That was the week that was

The blogosphere observed a week in Britain which started with calamity for the Lib Dems and ended with disaster for the government, via oblivion for the national football teams.

The plodding Lib Dem leadership race experienced its first jolt in the spotlight at the beginning of the week as it emerged during a debate on the Politics Show that Chris Huhne’s team had circulated a dossier on Nick Clegg entitled “Calamity Clegg”. The cringeworthy scene can be viewed here.

Despite many feeling the Calamity tag would stick to Clegg, Nich Starling believes Huhne came off the worse: “This sort of rubbish is an absolute gift for our political opposition and sadly shows that some people in Huhne’s team really are not fit for senior positions. If they can produce this rubbish, seemingly without Chris’ knowledge then it says a lot for those who surround Chris and Chris himself.”

Though the document was hastily withdrawn, a copy can be found on the devious-as-ever Guido Fawkes's blog. Political Hack UK runs through the document and concludes both candidates are as hypocritical as each other. The post is titled: “Bald men still fighting over comb.”

Though many in the blogosphere have summarised the Politics Show tussle in the context of the Lib Dems plight, the best analysis can be found courtesy of Martin Bright: “This has been a peculiarly Lib Dem kind of spat: essentially an argument to establish how much the two candidates agree with each other. It’s a row all right, and it has even become quite spicy at times, but it’s hardly Blair-Brown territory, or even Cameron-Davis. Liberal Democrats just aren't like that.”

The Lib Dem hierarchy would have been overjoyed with the week’s later unravelings, in what has been dubbed Labour’s winter of disc-ontent. The announcement of the amount of money which has so far been spent on Northern Rock was soon followed by the HM Revenue & Customs data loss debacle. The email trail which was so embarrassing for HMRC and the Treasury can be downloaded here.

Just as to blame 22-year-old Scott Carson for England’s failure to qualify for Euro 2008 would be incredibly short sighted, so too would it be to posit the data loss blame on the unnamed 23-year-old official’s shoulders. There is an interesting dissection of HMRC’s Annual Report at Burning our Money, which states: “The problem goes beyond a simple matter of staff cuts. Just like at the RPA [Rural Payments Agency], there are also new IT systems, and there are new ‘lean production’ work patterns being imposed- less case working, and more specialisation (aka dumbed-down production line jobs). It’s a toxic combination, and staff morale is rock bottom.”

With polls now putting Labour up to nine points behind the Tories, a week is certainly a long time in politics.

This also appears at www.newstatesman.com/blogs/best-of-the-politics-blogs.

Home Office hotting up

In a torrid week for the Home Office, Jacqui Smith found herself the hot topic in the blogosphere. A tip off emerged over on The UK Daily Pundit: “Preparations are said to be underway in Downing Street to replace Jacqui Smith as Home Secretary should she fail to quell the ongoing media onslaught over her alleged role in the latest blunder by the Home Office and the subsequent cover-up that followed. If she does resign, Des Browne is expected to move to the Home Office and Ed Miliband is being tipped for the Defence Secretary’s job.”

While, Mike Smithson at Political Betting finds Smith’s chances of surviving until the 2009/10 election “slim” and weighs up possible replacements based on the latest Betfair odds: “I quite fancy Edward Miliband but 4/1 seems far from generous. Alan Johnson (2/1 favourite) could be asked to switch - he’d probably be a safe pair of hands and could give a bit of stability to a post that has become Labour’s poison chalice.”

As the two Lib Dem leadership candidates went tête-à-tête on Question Time this week their verbal bout drew rave reviews across the net. The Liberal Democrat Rumble in the Jungle is reviewed by Bernard Salmon and condensed to: “My scores on the doors were: Vision - Clegg 7, Huhne 8; Detail - Clegg 8, Huhne 9; Charisma - Clegg 8, Huhne 7; Passion/forcefulness - Clegg 7, Huhne 8; Pressure - Clegg 6, Huhne 9. Totals: Clegg 36, Huhne 41.”

For Nich Starling, Hunhe “just edges it”, while Linda Jack believes “Clegg [drew] first blood”. As for Chris Paul’s verdict: “Goodness me these two are big pants.”

Over at Lenin’s Tomb, the tale of Iran’s Blogfather, Hossein Derakshan, is recounted. Derakshan is the subject of a $2m law suite from a pro-Washington Iranian commentator, Mehdi Kalaji, over comments he made on his blog. Derakshan has also faced a backlash from his peers for removing criticism of the Iranian regime from the English section of his blog in retaliation of the West’s demonisation of Iran.

