Times – Tories plan to beat ‘bias’ by bringing in bloggers: The Conservative Right is to turn to new American campaigning techniques and the internet to try to revive the party and overcome what it sees as opposition from the metropolitan Establishment. Only weeks away from the general election, senior Conservatives will open a new front today in the battle for ideas by creating a website advocating “social conservatism”. It will invite people to bypass the media and put forward their own views on how the party should evolve. The faction behind it denies that it is “rocking the boat” in the pre-election period and says that in the early weeks the website will be used to campaign for a Conservative victory. It wants people to use the increasingly popular practice of “blogging” – writing online diaries – to break the power of the broadcast media.
1. Notice the ‘liberal bias’ myth that’s woven into this project.
2. Note the level of original thinking, boys and girls! It work in States; we do exact same thing here. Exact same thing!
3. Not a good time to launch, Tory chaps. But please do excuse me for questioning your collective genius.
4. Tim Montgomerie? Is this he?
5. If it’s all about bloggage, then why is the site here and the weblog aaallll the way over here?
It seems to me that the plan is to use wingnuts in the US to plough the field and seed a fresh crop of wingnuts here in the UK. So we can all begin shouting at each other.
Take a look at this rather direct appeal to the Christian right, this charming ‘Leftisms’ post and this (from the article linked above): The second phase will follow immediately. At that point, it will begin to urge Tory supporters and natural conservatives, particularly within the faith communities and environmental movement, to support ‘one nation’ conservatism.
(One Nation? Oh dear.)
Where in this high-minded and well-thought-out project is the plan to get actual MPs communicating via actual weblogs?
