Bitchy smear campaigns are not what the blogosphere is for – LabourList must do better

By Laurie Penny

Part of what’s so damn embarrassing for the British Left about this whole fiasco is that it’s a non-event, politically speaking: professional smearers in smearing each other shocker. It’s refreshing that LabourList’s editor has seen fit to publicly apologise. On BBC Radio Scotland today I suggested that, for the good of this site and for the good of the Labour Party, Mr Draper needs to step back from editing LabourList and let some of the young guns who’ve been doing the bulk of the legwork take a more prominent role (I’m not one of them, by the way, I’m just a hanger-on).

What ‘smeargate’ demonstrates, depressingly, is that Labour’s top strategists don’t have any better ideas than going through the Tories’ dustbins. Unless New Labour been taken over by nappy-eating urban foxes, I think it needs to start offering something better double-sharpish, because as far as I can recall nobody ever won an election under the slogan ‘not the other guy’.

It’s unfortunate for the Labour party that the blogging revolution has occured during its political tenure, but that’s the way it is, and good as the internet is for facilitating nihilistic, bile-ridden smear campaigns like Guido’s, it was a serious error for McBride, Draper and their associates to even begin to think that they could work the same magic from within the Westminster bubble. That’s just not how the blogosphere works. Ask anyone under thirty.

Where Draper et al went wrongest of all is in trying to emulate Guido in the first place. Paul Staines, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a frothing right-wing anti-political arserag, a misogynist, a suspicious white stain on the face of the blogosphere. It’s thoroughly shameful that the editor of this site has developed such a schoolboy obsession with his thoroughly mediocre work. All a tussle with anti-political sleaze-machines like Guido was ever going to be was a race to the gutter – a race to the gutter which Guido has won. Well done, Guido.

What breaks my heart about all this is that there are alternative left voices out there, and alternative Labour voices too – plenty of them. The political blogosphere is, in fact, far more than a sleazy sideshow of arrogant white middle-aged men screeching like apes, rolling about in their own faeces and wanking angrily at each other. In fact, the internet is riddled with genuinely progressive voices, and the best of them have understood exactly what Guido understands – that you can’t be a citizen journalist and a member of the political establishment at the same time. Blogging can inform politics, but it is not politics, and it cannot be done from Whitehall.

Sunny Hundal has some of the best commentary I’ve seen on the whole shambles, over at Liberal Conspiracy:

If you’re pissed off by this whole episode – and everyone involved – then it’s obvious what the task ahead is. There’s no point complaining about it. If we want the left to succeed and not be killed off by the libertarians, Conservatives or New Labour, then we have to do it ourselves. Otherwise the likes of Derek Draper and Guido Fawkes will end up dominating the conversations.

Today, I am ashamed of the British left, on and off the web. But I believe we can do better than this. I believe that – as long as certain almost universally male comrades learn to share the platform, drop their pointless schoolboy obsessions, understand that smears and violence acheive nothing, and grow the hell up sharpish – we can be better than this, and we can come up with new political narratives that actually matter to the people on the ground. Who’s with me?

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And by the way, for those of you who know what I’m talking about: it’s come to my attention that there’s already Guido/Dolly slash out there on the internet. I definitely had nothing to do with it.