Randomly Selected Article or Link

Right, if anyone actually cares, I'm probably going to upset a few people with this, but please, don't take any of this personally; to whittle down the 300 or so political blogs I try to "always read" down to just ten was nigh on impossible. To then put them into some kind of order was pretty well beyond me. In the end I kind of chose blogs that sort of represented the various types of blogs I read - you know, ones with think pieces, ones that are group blog type sites, ones that comment frequently, often briefly and incisively on current news, libertarian, Lib Dem and Labour ones say (sorry Tories - the only one for me that would have come close would also have come under the libertarian "category" anyway).

So really I hope that enough people have voted by tonight other than me to dilute my contribution enough to be as meaningless as it appears to me in terms of actually ranking the blogs I "always read"...

1. The Devil's Kitchen
2. Stumbling and Mumbling
3. Cicero's Songs
4. Schneider Home
5. UK Libertarian Party
6. Don Paskini
7. Gladstone Bag
8. Cobden's Comments
9. Liberty Alone
10. People's Republic of Mortimer

As I say - no taking it personally. I should probably have kept my gob shut!

...in this leadership contest anyway. Barrie Wood in Progressive Politics: Our Voters Want Simon for Leader ! suggests that Chris Huhne is "grey in every sense of the word" that the Tory membership probably realised that whilst they might want Davis, their heads told them to vote for the electable one and so on.

Needless to say I disagree. Just look at this leadership election itself - people seem to have gone and sought out the "outsider", the "unknown", Chris Huhne, to find out what he has to say so they could make up their minds about him. And in that he has come across well. The others, the familiar faces, Simon and Ming, they think they already know what they stand for and what they're going to say.

If we are to carve out a new political-economic landscape and present innovative ideas to the public, we don't want people switching off because the know and recognise Simon or Ming and think they know what they're going to say. We need someone who can take the new challenging ideas and put them in words for everyone to understand. And we want people to think "oh, he's new, what has he got to say".

On both fronts, Chris has it. With the others, "Mandy Rice-Davis Applies".

If we constantly decide where our party is going by trying to second guess the wider electorate, no wonder there's poverty of ideological discourse in UK politics. Are we to select our leader via a focus group of pebbledashed mondeo owners from the dead centre of the UK somewhere?

On Thursday "The Insider" (a laughable conceit of sniping from behind anonymity mostly at people trying their best to do some good in local politics) in the Oxford Mail complained that a Green councillor had not updated his blog for a few months, describing a blog as a "self important forum to tell people what you have been up to".

Until I got into this I was extremely skeptical myself about it. And I did think blogging was a bit of onanistic self-promotion that probably nobody would ever read. Of course the Insiders gives the lie to that suggestion - since he, or she, obviously does follow them sometimes. We've seen how instant news from ordinary people on the scene - long before the news crews could get there - gave us insights into the July bombings, the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the war in Iraq direct from a chap in Baghdad. How the BBC and other news networks are paying people for their camera phone eye-witness reports and images and so on.

All one can reasonably conclude is that it is in fact the media running scared. Blogging offers an opportunity for people to air their opinions for others to find and read. It threatens the monopoly of the "Fleet Street" scribblers in holding our attention for a few precious minutes every day. And of course they do it for money - whether the journalist or commentator getting paid, to the media giant continuing to attract advertising - if we all got our opinions from each other (and they're no less valid - often it seems more honest and truthful than opinion journalists in my experience) instead of from the self-important scribbler in a newspaper or television office, they have little else of worth to us.

Finally running scared of the power of the web are we, "Insider"?

I nodded off quite early last night so it seems all the hoopla was only just beginning. I was evidently not so unconscious as I thought, for I had had a nightmare about everyone rushing outside to see this Davis chap ride past on his high, ever so high, horse (a strange beast, for it had white bits where you would normally expect black and black bits where you would normally expect white) whilst waving their 28th day release papers and union flag bunting, and hailing him as potentially the greatest liberal Home Secretary the country's never had.

And then, half through my snoozing state, I sort of heard a bloke called McKenzie muttering something about Rupert Murdoch paying for him to stand against the arch-liberal Ricky Dickie Davey Davis in a by-election. Mr "28 days is enough" Davis might well be wondering what he's let himself in for - perhaps a real Conservative candidate who supports that party's membership's opinion that "14 days or fewer" was plenty when he himself voted against the Magna Carta a couple of years back.

And looking around, I see more praise heaped on. I see the Libertarian Alliance backing him unconditionally . I see the Libertarian Party inviting him to join them . I hear neo-con Conservatives saying they never, ever, ever, no really never for a second, supported 42 days, ever. That 42 was just a placeholder they had used to try to work out what question the government were trying to answer at the time.

Of course, the Libertarian Party is also playing a bit of politics here (and I think they should - to get some publicity if nothing else). They could of course do with a high profile "liberal" like Davis like a hole in the head right now. The Libertarian Alliance makes it clear they take a very different position on almost everything else Dicky D has ever said on crime and punishment. You can't adopt someone like that who would undoubtedly be seen as a flag-carrier with his wildly illiberal views on all sorts of personal and social liberal issues where the state should, to any half-decent liberal or libertarian, just butt out.

Furthermore, Davis's resignation may be an extraordinary event, but frankly it is a stunt. There's nothing him being re-elected in his own constituency can do to give him a different mandate on this particular issue. Indeed it only has downsides from what I can see. He will not be steering the Tory revolt against the bill in the House of Lords, and he could end up not very convincingly re-elected (either because there is no contest and nobody bothers to vote or, if there is a contest, someone makes gains against him).

If I were a party strategist, personally, I would stand the best candidate one can find against him. The most liberal or libertarian we can find, and make this an issue of what sort of freedom do you want - his, the freedom of 28 days is okay even if that too breaches all the ancient rights he is now trying to defend and no other personal freedoms on issues like drugs and sexuality, or real freedom where the government gets out of as many aspects of our lives as possible.

The man is a politician for God's sake. He's been in that place for two decades now. Politicians, especially entrenched ones like Davis, are the problem, not part of the solution, If he is the nation's new champion of liberty, the day I look for another homeland has just drawn closer.