Blogs have changed politics forever: good news for libertarians, bad news for Lefties

The Draper-McBride affair is the latest demonstration of one of this blog's long-standing contentions, viz that free-marketeers take more naturally to the possibilities of the internet than Lefties. Lefties tend to believe in control (or, as they prefer to put it, "collective action"). They don't understand that the web is the enemy of regulation. Instead, they struggle to press the internet into their existing systems, treating it as just one more way to get their message across.

The whole wretched saga of LabourList pefectly proves the point. From the moment of its inception, it has been a top-down rather than a bottom-up website. Its zeal for the party line made it so dull that even committed Labour supporters stopped reading it. It was, in short, the precise opposite of what a blog should be.

This, incidentally, is why people now have trouble believing that the scurrilous emails were not, at least on some level, authorised in Downing Street. Derek Draper, the man behind LabourList, denies it. Then again, he denied (while being rude about me) ever having discussed these things with Damian McBride - a denial that, we now know, was made with smoke billowing from his pants. Many Rightist blogs are now demanding Draper's dismissal, but I hope he stays for as long as possible. Watch his performance here to see why.

The whole episode shows how blogs have pulverised the old media and political monopolies. Some Leftie journalists dimly perceive this point, even if they don't truly understand it. They are vaguely aware of the connection between the rise of YouTube and of online news, and pay cuts in their own industry. They can see that most of the new entrants are, like Guido, on the libertarian Right, and they resent the fact with the impotent rage of men who see their day passing.  continues here

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Benefit fraud pair sent to jail

A couple who sailed part way around the world on a £100,000 yacht while claiming benefits have been jailed.

Shashi Bacheta, 52, was sentenced to 21 months at Swansea Crown Court, while Jeffrey Cole received nine months.

Bacheta, of Swansea, admitted 16 counts relating to benefit and Cole, 58, admitted four charges which were together worth about £43,000.

It was found, despite claims Bacheta struggled to get out of bed because of an illness, that she went scuba diving.

Swansea Crown Court heard that at various times between October 2002 and January 2008 she claimed housing benefit, council tax relief, income support and disability living allowances.

She claimed to be unemployed and failed to declare she was living with Cole at his home in the Sketty area of Swansea or declare any of his assets.

These included his yacht Kismet.

The court heard that mother-of-two Bacheta was paid disability living allowance, council tax benefit and housing benefit while cruising around the Canary Islands on the Kismet.

Cole pleaded guilty to four offences of obtaining wrongful credits and false accounting.

Judge Huw Davies told Bacheta: "You were in perfectly good health and took active holidays to travel so much of the world.

"You went on safari and sailing the seas in a private yacht.

"You were guilty of a set of cynical offences of defrauding the benefit system.

"You started off making applications for housing and council tax benefit. You went on to make application for any benefit you considered it possible to make.

"There was a degree of sophistication in what you did. You sought to get round the checks as a challenge to your ingenuity."

Gran Canaria

The judge said the pair had been living together for five years and "taking holidays in some considerable style".

He told Cole: "You bought a yacht for £100,000 having sold some of your properties. You set off to enjoy your personal wealth and money extracted from public funds."

Swansea Crown Court heard the couple were caught after posing for photographs while their yacht was moored in Gran Canaria.

Two retired police officers, enjoying a similar around-the-world adventure, snapped the couple before posting the pictures on their blog.

Fraud investigators, who had become suspicious of the pair, discovered the blog while searching on the internet for the Kismet.

At an earlier hearing, the court was told that Cole pretended to be her landlord when they were in fact living together.

Ian Wright, for Bacheta, said she had "acted out of greed" after getting divorced from her husband of 20 years. continues here

I haven’t posted for a while, setting up the forum seems to take up vast amounts of my time, coupled with work and home commitments, time just seems to fly. Well as a new weblog our readership is relatively small, “we’d like to thank you for staying with us”, it is hoped that quite soon we shall have a new writer, a quite gifted writer with considerable insight, coupled with this, an American friend, has given us the link to the fantastically gifted, although persecuted, Kevin MacDonald weblog.

Kevin MacDonald, is the author of The Culture of Critique, An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, part of a fantastic trilogy chronicling Jewish ethnocentrism. We hope you enjoy reading his weblog, linking it if you have your own site, please take the time to interact with us here, by commenting or better yet join our forum. Once again thank you dear reader, onwards and upwards.