So anyway. A few months ago the good people at Friday Books asked me to curate an anthology of some of the best of this year’s British blogging - much like Tim Worstall’s excellent 2005:Blogged.

Well, it’s nearly here - The Blog Digest 2007. It goes on sale on this Friday, December 1. You can get it online at Amazon, Politico’s, Waterstones, and in all good books shops. It features a hundred(ish) posts from some of the UK’s best bloggers (and me) and a cover and cartoons by the estimable Matt Buck (The cartoon that heralds the chapter on sex is truly something to behold.) I’ve had my copies back from the printers and it’s looking really rather ace, if I do say so myself.

The book is in themed chapters this year (unlike Tim’s which was ordered chronologically) - Culture & Media, Sex, War, Politics, Activism, Work & Play, Death and Sport. I’ve tried to create a broad collection so, as well as some of my favourite blogs, there are quite a few excellent ones in there that I hadn’t read before researching the book. I can’t remember just how many blogs I looked through but it was loads and loads.

Hopefully, it’s a rounded collection if not a particularly balanced (politically, at least) one. Strange as it sounds for a collection of other people’s work but I hope it reflects my own personality to some extent. There’s outrage and anger and my sense of humour - many of the pieces are in they because they made me laugh out loud - in there.

I tried also to make the book as accessible as possible for people with little or no knowledge of blogs (maybe someone will buy Matthew Taylor a copy). Hopefully it showcases some of the fantastic writing that you can find out there.

Any plugging of the book would be gratefully accepted. Obviously I stand (hopefully) to make some money out its sales but it’s also a shop window for some real talent that deserves wider exposure. (Advertising the book on your blog via an Amazon Associates account might be worthwhile - an ad for Tim’s 2005:Blogged bought me a couple of DVDs this year.)

Thanks to everybody who made this possible - the Friday Books gang and, of course, all the contributors who gave permission for their work to be included.

Needless to say I’m very excited. I shall of course be hanging round all the bookshops in Brighton saying ‘Oh, this looks excellent, I think I’ll buy ten copies’ in a loud voice. If anybody spots the book in the wild or sees any reviews please let me know.

Update: As of ten days ago, David Blunkett had only shifted 1,000 copies of his memoirs. For Christ’s sake, at the very least, please help me do better than that. If/when the Blog Digest reaches 1,000 sales, I’ll let everybody know and we can have a good old laugh. So, buy the Blog Digest and help rub David Blunkett’s nose in it.

Update update: Anybody tempted to buy the book from Amazon but put off by the message ‘Availability: Usually dispatched within 4 to 6 weeks’ should ignore it - Davide received his copy from them in 24 hours.

…as a wise man once said.

Leading on from comments about freedom of speech made by the Prime Minister’s senior policy adviser, his former press secretary and the director of the Press Complaints Commission, we have this: Keith Olbermann (again) on former US Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s musings on the First Amendment.

It’s said from time to time by bloggers prepared to sail close to the wind on matters such as libel, that their blogs can’t be touched under British law because they’re not hosted in the UK. One or two bloggers like to point out that their blogs are hosted on blogspot in the US. Well, they might want to keep an eye on Newt and his own ideas about freedom of speech:

“This is a serious, long-term war,” Gingrich added, “and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country. It will lead us to learn how to close down every Web site that is dangerous.”

And now the apposite quote from a significant piece of prescient fiction (it’s 1984’s day off today unfortunately - it’s knackered through overwork):

Goose-stepping morons [...] should try reading books instead of burning them.

To Donald and his partner Lucia, a baby girl, born yesterday at 12.46pm weighing in at three kilogrammes. Mother and baby both doing well.

It seems, at least in the higher echelons of what pass for New Labour’s ‘foremost’ ‘minds’ these days, that blogs are inciting something of a moral panic. First, last week, we had Tony Blair’s senior policy adviser Matthew Taylor* telling us that blogs and bloggers were undermining the relationship between public and politicians.

Now we have no less a figure than Alastair Campbell speaking of his concerns.

Former Downing Street spin doctor Alastair Campbell, who chaired the session organised by the Commission for Racial Equality, said blogs were “perceived as a positive development” but added that “some of the most offensive stuff” comes from them…

Most offensive? Well, it’s a cheap point and no less valid for that, but if you amalgamated all seven million UK blogs together and measured their collective offensiveness, it would still only be around one or two millicampbells. Devil’s Kitchen (for example) may be impressively foul-mouthed and therefore of dubious taste to the small-minded but I’m pretty sure that he hasn’t yet orchestrated a propaganda offensive (in both senses of the word) that contributed to the deaths of 655,000 people. What’s more offensive, a sweary blogger or a Deputy Prime Minister who can’t keep his hands to himself?

