Change we need?

The recent turmoil involving Damian McBride, Derek Draper and Guido Fawkes is obviously the big story of the moment, and I was rather expecting matters to quieten down before I came up with a value-judging assessment of the whole affair. As it seems, however, the revelation by Guido, prefaced by this cryptic (and possibly in future even iconic) image, and elaborated on at length by the MSM over the long weekend, that Downing Street advisers (who were about as close to Gordon Brown as anyone in the Civil Service could get) were putting together some of the most sordid and ungrounded smear stories about senior opposition MPs ever to see the light of day, has opened the floodgates for a whole host of “I am Spartacus”-style mea culpa pieces from all sections of the media, and the furore just doesn’t seem to want to die down. In fact, it’s started to spread across the Atlantic, where the reaction so far has been one of bemusement that such smear campaigns weren’t already a run-of-the-mill part of the political process.

Though Brown has tried to cleave the middle way between acting like nothing happened (his favourite ploy) and a full apology by sending letters to the MPs and partners concerned, pressure seems to be mounting on him to just bite the bullet and say sorry. From the grassroots and back benches of his own party, too (yes, those are four separate links to four separate Labour blogs). And Guido’s not laying off either – he wants an apology for the smears on him and Iain Dale concocted by the same team not so very long ago, and is now calling for the head of Tom Watson, the Digital Engagement Minister, while Danny Finkelstein has fired off a resounding j’accuse in the direction of Charlie Whelan as well.

The blogosphere has undoubtedly come into its own, and the more anarchic propagators of the genre will be celebrating 11.iv.09 as B-Day, the day when blogs first began to matter. But a more reflective thread of enquiry is starting to emerge, represented by this article by Sharpe’s Opinion, and fiercely echoed by Devil’s Kitchen, which asks what the long-term effects of what is starting to be known as ‘Smeargate’ will/could/ought to be for UK politics. A particularly potent related piece is this one by Alice Miles of the Times, already picked out for (albeit selective) praise from Guido and Iain Dale. Clearly the MSM will have to start paying more attention to what the inherently individualistic online media say and think, unconstrained by the bounds of party line, corporate opinion, or even sometimes conventions of decorum. But if the opposition parties need to learn anything from the events of the last few days, it’s that they should on no account try to ‘harness’ the power of the internet in the abortive manner that McBride, Draper & co tried to, in a centralised, controlling, top-down way – if anything, it is such attempts by political parties to mimic the universalist anti-statist format of the blogosphere that will wind up the bloggers the most.

What parties need to learn is that, thanks to the increasingly perfect permeability and transparency of the political process due to electronic and virtual media, the merest rumour about each and every policy they make will not only soon find its way onto the internet via the contacts that the legislators have to the ‘outside’, but also, thanks to the effortless ease of communication the UK enjoys, will very rapidly spread to a much wider audience than would have been imaginable in the past. A conversation over a pint in a Westminster pub will, by means of text and email and tweet and phonecall, make its way before long to a politically-minded blogger, and from there to someone of the stature of a Guido or an Iain Dale, and thence to the research desks of the news networks and the press.

This will (or should) have the consequence of making politicians become more circumspect about their own personal practices and those of their staff of advisors. This is perhaps wishful thinking on my part, but certainly in line with Tony Blair’s credo of having to be “whiter than white” – the McBride story shows that no tier of the civil service or political hierarchy is safe from the scrutiny of the public and the press. Given that, by old conventions of accountability, the buck still ultimately stops with the minister in charge of a particular department, it certainly provides an incentive for senior frontbench MPs of every party allegiance to go through their staff with a fine-toothed comb to make sure each and every employee of theirs (and thus also of the taxpayer) is pulling their weight, both morally and productively. Though it was coincidentally the right-libertarian bloggers who brought down the “Brown cabal”, neither the Conservatives nor the (centrist-liberal) Lib Dems can excuse themselves from this task.

Whoever wins the next General Election come May 2010 can expect the considerable and growing might of the blogosphere to perform exactly the same sort of dispassionate anti-state scrutiny of them and their advisors as soon as they are installed in office, so it only makes sense to curb the rotten elements privately before the blogs do it for them in public. After all, the point of politicians is that they be the best people available to act as statesman and stewards of the people’s institutions of government – and the point of a democracy that they be held accountable for such a claim, and that they subject themselves to scrutiny in as honest and open a way as possible (not without reason is the word ‘candidate’ derived from the Latin for ‘white’, candidus). As Guido has trumpeted several times of late, people should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people (a quote attributed variously to Che Guevara, Mahatma Gandhi and V for Vendetta). And the MSM, as the majority shareholder in the public’s scrutiny-resources, can really afford to be rather more daring in the peformance of its share of the task, as Alice Miles suggests. Perhaps, now the  blogs can be reasonably safely relied on to provide the nitty-gritty gonzo journalism that political and corporate pressures previously prevented the MSM journalists from carrying out themselves, we will finally start seeing a few more reports like Andrew Gilligan’s notorious piece on the ’sexed up’ September Dossier, in which every corner of the MSM (not just the tabloids) starts seriously holding those that govern us to account.

~ by Marius Ostrowski on April 15, 2009.