Yet at the heart of the Yes campaign in last week’s AV referendum seems to have been a big mistake: trying to run a grassroots campaign to win a national contest.

Grassroots campaigns can pick off parts of a country. Grassroots campaigns can win when there is no national opponent (cf the campaign against the government’s forestry proposals last year – a very effective use of grassroots mobilisation, but not up against a direct opposing campaign). Grassroots campaigns can also raise the funds that fuel national media and advertising campaigns (cf Barack Obama and his mamoth TV advertising spending for the 2008 Presidential contest).

But where a grassroots campaign is up against a national media and advertising campaign against it, grassroots are not enough.

In its own terms, the Yes campaign’s grassroots efforts were very impressive: dominating local media coverage for the much of the campaign with local events and stunts; huge numbers of volunteers brought into the campaign; impressive online donation figures and levels of web traffic that easily beat the No campaign.

There were, inevitably, some mistakes too – especially  in the very small number of different leaflets available which meant that even where there were people willing to regularly deliver an area it was extremely hard to do more than a couple of deliveries – and frequently the idea was that one leaflet would make a difference. (Just as doing only the one leaflet so often results in someone winning a Parliamentary election. Oh, hang on…)

But even without any of those mistakes none of that would have amounted to nearly enough in the face of a national politician speaking out in the national media. The headline polls moved when David Cameron started speaking out as Tory voters shifted heavily to the No camp in response. The No campaign may have run an extremely intensive online get out the vote campaign, but by then it didn’t really matter.

The combination of David Cameron and the Daily Mail is not a sure-fire election winner by any means (see May 2010 for a start), but the answer does not rest with street stalls and tweets in a national contest.

Of course you cannot magic ideal supporters out of thin air, but in the end it mattered far more that so many Labour MPs, peers and councillors did not follow Ed Miliband’s lead, that no Conservative MPs came out unequivocally for a Yes vote and that only the usual suspects amongst media outlets backed a Yes vote (and many of them half-heartedly).

There are many things political parties and campaigners can learn from the grassroots and online efforts of both sides (as Paul Waugh has pointed out) but the most important is a reminder of the limitations of both.

Today it is Andrew Reeves, who blogs at http://andrewrunning.blogspot.com.

1. What’s your formative political memory?
In 1984 Ken Clarke gave me an award at a thank you party for delivering leaflets for him. In front of the 200+ people there he also asked me if I wanted to join the party – and in front of them all I said no! I was pleased he’d won but said that the more I had got to know the party I realised why I couldn’t. He was somewhat embarrassed!

2. When did you start blogging?
Tuesday 15 May 2007.

3. Why did you start blogging?
I worked for Lynne Featherstone from just after the 2005 general election until the end of 2006, before becoming one of the two London Campaigns Officers. I was amazed Lynne found time to write her own blog posts so this was my initial inspiration. I also signed up to run the Great North Run in 2007 and so wanted to use it for a training diary.

4. What five words would you use to describe your blog?
I cheated here, I asked some friends for their five words – here is a selection: friendly, personal, prolific, timely, political, caring, liberal, sharp, punchy, researched, readable, passionate and straight-talking.

5. What five words would you use to describe your political views?
I’m a social liberal democrat.

6. Which post have you most liked writing in the last year (and why)?
I enjoyed writing this, not because I was suspended from Twitter, because to be honest that was a nightmare, but thanks to the support shown by the online community, inside and outside the Liberal Democrats:
Andrew Reeves is still suspended on Twitter – but the support is awesome

7. Which post have you most liked reading in the last year (and why)?
I love reading Caron’s writing, because unlike my shoot from the hip and rant style, Caron is more methodical and this shows in her writing. In this post Caron highlights the hypocricy of the Labour party while still maintaining decorum – perfect:
Labour didn’t love NHS Direct

8. What’s your favourite YouTube clip?
I don’t particularly bother with YouTube, but this was my favourite ever:

9. Which bloggers, writers or thinkers inspire you?
Sara Bedford, Mark Pack and Caron Lindsay are the main three I read. I also read Paul Waugh and Olly Grender‘s pieces. Lynne Featherstone continues to inspire me, now a minister, a little more than before. Jeff Breslin (SNP Tactical Voting as was) is one of my favourite non-Lib Dem writers.

10. Give us a surprising fact about yourself:
I was a DJ in a gay pub (Admiral Duncan) and club (L’amour then Club 69) in Nottingham before leaving my home town in 1987/8.

