Irish Political News

Iain Dale reports that a Group Blog has started from the House of Lords, which seems to be Clive Soley expanding his existing project sideways - admirable. This is from Clive Soley, Lord of I’ve forgotten where: In 2003 I started a blog as an MP. I regarded it as a success and it certainly attracted some interesting debates. It was important for me because it enabled me to talk direct to people without first finding a media outlet. I saw it as a meeting room without walls. There are problems for an elected representative however. The more successful your blog is the more time consuming " and time matters for MPs! You also have to decide whether to answer all the points or just those from constituents or just let the blog run itself with occasional inputs from the MP Over the last 12 months I have let my blog http://clivesoleymp.typepad.com/ drift into gentle decline with only occasional posts. But down in the Westminster forest something was stirring. I had talked to the Hansard Society and to the House of Lords Library and Information department. The result? A new Lordsoftheblog http://www.lordsoftheblog.net/ has emerged blinking into the daylight! The Hansard Society has been a good midwife! Nine Lords are participating and I think that number will grow. The idea is, in effect, a group blog. We all make (hopefully!) two posts a week and no doubt each Peer will decided how and when to respond to comments. I hope it will give people a greater insight into the working of the House of Lords and enable Peers to inform people of their views and their actions, their votes and their policy aims. MPs and Peers need to find new ways of engaging with the public. A blog is not the complete answer to the feeling of alienation from the political system that many feel today but it is part of the answer. In the 1950 trade unions and the church played a bigger role in informing people about their political rights and duties. That has gone and the conventional media has been unable to replace it. There is no shortage of opinion today " almost everyone with access to the internet can have their shout but Peers and MP are legislators and what they think and do is more than opinion " it is also news. So we now have one more way of telling people what we are doing and why. Hopefully it will also give the public a chance to talk to us more directly even if we cant promise to answer all their comments or to do everything they would like us to do. My thoughts The welcome: I wish it well. Like Paul Burgin, I hope it helps make the workings of Parliament better known. And the niggles: Like nearly everybody else they have put it on an international dot Net domain, (http://www.lordsoftheblog.net/) which guarantees that it will be harder to find for people searching on Google UK. Welcome to the political blogging ghetto, M’Luds. In their case, the House of Lords profile may help. A serious one. Why do establishment blogrolls all consist of the same “Great and the Good” boilerplate. Has no one any imagination or willingness to spend some time looking for interesting hidden blogs (no, I don’t necessarily mean this one - I mean interesting real life blogs). You have some leverage to help demolish the walls of the political blogging playpen - please use it to link to blogs that don’t get enough attention. Why not a rotating schedule of those not in the Iain Dale 500?) I like the Terms and Conditions clause 5: “Dont submit comments which are substantially material from another website, publication, news feed or blog.” Someone will have some fun with that.For a start, the T&Cs themselves appear to be substantially material from the Food Standards Agency, WorkJam, DirectGov or the Department for Communities and Local Government Webchats (among others), and I claim my ?5. OK, two of those are Hansard Society Websites -but even so! I wonder whether corporate consultants (as opposed to micro-consultants who are far better value when not being discriminated against by the tax system) charged a 4 figure sum to write those T&Cs originally. Wrapping-Up Anyway, I’ll be following Lords of the Blog to see how it goes. Tags: lords of the blog, nine lords a leaping, clive soley, Lord Soley, Lord Norton, Lord Tyler, Lord Lipsey, Lord Dholakia, Baroness D’Souza, Lord Teverson, Baroness Young of Hornsey, Baroness Murphy