This seems a good idea to me, in that people would feel much more comfortable giving time and money to candidates they admired, rather than parties they disliked.

By progressive, do you mean everyone who seeks a different future for the UK, or only those who follow a left-leaning path?

I think you’ll find there are a lot of very innovative and exciting ideas for using the internet and free data from all sides of the political spectrum.

The way to do this is not to compete with existing political parties, or to seek to infiltrate them, but to operate around and alongside them, specifically by supporting progressive individuals in politics and campaigning for feasible institutional change to promote decentralisation of process and the rebirth of mass democracy.

I rarely agree with you so unreservedly but AOL! This is exactly the line I’ve been arguing for a while; as I am with Sunny on the thread where he’s trying to revitalise the left. The answer is to outperform the existing plutocracy by circumventing, rather than submitting to, its control structures.

After the election, such committees might even morph into Progressive Clubs, working towards the goals outlined in the following paragraphs as well as networking and promoting progressive stances on local issues.

Grand plan. I will start one if you will.

Good to see this coming to light again. Happy to help in any way I can.

I’m going to be negative, but treat me kindly because I want to see the positive.

1. The grand coalitions that have achieved political change in the UK in recent years have been really broad organisations. An example would be the lobby group for Scottish devolution, that was cross party and non party.

2. Great organisations such as Charter 88 failed, because they only appealed to political wonks (eg Liberal Conspiracy readers).

3. No2ID will succeed, in spite of being an internet based organisation. Exceptionally, those who are best able to present the case against ID are bloggers and web journalists.

4. If I set up a committee to support a decent MP and present a £10,000 cheque to the election campaign, the central/federal party will simply reduce their contribution by £10,000. The UK party system is too centralised to admit random outsiders.

5. I’d back a fund raising campaign to pay for a researcher for a decent liberal MP. The researcher would have to work exclusively (in paid time) on the liberal aims of the fund. The aims would need to be concrete and require inventive law.

Hm I’m also going to be negative. The blog reminds me of a David Austin cartoon of a bespectacled young man tapping at a computer and saying ‘rigorous analysis is the way forward for socialism’, and the caption was ‘I live in an imaginary future’.

Charlieman says

’1. The grand coalitions that have achieved political change in the UK in recent years have been really broad organisations. An example would be the lobby group for Scottish devolution, that was cross party and non party.’

That’s true but the labourites regarded devolution as an end and the nats saw (and see) it as a stepping stone. This is a chase (to adapt Dryden) that had several beasts in view.

You leftists should relax. This is just all part of the labour-conservative cycle that you should all be familiar with: a decade or so of left-liberal “progress,” followed by perhaps a decade of consolidation, or slower rate of “progress”, effected by “conservatives.” That indeed has been the historical function of the Unconservative Party since world war 2.

All your dreams of a socialist, egalitarian State, run by bureaucrats and technocrats, deconstructing the bourgeois family and striving for “equality” in collaboration with your designated victim groups, will not be seriously endangered by Dave Cameron’s tories let me reassure you. The “soft” dictatorship, of social democracy in which both parties agree on all fundementals will continue as before. Remember John Major’s government – that politcally correct, pro-EU, pro-crime warm-up to New Labour? Well a Cameron government will be even wetter than that! For fuck’s sake, Cameron’s not even pretending he’s not liberal.

I only wish I could say that your fears were justified and that we really did have an incoming government that was openly and gloriously reactionary. One that was actually prepared to roll back liberal “gains,” Fortunately for you and (and unfortunately for freedom-loving patriots) Cameron’s tories are not the ones to save this country from the Leviathan state.

Why is it that the bloggers here can only think i two colours: red and blue?

Sunny’s a Green.

A globe-trotting, motorbike-riding green..!

Although I think the aim of the post is a good one I suspect practically speaking it would be hard to maintain a cohesive group around it because it would by its nature exclude members of parties.

Not because they wouldn’t be sympathetic but because if they raise money for candidates in another party they open themselves up to being expelled. Whether there are enough people who are sufficiently energised about politics but who’ve not joined a party to keep it going seems unlikely.