You can see all our posts featuring Liberal Democrat bloggers here.

But no, her complaint was that, as Paul Waugh reported, the government is spending money buying artworks that will then be displayed in public buildings and visible to visitors rather than giving money to arts organisations.

Yup, the complaint was that rather than directly supporting artists by buying their work, the government should be giving money to organisations. Not complaints about the sort of art being purchased, who it is being bought from or on what terms; just complaints about buying art rather than giving grants to organisations.

Support for individuals bad, support for organisations good. Rather a touch of the New Labour love of the client state there – get people dependent on organisations, make organisations dependent on public funding and bingo, you’ve got a coalition to support your view of what the state should do.

With an impressive cast of contributors, including Peter Riddell, Carolyn Quinn and Michael White, the book has plenty of insider information, presented usually in the style of lively anecdotal chats. This is not a tedious career advice book nor a studious academic tone but rather something that gives a flavour of what it is like to be a political journalist and how to get there.

MP Adam Holloway’s contribution is the one that turns sour on political journalism, explaining how he became so disillusioned with coverage of himself that he not only ceased writing a column for the local newspaper but also stopped sending out local news releases.

The chatty style makes the book an easy read to dip in and out of, but does come at the cost of some questions being glossed over. In particular, there is a steady supply of anecdotes about how journalists managed to make the news, such as by prompting a thought in an MP, but beyond the banter there isn’t any consideration of the more serious ethical issue of how often a journalist should be making, rather than reporting, the news. For people considering entering the profession, a more direct discussion of ethics would not have gone amiss.

That many of the contributors have had long and successful careers means necessarily that they cut their teeth before the internet age upended journalism, but contributions towards the end – including an excellent one from Ivor Gaber – give a flavour of how the internet is changing the way journalists operate. It is instructive just how often reading blogs features in the brief “week in the life” of James Landale, though again a new person to the profession might perhaps have been well served by a piece majoring on whether, and if so how, to use the opportunities offered by blogging and Twitter. People such as Benedict Brogan and Paul Waugh have shown how these tools can be used to enhance reputations and make connections to help further journalism careers.

These are, however, reasons to read other books too rather than not to read this collection, for Sheila Gunn has put together an entertaining and enlightening easy-to-read introduction to the profession of political journalism.

You can buy Sheila Gunn’s So you want to be a political journalist? from Amazon here and So you want to be a politician? is also available. My chapter for the latter is available online for free.

Certainly better to pick from the front page than the back page, as announcing a barcode would have been lacking a little in interest (except, perhaps, to one of my former economics lecturers, who once tried to persuade us that the checksums on barcodes matched up with a warning from the Bible and predicted an imminent Second Coming).

That however wasn’t the only major policy was a distinct Liberal Democrat flavour to it. So too was the news about pensions. As Stephen Williams MP put it, “Proposals for a £140 flat rate pension, together with the Lib Dem commitment of restoring the earnings link, will ensure our pensioners get a fair deal”.

Both of those announcements were unsurprising, but one decision that had been up in the air was over the Green Investment Bank and how much power it really would have. George Osborne’s previous strange absence from the debate was put to rest when he announced a series of pieces of good news on the Green Investment Bank: starting a year earlier, £2 billion more in funds and, crucially, it can borrow. As Paul Waugh put it “Big victory for Cable”, not to mention Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg, who had taken the lead in settling the internal debate over how much powers to give.

Amongst the details was success for the long-standing Liberal Democrat calls for water rates relief in the South West, though overall the details did not add up to a particularly green budget, Green Investment Bank aside. The IFS’s initial analysis is that, “The Chancellor also insisted that green taxes will rise as a proportion of total receipts. This remains the case on current Treasury forecasts, but by the narrowest of margins”. Some of the non-financial measures, such as the new standard for zero-carbon homes, give the Budget a greater overall green tinge than the pure financial numbers show. How deep that tinge is will depend on how measures such as the presumption in favour of sustainable development pan out when the details are settled.

Here’s the email from Nick Clegg to party supporters about the Budget:

Today the coalition government has announced a budget that will return the UK to sustainable and balanced economic growth and which puts helping Alarm Clock Britain at its heart.

We are increasing the income tax threshold by £630 to £8105; lifting hundreds of thousands of low income earners out of paying income tax and putting £126 back in the pockets of low and middle income earners. This is in addition to the last budget that took nearly a million of the lowest income earners out of tax and made millions of hard working individuals £200 better off. We are making a real difference in people’s lives – from the front page of our manifesto to people’s back pockets.

