Horrifically busy in the real world, hence the longest break in blogging on this site in more than six years. I am, however, still commenting away about the EU (among other things) in 140 characters or less on Twitter on a daily basis – that’s the best place to find me these days. You can get an RSS feed of my Twitter ramblings here – just be warned that it’s not all politics related, some of it’s personal, some of it’s very silly, and some of it’s very sweary.

Twitter has a wonderful ability to suddenly introduce you to new people – a 140 character limit meaning that you can read hundreds of different people’s opinions every day in a way that simply isn’t possible in long-form. If also means I’ve been coming across more ridiculous nonsense than I have in several years, as I keep getting alerted to stories and blog posts from sources I’d never normally come across by myself.

When these are EU-related, they’re normally incredibly familiar – the usual stories that get repeated year after year. Having, as I do, fairly extensive archives, I keep finding myself using old posts to rebut “new” stories – be it over the EU budget, the EU’s role in guaranteeing British freedom, the concept of an EU superstate. Along the way, I’ve got into arguments with anti-EU campaigners from the Taxpayers’ Alliance, the Bruges Group, OpenEurope and more.

It’s all great fun. A bit like blogging in the good old days, when I actually had time to read and comment on other blogs.

Having said that, I’m planning to start blogging again soon. I’m writing less and less in the day job these days (unless you count innumerable emails, Powerpoint presentations and planning documents), and am starting to get rusty.

There’s still a question of precisely what to write *about*, though. I’ve covered many of the broad EU issues – often several times. I have no time for party politics or the “personalities” of the Brussels bubble (something I’ve never been a part of anyway). I usually haven’t got the time – or expertise – for detailed policy analysis. And as entertaining as arguing with eurosceptics can be on Twitter, I prefer to keep the blog for considered argument and polite debate – turning the focus back to pointing out the flaws of eurosceptic arguments tends to attract the kind of responses I have no interest in dealing with.

And in any case, these days there are plenty of other EU bloggers to do that sort of thing – you can find them via Bloggingportal. (I remember when this here EUblogosphere were all fields – just me, EU Referendum (sadly increasingly shrill in its anti-EU vehemence these days), A Fistful of Euros, and a handful of others, now long since departed.)

So, back properly soon. Hopefully. At which point I’ll hopefully also find time to give this place a spring clean – some of the site’s code has broken, and a redesign is long overdue to make the text more readable. The only trouble is I’ve lost my FTP details, so can’t get in to change anything…

More egg nonsense, I’m afraid, but this was too good not to share. From the comments to inexplicably popular UK political blogger Iain Dale’s “you couldn’t make it up” post about the made-up story about the EU banning the selling of eggs by number:

“At June 29, 2010 10:45 AM, Roger Thornhill said…

@Douglas “The weight needs to be displayed. That is all.”

Replace “weight” with “yellow star” and the penny might just drop for you.

Yes, that’s right – someone whose chosen online pseudonym is the name of Cary Grant’s falsely-persecuted everyman in Hitchcock’s conspiracy thriller classic North by Northwest is comparing a regulation asking for food packaging to include an indication of the product’s weight to the start of the Holocaust.

First they came for the egg boxes, and I did not complain, for I was not an egg box…

As I say, sometimes it can be very hard to take eurosceptics seriously… This is now my new favourite stupid anti-EU comment of all time, swiftly overtaking one-time sensible anti-EU blogger Tim Worstall’s bizarre allegation that I simply *must* be in on the grand EU conspiracy – how else to explain someone saying that europhobic bullshit is, erm… europhobic bullshit? (Though to be fair on Tim, he’s only the latest in a long line of ranting maniacs to flatter my ego with suggestions that people might find me worth bribing.)

I do love writing about the EU sometimes – it has a wonderful tendency to bring out the very maddest in people.

Details here. I’ve been named the UK finalist in the internet section for my June 2009 post on the percentage of UK laws that come from the EU (also published on Liberal Conspiracy and BlogActiv).