However, just so I don’t end on a positive note I think the attempt to bring progressives / lefts together on common projects regardless of party affiliation is extremely important and one we can run with.

Take the idea to raise money for a researcher (above). I suspect the most efficient way would actually be to raise money for an independent researcher who makes their work available to MPsetc so they contribute to campaigns for/against legislation without tying themselves tightly to one grouping.

That would be the start of a think tank i think. Could be an idea…

Bonjour,

Un grand bravo pour votre place au top50

Voici le lien pour voir ce classement :

http://www.lameilleureinfo.fr/top-50-des-blogs-europeens/

Encore Bravo !

Guy

Agreed that there has not been enough blue sky thinking about the influence the internet can have in the way that we are affected by politics. It is still viewed by most as just another communication channel in which traditional political thought and debate can be conducted. The true possibilities have not yet been realised or even properly explored.

Roll on virtual politics.

Most importantly, the net offers the possibility of a defensive mechanism to those of us who are not prepared to stand aside and be silent whilst the government and its acolytes try to engineer our lives and restrict our freedoms.

Ah, as Guy said this blog made it in the top 50 best european blogs?

@ Ianvisits..

I concur. Though not sure what could seem to be progressive within the realms of a right wing ideology? Even neo-conservatism was not that progressive, though more innovative as it shared more in common with the utopian ideals of communisn, then actual conservatism..

#6

Your point four isn’t true, at least not for the Labour Party. If you donated 10k to the local CLP, and it was a CLP organised enough to be doing proper campaigning, they’d spend it themselves AND take whatever they could get centrally. I suspect it isn’t true for the Lib Dems either, although I don’t know.

From the volume and nature of the responses it looks like this one isn’t going to run.

Mike – It’s an interesting idea. However we don’t have a political culture or system that makes it easy to slot ‘progressive money’ into a candidates pot and expect something back as American progressives have done. That doesn’t make this post a bad starting point for discussion.

Where people talking about their preferred policy solution to problem x on the internet is at best diverting, money is one of the areas where the real power lies. If this place is to have a significant political effect it has to find a role beyond merely discussion. Money isn’t the only area to be explored though. Activism is equally important. The number of people that the Obama campaign and its allies were able to put on the ground and on the ends of phones shows that people can be enticed to get involved in politics by good organisation. Community building is important. Dailykos raises money and promotes and agenda, but primarilly it’s role is that of a community brought together by shared political goals, to link individuals to potential friends and allies through their discussion and to propel them out the other end ready to take real action. Research as has been said is important. Having a group of lay experts who could rapidly provide the progressive alternative to right wing policy, spin or talking points would be a vastly useful resource.

Obviously you can’t do them all here, or indeed anywhere. It’s too diverse a set of tasks. But someone (you? we? I?) needs to come up with a practical way that we can raise sufficient money and use it cleverly to advance our shared agenda.

@18:

There may be some mileage in Christopher’s idea: “Research as has been said is important. Having a group of lay experts who could rapidly provide the progressive alternative to right wing policy, spin or talking points would be a vastly useful resource.”

Sites like Lib Con already provide a source of ideas to journalists and politicians. So why not set up an “invitation only site” where sane people can exchange ideas with opinion-formed professionals?

The idea seems smart for a minute, but it is unworkable owing to leaks. Serious politicians (so we’ll exclude Damian McBride) don’t write anything down until they are ready to say it in public.

@19 – I don’t really see how you get from my idea to saying it would require access to the inner thoughts of political insiders.

I was more thinking of a resource that is able to generate a pithy list of weaknesses to a policy position from a progressive standpoint. So for example the Tories may propose 15000 new prison places and we quickly announce how you better spend that money within the criminal justice system to get a better return for society.

The progressive case is usually the more complicated one and the onus is on those who hold those views to formulate and present that case as succinctly as possible. Everyone with a bit of knowledge can play a role in that, you don’t have to be a “serious politician”.