How many blogs has Campbell read in order to form this conclusion? Maybe he has someone like self-styled blogging superstar and Westminster watchdog Guido Fawkes in mind which suggests Campbell hasn’t ventured very far into Blogistan. He’d be guilty of a gross category error. Holding Fawkes up as an example would be like eating a turd and then declaring your dislike of chocolate eclairs. Sure, they’re both long and brown but you’re the one who’s been eating shit.

To think that Campbell once consorted with princes and presidents and now he’s slagging off bloggers for whatever slim living it affords. I think I have an erection.

Speaking at the same conference Press Complaints Commission director Tim Toulmin said he’d like to see a voluntary code of practice for bloggers much like the one we already have for newspapers and magazine. Needless to say, many bloggers have told Mr Toulmin what he can do with his Blogger’s Code.

It’s self-serving nonsense and ultimately unenforceable. I was once at a talk given by a PCC representative who closed the lecture with the words, ‘I know a lot of people think the Press Complaints Commission is toothless, but…’. They then refused to answer questions afterwards.

The laws of libel and contempt of court apply to bloggers as much as they do to journalists. Unlike newspapers who only admit to mistakes when what laughingly passes for PCC sanction is applied, blogging is a peer-reviewed medium where factual inaccuracies in post can be pointed out in the comments. It’s already self-policing. The best bloggers already unspokenly adhere to a code. Only the lowest of the low delete comments pointing out their mistakes and that kind of censorship tends to get flagged anyway. As for redress, as Robert Sharp says:

My comments box is open, and I respectfully invite you to redress yourself there. My readers shall consider your point-of-view, and if they agree with you over me, then I shall probably lose credibility with one or both of them.

And the rest is dictated by common decency and accepted social mores. (Messy, I know, but it’s my experience, with one or two exceptions, that if you want to be successful in Blogistan, being a total wanker will not get you very far.) And the fact that, like television, if something isn’t illegal but you don’t like it, then turn it off and go and find something more to your tastes.

* It’s to be wondered just how close Taylor was close to the formulation of Blair’s contemptuous attempts to establish formal social contracts between government and public. Taylor’s assertion that…

…certainly betrays a line of thinking that says the public should be singing louder for its supper ‘beyond paying taxes and obeying the law’, as the Prime Minister’s policy review puts it.

Tim Worstall’s Britblog Roundup #93, Mr Eugenides’ Swearblogger Roundup #8 and James Higham’s Blogfocus.

I am a big fan of the “intelligent design” teaching packs that the god-botherers are sending out to our schools. I hope the government makes them compulsory. They will be incredibly useful in teaching kids the single most important lesson that anyone learns in school.

That lesson is, obviously, that adults in positions of power and responsibility often talk the most extraordinary bullshit.

read the rest…

“Rights and responsibilities” is a current catchphrase of Blair’s government. The problem lies in its preferred distribution of each: rights accrue to the government, and responsibilities to citizens. That’s a dotted line we should refuse to sign on.

read the rest…

When the BBC news website puts up a story, if that story changes, instead of starting a new page they simply update the original page. Fair enough you might say, apart from the pain it can cause us bloggers who can find quotations used from the original article changed or deleted.

However, Dr Crippen finds a more suspect use of this ’stealth editing’ - a rather glaring mistake swept away with the clatter of a keyboard. Basically, they recycled a press release as news without citing the source of the release’s vested interests.

Dr Crippen complained to the BBC and got an accusation of misrepresentation for his trouble. Fortunate then, that the original version of the story has been tucked away on the internet so the before and after comparison can be made and Dr C vindicated. Go read the full story.

Trust no one, as ever.

Clive Nosemonkey has a new address and very nice it looks too.

If anybody is at a loose end tonight and would like to see me make a complete arse of myself, then they should tune in to 18 Doughty Street at 9pm.

Apparently you can text and IM questions into the show so if anybody could send in a few easy ones to get me out of trouble, I’d be eternally grateful.