Alarm Clock Britain will be further helped by the measures we have taken to give motorists a fairer deal. We are shifting taxation away from the pumps and onto the broader shoulders of the oil companies instead – with fuel duty being cut and taxation on oil companies rising.

At the same time we are making the wealthy pay their fair share with increased measures to tackle tax avoidance, higher charges for non-doms and a special tax on private jets. This budget also places green growth front and centre – the Green Investment Bank will begin operation next year with £3bn of capitalisation, delivering an additional £18bn of investment in green infrastructure by 2014-15.

We were left a toxic economic legacy by Labour with a record deficit and debt. Under Ed Balls Labour have no answers and solutions to the mess they left. The difficult decisions we have taken in government have rebuilt confidence in Britain’s ability to pay its way, kept interest rates lower than they would otherwise have been, and have provided the stability that business and individuals need to invest in the UK’s economy.

There are no easy decisions in this budget. But we are delivering a budget which will mean that that those who can pay more will; and those who are working hard to make ends meet will get a helping hand. This budget is progressive, green, liberal and what our country needs at this time.

Earlier in the day Danny Alexander took to YouTube to talk about the Budget:

Here’s the speech which got this reaction:

Thank you so much for inviting me to speak to you today. It is a real honour to be here.

You don’t need me to tell you that the job you do is one of the most important jobs there is.

You are the lifesavers as well as the shoulders to cry on. You are the healers and well as the comforters.

Politicians have the chance to make a difference once in a while. You make a difference every day, if not twenty or a hundred times a day.

You, as nurses and as a profession, have my respect, my admiration, and my utmost commitment to support you and the work you do in our NHS.

The RCN itself, of course, is the largest organisation of its kind in the world, and also, I might add, the best.

I met a group of student nurses a few months ago when they came up to Parliament on the RCN bus.

And today, I’ve come here to the RCN on the Liberal Democrat campaign bus – the most glaringly bright yellow vehicle you’ve ever seen.

It’s a particular honour to be here because you are leading the way in addressing the challenges in the NHS, setting the example politicians must now follow – something I want to discuss in more detail in a moment.

And you are making your voice heard on the political stage, with your Nursing Counts Campaign.

You are right to say that NHS services must be protected.

That if the axe falls on caring staff, it will cost us all more in the long term.

And you are absolutely correct to highlight the importance of public health and specialist nurses, to help us keep people healthier and manage long-term conditions more effectively.

One particular proposal you are making caught my eye: protection for whistleblowers.

Just before I was elected leader of the Liberal Democrats I went on a march with a Manchester nurse Karen Reissmann who had spoken out about her concerns over the provision of treatment in her local area and had been summarily sacked.

Though I clearly didn’t make much of an impression as she’s now standing for another party.

But there’s a simple principle: nurses need to be able to highlight their concerns without fear and without threat of retribution.

You see what is going on: you must speak out, and when you do, you will always have my support.

Whether it’s community nursing to improve public health and reduce demand on the NHS, or specialist nursing, from rheumatology to mental health, to take the burden off consultants, and GP follow-up appointments and improved patient care.

Your skills, initiative and ideas are going to be essential to the changes we make to ensure the NHS services people rely on are protected even now that money is tight.

I could tell you about the wonderful nurses in our local surgery, or in our local hospital, who have cared for my three sons on countless occasions.

I could tell you about the nurses who helped my wife Miriam just this weekend when she fractured her elbow.

But the truth is the only thing that is remarkable about my experiences in the NHS is how wholly unremarkable they are. I am just one of millions.

Parents turning up at A&E in the middle of the night with a sick child in their arms.

People going through months or years of chemotherapy in the battle against cancer.

Others finding a route out of depression or addiction with counselling and care.

Every experience is different, and yet each is the same.

The NHS is not a faceless institution but the sum total of millions of individual, acts of care and support.

The brainchild of a Liberal, Beveridge, the NHS was founded on a series of fundamentally liberal, and fundamentally British values.

Fairness. Equity. Solidarity. Those principles endure today. Rightly so.

It is something that perhaps too many of us, too often, take for granted, but which must never change.

The NHS is a precious inheritance. It must not be cast aside.

I am wholly committed, head and heart, to keeping our NHS, free to use and paid for by us all. But you and I also know that’s the easy bit to say.

