Congratulations

to NightJack, winner of the Orwell Prize for blogging.

NJ is a wonderfully cynical serving policeman who blogs about his working life. To give you a taste, here is an excerpt from a post offering guidance to 'decent folk' brought into contact with the police:

Complain First

Always get your complaint in first, even if it is you who started it and you who were in the wrong. If things have gone awry and you suspect the cops are going to be called, get your retaliation in first. Ring the cops right away and allege for all you are worth. If you can work a racist or homophobic slant into it so much the better.

Make a counter allegation

Regardless of the facts, never let the other side be blameless. If they beat you to the phone, ring anyway and make a counter allegation against them. Again racism or homophobia are your friends. If you are not from a visible minority ethnic culture, may I suggest that that the phrase “You gay bastard” or similar is always useful. In extremis allege sexual assault. It gives us something to bargain with when getting the other person to drop their complaint on a quid-pro-quo basis. This is particularly good where there are no independent witnesses. When it boils down to one word against another and nobody is ‘fessing up, CPS run a mile and you, my friend, are definitely on a walk out.

Never explain to the Police

If the Police arrive to lock you up, say nothing. You are a decent person and you may think that reasoning with the Police will help. “If I can only explain, they will realise it is all a horrible mistake and go away”. Wrong. We do want to talk to you on tape in an interview room but that comes later. All you are doing by trying to explain is digging yourself further in. We call that stuff a significant statement and we love it. Decent folk can’t help themselves, they think that they can talk their way out. Wrong...

Guido in Brown's sights?

David Hughes at Three Line Whip is right that Ed Balls was (once again) a disgrace on the Today programme this morning, suggesting that all parties are equally guilty and that poor li'l Ed'n'Yvette have suffered from nasty comments left on Guido's site.

Hmm. Putting aside the utter irrelevance of the blog of one private individual to the rights and wrongs of the activities of a government employee, it is striking that Guido was attacked by name, once again, by a Government Minister, following Hazel Blears' moralising about his 'vicious nihilism'. and his being smeared by one of the men of the moment, Civil Service Minister Tom Watson.

So that's three Government Ministers (and there may be more) who have chosen publicly to attack an individual blogger, which seems to me pretty extraordinary. And all this is against the background of Andy 'Teenage Twat' Burnham's muttering about rating each and very blog and other site on the internet with 'cinema-style ratings'. (Twat.)

Now we know that Brown is a man who harbours a grudge, and who fixes on destroying his political enemies. We also know that Guido is, at this moment, probably more of an effective Opposition than Cameron. Is it too fanciful to think that in this unusally light Parliamentary session space might be found for a Bill to help 'clear up our politics' ((c) G. Brown) by - somehow - trying to control the 'vicious nihilists' of the blogosphere?

Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome

Through the magic of Google Analytics, JMP researchers have found that someone from Vicente Lopez in the outskirts of Buenos Aires has visited us in the last few days. For only 30 seconds, mind you, which risks coming across as a trifle brusque, frankly, but nevertheless, we are delighted to have had his or her company for that short time, and hope that the senor or senorita concerned returns soon for a slightly longer follow up visit. JMP is very much a 'hands-across-the-water' sort of blog, after all. Next stop: (anywhere at all in) Australia!

Little Green Evolution Wars

Anyone with more than a passing interest in the political blogosphere will have come across Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson's fiercely pro-Israel, anti-Islamist (some would say anti-Muslim, I think unfairly) blog that he has maintained since pre 9/11. Some of the sycophantic commenters on the threads are deeply unpleasant characters, and it's a scary swamp of group-think sometimes, but our Chuck has broken some interesting stories and it's always worth a look, if only for a glance into the often dark heart of the American right (a heart that still appears utterly traumatised by the events of 11 September 2001). 

So what are we to make of LGF's recent broadside against creationism? It's a meme which is at odds with a not insignificant section of his readership - the mid-West, scared of A-rabs, "Left Behind" crowd - and Johnson seems on occasion to have taken delight in the upset he's caused. In many ways it's a brave step for Johnson and interesting, and I've also been amused that he has managed to link creationism with political Islam just to stir things up even more. (See here for an example.) Is this more evidence of the Rove Republican-evangelical alliance that was such an effective vote winner for so long breaking-up? Or is it just Chuckles starting to move out of the far-right ghetto? 

Blogging, politics and humour

Iain Dale spots that rarity, an amusing leftwing blog post. Why is British political blogging dominated by non-Party, amusing, right-leaning blogs? None of those adjectives seem inevitable to me. When considering politics and humour, it's always the left you think of. Take the News Quiz on Radio 4: regulars Jeremy Hardy and Mark Steel are present or former SWP-ers, and chairman Sandi Toksvig is a Lib Dem. When did you last come across a rightwing political humourist on the box or the radio? Is it a "damn pinko BBC" thing? I don't know. But then consider the blogosphere, headed by the libertarian king Guido, and his waspish Tory queen, Iain Dale. They and obvious other big hitters are to the right, and they're the best bloggers around.

What is it about blogging that the right is so much better than the left? Does the pure market of the blogosphere show that right leaning political commentary is more popular than leftwing stuff? Or just that more Tories than labour types read blogs? I think part of it is that popular blogs are libertarian-leaning which (a) sits naturally in the internet and (b) means that they can be, and are, amusingly irreverent about practically everything.