From the announcement:

“An article on the percentage of our laws originating in the EU got the UK nomination for the internet section. The judging panel found James Clive-Matthews’ EUtopia blog overall very entertaining, but selected this entry for its attempt to clarify how the arguments used to make claims about the influence of EU legislation often take original quotes out of context. EUtopia does not draw any conclusions, but lays out the context for the various claims and counter-claims, as such helping to clarify what is often a contentious issue.”

Which is nice.

I would also like to state for the record that nothing I have written on this blog has ever been published with the hope of securing money. It’s all just for my ego – not for anyone else’s, and certainly never to support any political institution or ideology (except on the very rare occasions that I feel that such support is warranted).

So although I find (UKIP press officer) Gawain’s old description of this as the European sycophancy prize amusing, I’d dispute it. Because any blogger/journalist willing to spew out rubbish that they don’t believe in the hope of sucking up to the powerful is never going to be worth reading anyway – and no amount of prixe money will ever alter that.

On a related note: For a more detailed analysis of the percentage of UK laws that come from the EU, check out this detailed report into the subject (PDF). Fascinating stuff – and also tends to support my own vague conclusions.

Hell, I’m supposedly a leading EU politics blogger, and I’ve barely discussed what’s been going on in the midst of one of the biggest crises I can remember the EU facing as the various member states try and work out what the hell to do about the Greek economic collapse.

I thought it was just me being lazy, but according to The Week in Bloggingportal roundup of Euroblogs, not a single one of the 555+ EU-related blogs that Bloggingportal aggregates could be bothered to discuss last week’s EU summit.

Of course, that’s not entirely true. Good old Fistful (one of the few EU-focussed blogs to have been going longer than this place) has been covering the Greek crisis in depth for ages now, and had another lengthy post on Friday looking at how the Greek situation could impact on the Eurozone. Yet even Fistful found little room to discuss the machinations at the EU Summit, preferring to focus more specifically on the economics.

And herein lies the problem. Now that the Lisbon Treaty has been passed, the major areas of EU-related debate have shifted – as they often do, when there aren’t treaty negotiations going on – to the economy.

The only trouble is that there have been treaty negotiations going on for so long now (pretty much continually since the late 90s, with first the Nice negotiations, then the discussions that led to the EU Constitution, then the run-up to Lisbon, and Lisbon again after the first Irish referendum) that most EU-watchers (especially us amateur ones) have become more used to constitutional issues than economic ones. We’ve all been looking at the big *political* picture, not the economic one. (And – let’s face it – most people who are interested in politics aren’t very good when it comes to economics… How many newspaper columnists outside the Business section would you trust on economic analysis? How many politicians not involved with a Finance ministry, for that matter?)

But the EU is, at its most fundamental, an economic body. Yes, you can dispute precisely how it goes about it (and you may be one of the conspiracy theorists who sees the economic aspects of the EU as being a mere smokescreen for the political project), but at the EU’s heart lie vastly ambitious economic projects, from the Common Market and Common Agricultural and Common Fisheries Policies through the Eurozone, Regional Development Funds, even the attempts to cut mobile phone tarrifs and promote the free movement of people. All of these are economic at heart – and even if you are one of the conspiracy theorists, they are economic as much as they are political.

But understanding continental-scale economics takes levels of knowledge, reading, education and understanding that most political commentators simply don’t have . Hell, the very fact that there’s still no consensus on the benefits of the euro shows that – and most people who comment on the euro, even those who have the economic background to know roughly what they’re talking about – don’t have the knowledge of the individual economies and polities that make up the Eurozone that would really be necessary to provide a proper analysis (though Fistful and the Economist’s Charlemagne have good stabs at coming close on occasion).

And so what we mostly do, us EU political commentators, is we try to discuss what’s going on in the EU in terms that are easier to understand. We try to treat the EU as if it’s a country, and EU politics as if its the politics of any old nation state. We try to create conflict – as over the European Council Presidency appointment – and we try to create factions – be they pro-EU vs anti-EU (if you’re in Britain), neo-liberal vs socialist, Anglo-Saxon vs whatever you happen to identify with that’s not Anglo-Saxon (if you’re outside Britain), or whatever.