The real question that politicians now have to answer is not: How much do you love the NHS?

It’s how do you protect and improve the NHS at a time like this when money is tight.
There will be 3.5m babies born in over the course of the next five years – 100,000 more than in the last five.

How do we guarantee they will be born as safely as babies born today?

There will be an extra 1.7m people in need of long term care by 2026.

How do we guarantee they will get the standards of care available today?

There are new treatments and new drugs for diseases like cancer being developed every day.

How do we ensure a publicly funded NHS can afford to make world-class treatment available for all?

And how do we do any of this when there is less money to go around in all our public services?

I believe we can and must protect services and jobs in the NHS.

But we can only do so if we face up to the realities of the situation in which we find ourselves.

I could have come here with promises of bags of gold, but you would not have believed me. You live in the real world. You know, we all know that money is now tight.

The deficit now stands at £167bn.

And we all know that finding bucketloads more money for health at a time when budgets are tight could only come at the cost of other equally essential areas like schools and police.

So you know we have to find ways to help the NHS do more with the money it already has.

And you are rightly sceptical, as you said at the weekend, of promises from politicians that do not face up to those basic facts.

And do not acknowledge that cuts are not something that might happen in the future but something that is happening, right now.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies this morning assessed the parties’ policies on the deficit and taxation.

And concluded that the Liberal Democrats’ plan is the most credible – even if there’s still much more work to do, we have gone further in spelling out how to cut the deficit.

The most fair – we will put money in the pockets of people who need a break by raising the income tax threshold so that no one will pay a penny of income tax on the first £10000 they earn.

A proposal which the IFS has specifically said is the best way to encourage people to move off benefits and into work.

The old politics is to make unfunded promises and hit you with surprises after the election.

Our way of doing things is to be as open and upfront as possible about the challenges we face and how, together, we can start to fill the black hole in the public finances and deliver fair taxes to millions of people who need a break.

We need a new, different approach to the way money is allocated and used within the NHS.

That is what I want to talk to you about today.

I want to talk about our plans to help the NHS work better with the money it has by devolving power to patients, to local people and to staff like you.

Plans mirrored in many ways by the approach of my Liberal Democrat colleagues in the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament for the Welsh and Scottish NHS – both of which face similar if not greater pressures than the NHS in England.

We will look for efficiency and unnecessary programmes of spending wherever they lie. But because the NHS faces exceptional demographic pressures, savings we identify within the health service will be diverted, penny for penny, pound for pound to areas of the NHS which have been starved of cash, or could be in future years.

Areas like dementia, where demographic pressures are high, cancer, where the costs of treatment are rising, and mental health, which has been a Cinderella service within the NHS for far too long.

Our working assumption is that we will stick to the government plans for NHS funding.

That doesn’t mean trying to do the impossible: more with less.

It simply means spending money where it is needed, not wasting it elsewhere.

Just think of the mistakes that have marred the impressive record of investment in recent years:

A grandiose IT project running years behind schedule and billions over budget.

GP and consultant contracts poorly negotiated with no clear benefit for patients.

And an endless cycle of botched reorganisations of the endless quangos, boards, trusts and agencies that make up our health services.

An NHS which has more administrators, managers and clerks than it does hospital beds.

Government figures show it would take one person 491 years to provide all the data the government agencies demand from health services each year.

Last year filling in those forms cost the country a total of £1bn, enough to pay the salaries of more than 25,000 nurses.

Just imagine how different – how much better – our NHS could be if this were changed.

My vision for change in the NHS is a liberal one.

It’s about dispersing power – to patients and to clinical staff.

You know as well as I do that the NHS is over-centralised and still driven far too heavily by targets and bureaucracy.

And you know, both as people who work in the NHS and as people who use it that patients themselves have too little control, both over their day-to-day care, and over the direction and priorities of the NHS as a whole.

So I want to give more power to local people.

More power to staff and more power to patients.

First: local people

In the last 13 years, increases in public spending have been accompanied by the politics of big government.

More money has been given – and Liberal Democrats welcomed that decision wholeheartedly.

But it was given on the condition that central government got to decide how to spend it.

Central directions, onerous inspections and a myriad of bureaucratic targets. Micromanagement, waste and skewed priorities.

These are the hallmarks of a Labour NHS.

Liberal Democrats will radically change the way the NHS is run by devolving power to local people.

