it the "government of all citizens". And so, threatened and already slightly mauled, come the Counter-Reformers. They have already heaped the raft of new laws on us to tighten their grip, already cast out many of those who sponsor the new "economy of politics", whatever their intended ends, and try, with their FUD tactics to tell us that this new phenomenon sets us on a dangerous course.

Enter Matthew Taylor - no, not the nice liberal chap looks after the good folk of Truro, but the one who, from IPPR to Downing Street must count as one of the High Priests of the concentration of political power and generation of worthy ideas. Those of us who were not at this "internet conference" at which he gave what might be his valedictory rant from his Downing Street position cannot know I suppose how much of it has been reported without context by folks at the BBC and so on, but as one of those spinmeisters he must have known that choice phrases would be picked out and used in evidence against him.

But as much as on the surface his words tell us just how scared they are in the corridors of power about this new economy of politics, how dangerous might be the consequences (to them more than anyone else) of the "government of all citizens" they also show just how much they have missed the point. And if they want to oversee an orderly evolution from the current monopoly of power to a more broad based self-governance they are going to need to grasp this. For the alternative, revolutionary change, can sometimes be bloody. And if those who currently hold the monopoly of power do not want to be treated like the Catholics in this country were for the largest part of the last four hundred years, they need to join that new economy and not fight against it.

Taylor's words, as others have said, here, here, here and here at least, make me really angry. The patronizing tone about "us" not understanding how we put additional and contradictory demands on government and how we are not ready for self-governance by our increased interest in what they do "in our names" is exactly why I so loathe Westminster politics. I simply do not accept that the world needs people who think they have some unique abilities that give them a claim to be able to manage better the affairs of tens of millions of people at a time, and the internet, and blogging in particular, is proving exactly that, daily.

The depth and breadth of discussion, scholarship, information, interpretation and opinion available "out here" must surely rival anything possible in a pile of red dispatch boxes or a cabinet committee. Yes, we have to learn to discriminate - just as we now subconsciously filter out most of what John Prescott says, say. But we have economists and social scientists doing for nothing often what the sealed corridors of the Treasury and other Whitehall departments have long striven to keep from us and through voluntary co-operation people from all over the planet sharing their ideas and weighing them up and generating new syntheses of them. And on a one-to-one basis we are virtually meeting people from all over the planet, and you know what, we probably agree far more than our governments, posturing on our behalf, manage to do government to government.

It is they that are creating a dangerous new world, and we who are forging new alliances and trust relationships, and this is leading a vicious (if you happen to be on the inside of that plutocracy - rather more virtuous if you are not) cycle of distrust in politicians and them trying to hold back the tide Cnut style.

The big common factor now, as it was half a millennium ago, is that we, or they, cannot uninvent this new medium through which all this is being spread - even though they seem to want to on occasion, or control its development on their terms. If they understand where this is leading, they can still, probably, get away without the punishment we meted out on adherents to the old order and the civil wars that followed. If not, they will be solely to blame for clinging onto coercive outmoded forms of government which promise to deny us more freedoms than we started out with. And the answer is not the odd minister blogging or inviting petitions to Number 10, or insisting that councils have to let us pay our bills online. The internet will lead to a whole new, decentralized and more voluntary and participative, way of government. If they do not want to grasp this and help in the process, it is an admission that they think they are better than the rest of us. And they aren't.

But maybe we could rekindle that fire in Oxford's Broad Street just in case?