Lenin concludes: “I think it would be a pity if some neocon theologian was able to silence Derakshan’s blog. There is a huge wealth of background information on it that Western leftists would do well to get acquainted with.”

This also appears at www.newstatesman.com/blogs/best-of-the-politics-blogs.

What's in a speech?

The Queen’s Speech was widely seen as the biggest non-event in the British political calendar across the blogosphere this week. But the list of – mainly expected – bills and draft bills and the pomp of the occassion offered enough material to be picked apart at length.

An interesting debate ensured over at Dave’s Part on the subject of a bill which will allow unions to exclude members based on their political activism. Its origins lie in the instance of Aslef being unable to kick out a BNP activist. David Osler starts the debate by asking: “Could we see a situation where general secretaries are allowed bureaucratically to exclude internal opponents who belong to Marxist groups, for instance? And if so, shouldn't we flatly oppose the bill?”

As part of Kerron Cross’s sideways look at the proceedings, he notes: “Then into the House itself where BBC correspondent Huw Edwards pretended not to understand Dennis Skinner’s heckle to Black Rod about ‘who shot the harriers?!’ before pithily saying ‘well, some of those efforts work and some of them...clearly don’t’, which bizarrely was much the same thought I had had about the BBC decision to replace David Dimbleby with the clearly disinterested Edwards.”

A number of bloggers followed up a BBC/UK Gold list of the more bizarre British laws already in existence. Henry North London wonders why the Queen’s Speech could not have been used to remove some of them. Among the list: “1. It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament” and “6. In the UK a pregnant woman can legally relieve herself anywhere she wants, including in a policeman’s helmet.”

In an entertaining eulogy of Brown’s political vision, As a Dodo concludes: “Gordon Brown’s political vision will be scattered by a light breeze. Mourners are asked to send donations to offshore tax havens.”

A new left-wing blog launched this week, mischievously named the Liberal Conspiracy. Sunny Hundal catalogues how it was received across the blogosphere, and concludes with a rallying call: “For now it’s important we nail our colours to the mast, get conversations going and talk about issues the MSM is ignoring. That liberal conspiracy they keep saying is all-powerful, we actually need to build one.”

This also appears at www.newstatesman.com/blogs/best-of-the-politics-blogs.

Non-elections, elections and libel

With last Thursday pencilled in as the possible date for a national election, the significance of the day was not missed in the blogosphere.

Over at Politicalbetting, Mike Smithson ponders the implications of the Observer’s decision not to splash with an Ipsos-Mori poll which showed Labour 13 points ahead on the first day of the Conservative party conference. He concludes: “In years to come political nerds will produce lots of counter-factuals about the November 1st general election that wasn’t. I’m convinced that it was the Observer that did it for Dave.”

One election has, however, been confirmed this week. As Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne plan to go head-to-head for the Lib Dem leadership, bloggers began pitching camps. Mark Valladares and Jonathan Calder have both sided with Huhne because of his proposal to scrap Trident missiles, while Huhne may have lost Liberty Alone’s vote due to his favour for bureaucracy.

This Sunday morning Politicalbetting will host a live online hustings with Huhne, with a similar event with Clegg to follow. Other hustings are published on Colin Ross’s blog.

The week also saw King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia come to Britain, which led to a spate of furious blogging. Vince Cable’s decision to shun the visitor, whose regime has been criticised on human rights violations, met with much support from his own party and beyond.

But Dizzy Thinks finds the Lib Dems’ actions hypocritical: “The bizarre part of the argument for me comes in this notion of the rule of law, for it was the rule of law upon which the Lib Dems opposed the overthrow of a totalitarian secretive vicious regime in Iraq. Call me a neocon if you must but how exactly can one oppose a regime in strong moral terms and then equally stand by and say that the same moral argument does not apply to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. The positions seem entirely contradictory to me.”

While many on the Left oppose how welcome King Abdullah was made, Luke Akehurst, a former Labour candidate, defends the government’s decision: “Diplomacy sometimes involves sitting down and establishing common interests with people you would otherwise not want to invite to dinner. You have to do it if you have wider strategic interests that need protecting, or you just need to be in dialogue with your ‘enemy’s enemy’. Unfortunately it’s part of being in government - unlike Vince Cable we can’t indulge in gesture politics.”

Over at Spiked there is a book review with a difference. Five authors of banned books on terrorism detail what UK audiences are missing out on thanks to our libel laws. According to Private Eye, the story of the banning of these books has been kept out of British mainstream media due to the publications’ fear of being taken through the courts themselves.

This also appears at www.newstatesman.com/blogs/best-of-the-politics-blogs.