From Wembley Stadium to the Scottish Parliament building - oh, and did I mention the Millennium Dome? - Britain has a miserable record at bringing in big infrastructure projects on time and on budget. The crucial difference with the Olympics is that they can’t be postponed which means they are even more likely to inflate in cost. When Wembley wasn’t ready, at least the FA Cup Final could be moved to Cardiff. The deadline for the Olympics is an iron one. You can’t tell the world that you’re a bit behind and would they kindly come back in 2013.

The Olympic contracts are not fixed-price contracts. Every landowner, developer, contractor and builder, from the corporate suits to the sparks installing the lighting has been handed a loaded revolver to put to the head of the government. Pay up - or the Games get it. Whatever figure anyone is giving you at the moment, the real cost is going to be even more stratospheric. £8bn? Do I hear £10bn? The man who designed the Montreal Olympic park reckons we will eventually be landed with a bill of not less than £15bn for an event to which only the very wealthy and the very well-connected will get a ticket.

read the rest…

A few months ago, I found myself within spitting distance of Christopher Hitchens after attending a lecture by him on Thomas Paine. Having, however, now read this review utterly destroying Hitchens’ book about Paine (via Dave), I’m now regretting that I resisted, as crude as this sounds, the urge to spit.

As graceless and liverish as Hitchens was in the question and answer session after the lecture, and as unnecessarily foul-mouthed as he was at the later book signing, at least, or so I thought, his lecture on Paine was worth the entrance fee. Except, now having read the review, I realise that not a word that Hitchens uttered about Paine that night is to be trusted.

At the book signing I bought a copy of Hitchens’ ‘Orwell’s Victory‘, Orwell being a hero of mine (in so far as a 35 year-old man can have heroes, Han Solo notwithstanding), and had him sign it in a pointless attempt to secure a sod of common ground between me and a man I regarded as almost, but not quite, a complete tit.

The spine of the book is as yet unbroken. If Hitchens is half as inaccurate about Orwell as he is about Paine, the book is worthless. Ebay beckons. Any offers?

In the future, said British politics’ very own Lawnmower Man, David ‘Dave’ Cameron this week, political battles will be fought in cyberspace. As he strapped on his virtual reality goggles to launch the Conservative’s new down-with-the-kids ‘Sort-It’ website, he declared the ‘internet revolution’ is ushering in ‘a whole new age of political communication and engagement’ where ‘the old answers will not work’.

Now, to run the terrible, if unlikely, risk of sounding less cool than Cameron, we’d like to ask if the ‘old’ ways of political communication and engagement have really had their day. You know, the quaint, unfashionable stuff like going out and talking to people. Obviously, neither Cameron nor Blair like meeting the public face to face in uncontrolled situations because there are too many variables and too many chances they’ll be made to look like idiots. But it’s a problem of their own making.

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…unless you happen to read through pages 43-44 of the Postwatch Annual Report 2005/6, you’ll have no idea that the self-appointed (but certainly not self-financing) consumer champion spent £200,000 obtaining a judicial review of a Postcomm (that’s the regulator, by the way) decision; or that during this financial year they anticipate a potential £700,000 bill from legal action involving Royal Mail. Corporate lawyers get distastefully rich while different parts of the sclerotic state sue the arse off each other. Nor would you know that since Postwatch is funded on a fee per complaint basis, a shortfall of £870,000 caused by a drop in customer complaints is expected to be made up by the DTI. When service improves, it costs us more…

read the rest…

Henry Porter’s ‘Suspect Nation‘ documentary is up on YouTube.

He’s doing something right, is Henry. This is from an Independent interview with the Observer’s editor, Roger Alton:

One of the good things we’ve done is a series by Henry Porter on surveillance and civil liberties, which I know is getting under Blair’s skin. One of Blair’s drivers said Blair was saying “fucking Henry Porter”, and last time I went to see Blair he name-checked Henry and got quite cross.

Thanks to Hannah for the links.

What Blair is proposing, in forcing a literal, physical contract between the state and individual citizens, is a destruction of this collective obligation between citizens. He is proposing the destruction of society itself.

read the rest…

Started by Iain Dale and spreading like a particularly virulent strain of crabs, the ‘ten things I would never do’ meme has been passed on to me via Not Saussure, the swine.

So, here goes…

10. Say never again.

9. Watch ‘Never Say Never Again‘ again.

8. Smile at a crocodile.

7. Trust a hippie.

6. Mind the bollocks.

5. Rain in Southern California

4. Can say goodbye, no no no no no no no.

3. Promise you a rose garden.

2. Give a sucker an even break.

1. Pass this meme on to ten others.

Some Iraqis are running even further, others not fast enough.