Part of the reason for this is a desperate attempt to get people interested in a subject that interests us – because so few people care tuppence for EU affairs. But it’s also because we understand conflict. We can explain conflict. We can understand personal, selfish reasons for particular policy positions. They make sense to us, looking at the EU from the perspective of people only used to national-level politics. We don’t all understand economics or interntaional law, and none of us understands the politics of all the individual member states. And so we focus on those things we do understand, and read those into everything the EU does.

But the EU is not a single, harmonious entity, and cannot be simply explained. It is made up of 27 individual member state governments (who all still have to agree unanimously on all major decisions, despite being made up of political parties of all stripes), plus the European Parliament, plus the commission, plus the numerous other bodies that hang around the fringes.

If “the EU” decides to act, it is never for just *one* reason. It is for *at least* 27 different reasons. Unlike with national politics, where policy decisions can often be explained in just a sentence, every EU decision is vastly complex – with large chunks of the decision-making process having taken place behind closed doors in languages that you don’t understand.

In short, we can never hope to understand the EU. It takes more economic knowledge than most of us have. It takes more knowledge of the politics and economics of the individual member states than anyone had. It takes an understanding of all the insane confusion of EU rules, reglations, laws and treaties that can only be gained with a lifetime’s study of international and EU law. It takes insider knowledge of diplomatic discussions and deals that will probably never be revealed.

All we can do is guess – and our guesses will *always* be based on only a tiny, tiny fraction of the knowledge that is needed to get close to the truth. In fact, I can state with utmost certainty that anyone who tells you that they understand the EU is either lying or deluded. No one understands the EU. It is simply too big, too complex, too secretive, too multidisciplinary, too multilingual, too innovative, too unique for anyone to be able to grasp it in its entirety.

This, of course, makes it fascinating to those of use who like a challenge. But it also makes it utterly daunting. To try to explain the EU is like trying to climb Mount Everest. Without oxygen. Or ropes. Or protective clothing. With both arms tied behind your back. At night. In a blizzard.

Little wonder, then, that sometimes the enthusiasm leaves us. Some will quit for good. Others will keep bashing away at it – perhaps deluding themselves that one day they will get it. I intend to keep bashing away at it – but after seven years of an uphill struggle, for now I need a breather while I scout out a new route. This economic crisis in Greece and its reveberations throughout the continent has shown that there are some major gaps in my knowledge of the EU, and I need to fill these in as best I can before I continue.

Back soon, I hope. But in the meantime just remember that *no one* knows what’s going on. Keep that in mind whenever you read anything about the EU and you should do just fine.

I’ve been a bit quiet over the last few weeks, largely thanks to the real world getting in the way.

One of the major projects I’ve been working on, however, is now in a pre-launch beta phase, and so can be officially revealed: Ideas on Europe – a new group blog that I’ve been developing in partnership with UACES, the University Association for Contemporary University Studies.

Describing itself as a place for “informed analysis, comment, dialogue and debate on all things European”, Ideas on Europe is intended as a non-partisan, multi-national, not exclusively political portal for academics working in the field of European Studies – taking in politics, economics, history, sociology, public policy, culture, geography and more – to engage with those of us outside the ivory towers as well as those within.

At the moment we’ve got nearly 40 contributors on board – a number that’s set to rise considerably – ranging from postgrad students to named chairs at high-profile universities. Some of them have begun to make their first forays into blogging, with posts from Jaani Kaerne (from the University of Tartu in Estonia), EUoplocephalus (from the University of Surrey in the UK), and (in German) Vanessa Buth – as well as a few from me – leading the way.

Among even this initial contributor base, there is a broad range of expertise and experience – with blogs dedicated to subjects like welfare, migration, security, energy, north Africa, and education, as well as more generalist contributors. Now that the site is going public, we should start to see a bit more activity from these early adopters.