I want to turn remote PCTs that answer to the Secretary of State, into accountable Local Health Boards answerable to the people who use the local NHS.

Two thirds of the members directly elected by local people and the final third indirectly elected representatives from local councils.

Let me assure you: this isn’t a proposal for yet another reorganisation of NHS structures.

I know – I hear it all the time from everyone I meet who works in the NHS – that you are sick to the back teeth of restructuring.

Our proposals will not put you through another pointless cycle of change.

What we want is for the existing structures, Primary Care Trusts, to become democratically accountable.

A responsive NHS should have a central structure, of course, but it should not dictate local needs – it should respond to them.

The signals shouldn’t always go downwards, in the form of orders, targets, rules and regulations.

The signals should go upwards, from patients, from communities, from doctors, nurses and local managers who have the perspective to understand what is best for individual patients’ needs.

But it’s not enough to devolve power to the health board level.

We should go further still.

Labour has finally moved towards a set of entitlements for every patient, and I want to see that idea implemented in full.

Under our proposal, where a health service provider fails to deliver those entitlements they will be legally obliged to pay for that treatment in whichever facility can provide it – inside the NHS or outside.

We know this can work because we’ve seen it work in Denmark.
Their entitlement system has driven up efficiency standards as state hospitals do everything within their power to avoid paying for treatment elsewhere.

It will do the same here. Saving money and improving standards.

And then, we need to empower individuals with truly personalised health services.

I welcome the changes the government is making to move in this direction.

I want to see more direct payments and individual budgets for people with chronic, long-term conditions – and in mental health services, in particular, where care still lags too far behind.

That means allowing health service users the opportunity to take much more control of managing their own care.

By giving real choice to the individual, we can empower that patient and allow them to shape a care package for themselves – a package that suits their individual wants and needs.

And nurses, especially specialist nurses, will be right at the heart of delivering those new kinds of care.

In the community, in surgeries, in hospitals – you are the people who the NHS will rely on more and more in future years.

The final step to reform is to put more power into the hands of you, the people who serve our NHS.

I know this is politically fashionable right now.

Even Labour, who took power away from front line staff, is eager to make promises.

The difference I can offer is simple: employee empowerment is a fundamental liberal principle.

Liberal Democrats are not fair-weather friends, promising more freedom one day, and threatening more rules the next.

The idea of devolving power away from Whitehall, away from managers, and to the public servants who are the heart and soul of the NHS goes to the core of everything we believe in.

We will put front line staff in charge over their ward or unit budgets. A change Nursing Standard has long been campaigning for.

We will allow staff to establish not-for-profit social enterprises or John Lewis-style employee trusts to run services of all kinds within the NHS.

We will let diversity and flexibility flourish within our health service.

And we can assure you: this will be a permanent change, not a temporary blip in an otherwise unrelenting stream of centralisation.

Nine months ago I launched a consultation exercise called Ask the People in the Know.

A website where public servants themselves could submit their ideas for delivering the services they know best – for less.

Cutting out the waste that only those on the front line see.

For far too long, governments of both old parties have sought to change things with commissions or reports researched, written and implemented in an office in Whitehall.

I wanted to turn that conventional wisdom on its head.

Instead of commissioning an expert to spend a year writing a report on inefficiency…
I asked the people who already know. We were inundated with responses.

Hundreds of people – dedicated public servants – putting forward their ideas from small changes to procurement regimes to major proposals to abolish duplication between regulatory agencies.

I want to ask the same question again today to you.

This weekend the RCN rightly said that unless change happens in our NHS, the savings needed will be delivered by sacking staff who are so desperately needed to deliver care.

And that will cost us all more money in the long term.

So how do we make the savings we all acknowledge are needed?

From Whitehall, a Liberal Democrat government can cut bureaucracy and streamline quangos. And we will.

We will scrap Strategic Health Authorities, saving £140m a year from management costs

We will help PCTs cut their management and admin costs back – in real terms to what they were in 2005, saving £800m a year.

We will decentralise the NHS and cut the central department in half – saving £100m a year.

And we will cap NHS chief execs’ pay, so that none earn more than the Prime Minister.

From government, too, we can use pay restraint to keep pay costs under control, and so protect jobs.

We will seek pay restraint with fairness.

Our proposal is very different from those of the two other parties.

I reject the idea from the Conservatives of a blanket pay freeze for all registered nurses.