(Video via Pond.)

‘It is a shame and it is embarrassing to us all when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality again.’

Good news everyone, the Independent have finally done away with the subscription wall that until now imprisoned their columnists. They are now all available to read for free.

The site’s navigation is abysmal (all the columns are arrange in chronological order rather than by columnist) but it’s a step in the right direction. Is it churlish to suggest the Independent’s webmonkeys might have put a little thought into this? And did anybody else know about this - it seems to have been done with no fanfare whatsoever.

For anyone who hasn’t read him, the first thing you should do is go and wallow in the godlike genius of Matthew Norman, though you’ll have to do a little bit of digging to find his stuff.

(Via Fisking Central)

Update: I tell a lie. After a bit of a ferret around - it wasn’t immediately obvious - all of Matthew Norman’s stuff is here. The collected Simon Carr - also worthy of your study - is there as well.

Tim W’s Britblog Roundup #92, Mr Eugenides’ Swearbloggers Roundup #7 and James Higham’s Saturday Blogfocus.

Courtesy of the mighty Sunny Hundal, we have:

New Generation Network is a collective of individuals calling for a new approach to tackle racism, discrimination and prejudice, and building a modern multi-faith and multi-ethnic Britain.

Its manifesto is here along with an accompanying commentary from Sunny.

It’s vital and inspirational stuff. If you like what you see, get along and put your name to the manifesto.

I’m still sceptical about the Downing Street e-petition thingy but that’s tempered somewhat by the fact that the ID card petition is going great guns. Get over there and sign it if you haven’t already.

And courtesy of Davide we have:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to hold a full public inquiry into the London bombings of July 7 2005.

The original petition calling for a public enquiry is still live too.

Does halal chicken taste any different from non-halal chicken? You know, not as nice? Call me hopelessly naive but why else would you object to your children being served ‘a Muslim Christmas dinner’? Unless you were an abject bigot with no sense of perspective who should have been neutered to prevent you breeding?

Or maybe the non-Muslim parents who ‘expressed outrage last night’ at the plans to serve halal chicken at a school Christmas dinner were objecting to the way a chicken is killed in order for it to be halal. That said, is there a particularly Christmassy way to kill chickens?

No doubt they insisted on only organic free-range chickens who led happy lives before being painlessly dispatched and served to their children. Serving the cheaper non-organic and non-free-range variety that spend their short, miserable lives pecking at each other in windowless sheds and standing up to their ankles in their own shit just wouldn’t be Christian, wouldn’t it?

‘Why can’t we have a choice of chicken which suits everyone, Muslims and non-Muslims,’ said ‘outraged’ mother Rachel Johnson, from Kimberworth, who is in no way a bigot. We let our kids eat food prepared in all kinds of disgusting ways but suddenly brown people are preparing it in a different (but no less inhumane) manner and Mrs Johnson feels ‘my culture is being stolen away from me’. That someone has apparently made off with her dignity and power of rational thought seems, conversely, not to bother her. Can we take it that Mrs Johnson and her supporters also eschew American movies and music of a black origin in favour of a strict diet of Ealing comedies and madrigals?

‘This was an attempt to extend the spirit of inclusion which would allow Muslim children to sit down and enjoy a meal together,’ said do-gooding headteacher and traitor to Britain’s unadulterated and unsullied cultural heritage, Jan Charters. Somebody should tell this hippie that Rosa Parks is dead. Nobody solved anything by getting peoples of different colours and cultures to sit down together.

You could go on all day about this. The stratospheric levels of ignorance at play here make you fear for the gene pool. Needless to say accusations of ‘political correctness’ were thrown about like confetti. An organisation called the ‘Campaign Against Political Correctness’ felt compelled to get involved.

‘It is almost as stupid as serving up pork on Eid,’ said Mrs Johnson, on behalf of a ‘lot of parents’, as the swarthy hordes threw a blanket over her and forced her to face Mecca. Kimberworth should be sealed off immediately to prevent these people’s DNA making it out into the wider community. And ensure their cultural purity, obviously.

In the new James Bond film, there’s a scene where ‘M’, Bond’s boss, goes on national television and declares that she knows who the villain is, where he is, what he’s up to and, furthermore, that her agents are following his every move.

Now, you’re probably thinking ‘what a preposterous load of old bollocks, that’s far-fetched even by the standards of Bond movies’. Ordinarily, we’d agree (we did make it up after all) but that was before we read the speech given last week by head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller.

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