Many of the areas we aim to end up covering are currently sorely under-represented in the world of Euroblogging – not to mention the relative lack of academic contributors to the various online debates, most of which are currently dominated by a combination of enthusiastic amateurs and professional political types – so I very much hope that those of us who’ve been active in this section of the internet give the site and its contributors our support, encouragement and advice as it starts to get off the ground over the next few months. Not least because the vast majority of our contributors have never blogged before – nor, indeed, taken part in online discussions.

I’ve already answered some questions about Ideas on Europe’s aims and intentions over at Kosmopolito (which now has its own presence on the new site) and also at Blogactiv, but naturally enough, I’m happy to answer any more that anyone may have here.

I’m on Twitter at the moment, blathering away more or less incoherently with a bunch of other Eurobloggers (@JonWorth, @JulienFrisch, @kosmopolit, @citizeneurope, @EuropeanCitizen and a bunch of others) as the results and rumours come in.

Follow along via the hashtags #eu09 and #ep09 – your best bet is probably to use Twitterfall to follow the various tweets live. It’s fairly simple to use, it must be said – just add a bunch of searches into the “Custom” field in the left-hand column (I’m using #ep09, #eu09, EU, Europe and elections), and get real-time commentary from all over the shop. Some of it’s rubbish, naturally – this is the internet – but some is surprisingly good.

Current trend – at 8:45pm UK time, so 15 minutes from the results – seems to be a surge in support for the right (both centre right and far right), with mostly falling turnouts yet again, though ranging member state to member state from c.20% to c.80%. But with national issues likely to dominate everywhere, working out Europe-wide reasons for any apparent trends is something to be treated with great caution.

Below the fold – my Twitter contributions from the night (in chronological order, starting c.8:45pm UK time, ending c.2:30am UK time – and for Twitter newcomers, “RT” indicates where I’m quoting someone else):
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This time from the editors of the European Parliament’s own website, with all sorts of hints of interesting new developments in the EU’s previously more or less dire online communications policy. From the early posts, they seem to get it – both tone and approach are altogether different from what we’ve seen from official EU bodies to date.

All of which reminds me – an update of the EU blog directory really is long overdue, especially now that everything seems to be kicking off in the once rather tranquil and under-subscribed world of Euroblogging. I’ll naturally be going through the various new compilations (Bloggingportal.eu, Blogactiv’s blogroll etc.) for ones I’m missing, but suggestions of omissions are most welcome.

(As you’ve no doubt noticed, I’ve been neglecting this place in recent months – arguably in recent years. I’m hoping that the new-found enthusiasm of others may prove to be infectious.)

Just like busses, you wait ages for some promising new EU-focussed bloggers, and then 81 turn up at once… (And, judging from their photos, they aren’t all youngsters, as I was expecting, and there are even some GIRLS! Shocking! Though once again there appears to be a definite under-representation of non-white faces among their number, which is a shame…)

At any rate, there certainly seems to be a fair amount of enthusiasm for this year’s EU elections on the interweb (see also the promising-looking EU Debate 2009 blog from Cafe Babel) – but will there be any in the real world? And what are these elections going to be all about anyway? Will the economy be on the mend by the summer? It’s doubtful. And in tough economic times, aspirations of working with people in other countries generally take a back seat to knee-jerk protectionism, as is currently being witnessed in the UK with the Lindsay Oil Refinery dispute (after all, there wasn’t so much outrage over the influx of Polish builders at the height of the property boom a couple of years back, was there?).

Convincing sceptical voters of the benefits of European co-operation can be tough even in the good times, so ready do people seem to be to believe the worst. In the bad?