But I reject, too the idea from Labour that you give a 1% pay rise to everyone, meaning an extra £1000 a year for a chief executive on £100,000, but just £190 extra

for a nurse just starting out on his or her career.

That is deeply unfair.

We propose a cap on pay rises of £400, so that the little money there is for pay increases is shared fairly.

Going to nurses who need it not consultants and senior managers who are already very comfortably off.

Every nurse earning less than £40,000 will be better off under our pay plans than under either of the other parties.

And while I do believe there needs to be reform to public sector pensions we will not remove a penny of entitlements you have already built up, and for which you have worked so hard.

So: cuts to central bureaucracy and restraint on pay: these are essential.

And the money will be diverted, penny for penny, pound for pound to areas of the NHS which have been starved of cash, or could be in future years.

But it is still not enough to protect the services we rely on. We can and must do more.

I was heartened by the report of the NHS Institute which identified £3.6 billion of efficiency savings that could be made if less efficient Trusts performed better.

Changes like reducing pre-operative bed days, increasing day surgery rates, and increasing the numbers of patients who turn up for their appointments.

The only problem is: I can’t make those things happen. Only you can.

So tell us how.

We need to change the way power flows in the NHS.

You should be telling us how to run it, not the other way around.

Central bureaucrats, hidden behind closed doors, do not know how to cut the fat without cutting into the services people need.

You do.

It is only the skills, innovation and ideas of the nursing staff of our health service that can protect it from the cuts you fear.

This is a time of real change for the NHS.

Let us make sure it is change in the right direction.

The NHS will not survive if we do not, together, take time to listen to the people who count, who work in the NHS, and then deliver savings which make sense.

By turning the NHS on its head, letting power flow up from you to the hospital boards, the local health boards and on, up to Whitehall, I believe we can protect the NHS we all rely on, even at a time when money is increasingly tight.

That is the change the NHS needs.

And nurses can and must be at heart of making it happen.

That’s been demonstrated again today, in the aftermath of the first televised debate between the party leaders. Paul Waugh has documented how various official party profiles have been boosted, but the most dramatic progress continues to be made by the unofficial group We got Rage Against the Machine to #1, we can get the Lib Dems into office!.

That group has now topped two symbolic numbers: over 50,000 members and more members than the number of fans for the official Conservative Party page on Facebook.

UPDATE: For some background to the group’s origins see here.

Following in the footsteps of email, blogging has also established a firm place in the logistics of politics, even if its impact on the overall style and conduct of politics is less clear and less dramatic. Blogs have become a key news medium for people involved in or significantly interested in politics, they have become a key part of the flow of news to and from journalists and for some MPs and candidates they reach local audiences large enough to be a significant factor in their election efforts.

For those running blogs, the run up and immediate aftermath of polling day is likely to provide the opportunity to establish themselves with new, larger audiences – and for one or more newcomers to blaze onto the scene. How, then, is the blogging landscape likely to look in the future?

At present, the political blogging landscape seems relatively clear. There are a small number of high traffic sites (Political Betting, Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes in particular), a range of sites for individual parties which are the centre of news and gossip online for those parties (particularly ConservativeHome, Lib Dem Voice and – in its much improved post-Derek Draper form – LabourList), expert sites for particular niches (most notably UK Polling Report but also geographic or issue based ones such as London Reconnections), some high profile journalists (e.g. Nick Robinson and Paul Waugh) and a smattering of individual blogging politicians. Beyond that are a large number of low traffic personal blogs, from which issues and personalities sometimes bubble up. There has also been the mini-wave of Labour veterans returning to party political fray as bloggers, with Alastair Campbell, John Prescott and Matthew Taylor all taking to the medium.

Although blogging in its early days was primarily about individuals expressing themselves and having the sorts of chances to reach wider audiences that were normally only available to a select few, in practice the political blogging scene has ended up dominated at the high traffic end either by blogs from traditional sources of power (MPs, journalists) or from groups of people. Even Political Betting, although still very much Mike Smithson’s creation, has a regular team of contributors. Even at the local level, it is rare for a blog to reach the sorts of audiences that good MP or candidate blogs does, though the patchy coverage of the latter leaves many more gaps to be exploited.

The move into blogging by existing sources of power, the establishment of high profile team sites and the establishment of ‘brand names’ like ConservativeHome means that we may see blogging actually become a rather less flexible field, with it being harder for new people to break in. Moreover, whilst journalists do sometimes pick up stories from bloggers, that is as nothing compared to the scale on which bloggers pick up stories from journalists. It is the rare political blog that regularly produces original stories.

