I share Perry’s high opinion of Alice Bachini’s Libertarian Parent In The Countryside blog, provided only that she is able to keep it going, which it looks like she might.
Even if she doesn’t she’s already supplied many good blogules, of which my favourite so far is this, the best short explanation of the exact place of “spin” in British politics that I have yet come across:
… New Labour’s gift for spin was never what enamoured them to the British public, it’s more complicated than that; in fact, we just thought spin was what professional politicians did, and we wanted a not-totally-incompetent government to manage the economy for us, so we voted for the one that spun competently thinking maybe they were capable of adding up a few numbers as well. Or at least that they would actually be in their offices looking at a few numbers now and then instead of just hanging out in brothels wearing football shirts and hiding brown paper bags of money about their persons. Anyway, spin was the price for competence, we thought, which is why we’re still paying it.
The hangers out in brothels etc. are Britain’s Conservative Party, in case you live on the far side of the moon and didn’t recognise them. I’ve been saying something along these lines in conversation for years, but never got around to telling the universe.
The entire quoted paragraph above was in brackets in the original, a flying-off-at-a-tangent in a piece that was basically aimed at Tony Blair’s dress sense, body language, etc., provoked by a Telegraph photograph of the Great Leader.
Irony – it’s precisely the politicians’ distractions (sleaze and spin respectively) that make them tolerable. When they’re too busy gtting their rocks off, or pretending that they can cure the NHS by holding press conferences, they aren’t buggering around in what’s yours or mine.