With the launch of the laudable Think About It EU blogging competition this past weekend (sorry I couldn’t make it, chaps, etc.), and the neat coincidence of the public launch of the rather promising BloggingPortal.eu cropping up at the same time, four bits of advice to anyone just starting up an EU blog, after almost six moderately successful years of my running one. (Four bits of advice that probably apply to anyone starting up a political blog, for that matter. *cough*Derek Draper*cough*)

1) Write about what interests you

If you set yourself artificial targets (two posts a day, say, or posts on a particular subject on particular days of the week), the structure this affords may help you in the short-term, but in the medium to long-term you’ll get a) bored, b) frustrated, and c) trapped into spending hours researching a subject you know nothing about, just to hit your self-imposed schedule. I’ve also always found that the best blog posts – both mine and other people’s – are the spontaneous, passionate ones. If you blog just because you feel that you ought to, you’ll also most likely end up being boring.

2) Don’t be afraid to write about subjects you know little about

Blogging remains largely an amateur affair, despite its increasingly high profile. Although it’s nice when genuine experts start to blog, the vast majority of (political) bloggers are merely interested citizens – and no decent political system can ever work if those citizens are discouraged from investigating the world around them and the actions of their political representatives. The major benefit of blogging is that it teaches both bloggers and blog readers new things – and nothing new ever comes from retreading old ground. (At least, not often – it’s still worth going over the basics again from time to time, just to make sure they remain the same as you thought they were, as blogging will often lead to gradual shifts in opinions.) Plus, from the point of view of the blogging community as a whole, one blogger’s misunderstanding can often lead to interesting discussions and increased understanding for many.

3) Be prepared to own up when you’ve made a mistake

No one will think any the worse of you for getting something a bit wrong – we’ve all done it, and we’ll all do it again. Everyone will, however, think a lot better of you when you admit your mistakes. The world of blogging is nice like that – honesty is valued, arrogance shunned. It’s almost the opposite of the real world in some respects.

4) Try to be nice

People who leave comments on blogs tend to be a lot more violent in their opinions online than they would be in the real world – especially, it seems, eurosceptics who comment on EU-focussed blogs, but the same is true for left-wingers commenting on right-wing blogs and vice versa (and it can get really messy when party politics gets involved). The temptation is always to respond in kind, or to simply hold up people of opposing political opinions to your own as objects of ridicule. But despite appearances, political opponents can get on amazingly well behind the scenes (both online and in the real world) – the over-the-top rhetoric is usually just for public show. Treat people with differing political opinions to your own nicely and they will often prove to be valuable contributors to the debate that we are all trying to foster – and this can be to everyone’s advantage.

Not official yet, but looks like Created in Birminham beat Melanie Phillips to the top spot – result! Congrats to them, and to all involved with the site.

This place – officially supporting CiB since the second day of the vote – came in 3rd to last, beating only CiB founder Pete Ashton (who not only also asked all his readers to vote CiB instead, but actively campaigned for last place) and, erm… Iain Dale’s Diary, supposedly one of the most popular British blogs going, with a professed monthly readership somewhere in the region of 20 times what this place gets.

However, this wasn’t just about stopping Melanie Phillips and her repellent (and often bizarre) worldview from being publicly lauded, though that is eminently satisfying.

As Pete Ashton notes (in a top-notch post worth reading in full for anyone interested in the UK blogging scene), this is also about showing

that community blogs like CiB are a good thing that should be supported… to show that a blog that has a supportive community, that encourages sharing, collaboration, communication and which doesn’t take sides in a partisan way is way better than some single issue, ranting, divisive megaphone in the echo chamber

I may well be a political blogger, but that does not mean I like political blogs. The majority are unreadable, unthinking, partisan dross, dominated by dogmatism and ingrained ideological prejudice.

The idea that any political blog is better, more worthy of an award and the associated praise, than a blog like Created in Birmingham – a positive force for good, encouraging creativity and a sense of community while offering an outlet and source of publicity to nascent artists, and thus a real chance to help boost careers and reputations, as well as for its readers to broaden their perspectives and try out new things – is just silly.