A possible picture of the future comes from the current top 10 politics websites in the US. Taking the Hitwise data (and their definition of politics website) for June 2009 we have:

• The Huffington Post
• Fox News
• Free Republic
• The Politico
• Daily Kos
• CNN
• Infowars
• Townhall
• Real Clear Politics
• Michelle Malkin

Although there is a very strong showing for blogs in that list, it also illustrates how a medium originally about individuals getting a new level playing field has congealed to be dominated by large enterprises. Daily Kos, for example, did originate with one person’s enthusiasm, but it is now a large team and in effect a small (or rather not so small) business. The Huffington Post has a budget many political parties would happily die for. And so on.

So my money is on possibly one or two new names grabbing significant new attention, but the upshot essentially being that those at the top more firmly establish themselves. There’ll be an A list of political bloggers more deeply entrenched. It will be a different elite from pre-blogging days, featuring people who wouldn’t previously have got a chance to be in the elite, and a more open elite, but an elite nonetheless.

Where new individuals in general will have more scope to shine, I expect, will be in providing on the ground commentary on particular campaigns or specialist commentary on how particular issues are played out through the election. Nich Starling (the Norfolk Blogger) has shown the possibilities during the Norwich North by-election. Although clearly partisan – being a former organiser for Lib Dem MP Norman Lamb and even talked about in the early stages of the campaign as a possible by-election candidate – his blog provided a detailed account of the progress of all the candidates’ campaigns that was of interest to Lib Dems and non-Lib Dems alike. In his case, by providing a detailed account of events, including posting up copies of all literature received and keeping a running tally, he provided information and content of interest to a wide range of readers.

Nich Starling’s success came from reporting – and making – the news, rather than simply being yet another blog that gives political comment on stories that are already been widely talked about by other blogs and the traditional media anyway.

The opportunity for such grassroots reporting of constituency campaigns, in a form that makes it easy for national journalists to spot stories, is also likely to result in far more of the ‘gotcha’ moments where a campaign or candidate is embarrassed by a false step that in the past would have not got any notice outside the constituency.

So whilst the overall blogging landscape may stay much the same, for many individuals it will be a rollercoaster ride.

Reproduced from the Total Politics Guide to Political Blogging in the UK 2009.

That phrase is a huge simplification of a complicated and nuanced theme stretching over many years, yet military conflict between Christian and Muslim forces were a regular part of European and Mediterranean history. Not just the crusades, with their large and direct British involvement, but the siege of Malta (the first one, not the one with the Royal Air Force), armed conflict in Italy in the Middle Ages and battles in the Balkans right up to the gates of Vienna.

Distortions of that history are often peddled by extremists in an attempt to justify all sorts of outrageous and inhumane behaviour in the modern world, most particularly both in the Balkans and in relations between the western world and Islam.

If history is of any contemporary use, and I believe it is, then surely understanding the true issues that lie behind the extremists’ justification of their contemporary actions should be there on the curriculum?

Paul Waugh has the details of Boris Johnson’s expensive taxis:

I know Boris loves London’s cabbies, but this is ridiculous. A new written answer to City Hall today shows that the Mayor seems to be following in the footsteps of Ken Livingstone when it comes to his love of the hackney carriage.

Boris’s total bill since taking over as Mayor is a massive £4,698 – even higher than the last time it emerged his bills were published (for just three months).

But what is extraordinary – and will horrify most Londoners who pay these bills – is that Boris has run up huge bills for keeping his cabs waiting.

You can read the full story, including a detailed list of the taxi journeys, here.

Meanwhile, Dave Hill over at The Guardian has the story on how Boris Johnson personally signed off expense claims on Ian Clement’s corporate credit card months after he’d said that the card should not be used:

New rules governing the approval of advisers’ expenses came into force on 11 March. They require the Mayor himself to sign off his team members’ expenses, and he did so for the first time in April. He did it again in May. The documents to which he added his signature were called GLA corporate credit card logs. In these were compiled the (arguably) legitimate expenses of Ian Clement, with any “personal use” ones already stripped out by the City Hall staff responsible. But if Boris thought Clement shouldn’t any longer have had a corporate card at all, why was he content to effectively endorse his continuing use of one? Had he forgotten all about it? Had he assumed Clement had handed it in? Had he just changed his mind? Or did he simply not look at what he was signing?