The only other blog genuinely worthy of winning in the shortlist (though others on there like Olly’s Onions and The View From Here are certainly well worth a look) was Baldy’s Blog, neatly summarised here:

Young local journalist/web editor gets ill. Complex leukaemia. Starts Blog to describe and explain the disease and treatment. Bone marrow transplant is successful. Post transplant complications set in. Proposes on Christmas eve to long term girlfriend. She accepts. Wedding plans begin in earnest. Fiancee leaves him. Broken heart. Leukaemia comes screaming back. Terminal prognosis. Campaign begins to teach all 17/18 year olds about how simple it is to be a bone marrow donor. Huge petition presented to Downing Street. Support from Gordon Brown, Alan Johnson, Ed Balls. Many media appearances nationally to push campaign. Dies 20 August aged 27. Campaign continues…..and succeeds.

Let’s face it. This is a Blog which has changed lives and which will save lives.

Baldy’s Blog eventually came in 3rd, beaten only by CiB and Phillips, and pipping last year’s winner Neil Clark to the bronze. It should have been higher.

The fact that the wildly successful Phillips – with her regular columns in national newspapers and magazines – even felt the need to campaign for the win (as she did) when there were such worthy alternatives on the shortlist only confirms my low opinion of her. And the fact that the world of political blogs continues to act as if it is all that matters – far-left maniac Neil Clark also remaining on a futile ego-trip campaign to the last, despite it being obvious to all that he had no chance of succeeding – when there are so many far more worthy, far more actively positive blogs out there? Well, that comes as no surprise, but still saddens.

Blogging is just a publishing medium. To say “blogging should be like this, not like that” is a nonsense, as blogging is about whatever individual bloggers want it to be. But blogs do have a brilliant ability to foster new communities, new relationships. Done right, they can bring people together to achieve great things, positive things. Political blogs are mostly about the negative – Melanie Phillips’ more than most.

Both Created in Birmingham and Baldy’s Blog are about creating something positive from blogging – in the case of the latter, creating something positive in the face of immense pain and hardship for the people who run it. This, for me, is what blogging should be about, if it should be about anything. Congratulations to them both.

Mad Melanie Phillips has pulled ahead in the Weblog Awards but Created in Birmingham can still stop the gong going to a right-wing harpie who appears to enjoy nothing more than stirring up racial tensions and pandering to the basest prejudices of society while pretending that some of the most wealthy and powerful military-industrial complexes on the planet are the poor, put-upon victims.

Vote now – and (thanks to the flaws of online “democracy”) vote often. To those still voting for me – thanks, you’re very sweet, but even I’m not voting for me any more.

(I’ll copy the offending article below the fold, for those who are interested. And for non-UK readers who don’t know what Private Eye is, it’s the UK’s best satirical political magazine – and also one of the few publications to still bother with proper investigative journalism. I’ve been reading it pretty much every issue since the early 90s, and can safely say that it’s far and away my favourite magazine, and probably the prime thing that inspired me to start blogging.)

Come on, Strobes – your EU coverage is becoming laughably bad. In Brussels Sprouts in Eye 1227 you quote the “director” of “The National Platform EU Research and Information Centre” (later just “the EU Research Centre”), who has supposedly “exposed” yet more devious details of the Lisbon Treaty as Ireland looks set to vote again on the damned thing.

Aside from the fact that what is supposedly “exposed” is actually just re-hashed, unproven speculative analysis that did the rounds of the Euroblogs well over a year ago, what’s most shocking is that had you bothered to look it up on Google you’d find that the impressive-sounding National Platform EU Research and Information Centre is actually nothing more than one man and his blog, most of the content of which consists of cut and pasted newspaper reports. Not only that, but judging by blog search engine Technorati, it’s a singularly unknown blog (only six inbound links) – probably why I’d never heard of it.

I’ve been running a well-regarded blog on EU affairs for nearly six years now (shortlisted for Best UK Blog in the 2008 Weblog Awards and given the Jury’s Commendation in the UACES-Reuters Reporting Europe Awards 2008, among various other accolades). But now I see where I’m going wrong – I should start referring to myself as the director of some grandiose-sounding institute and start spamming people with “press releases” to make people assume that I’m from a thinktank.

Seriously – if you need a fact-checker for your EU stuff, let me know. Brussels Sprouts has always had a tendency to believe the worst of the eurosceptic conspiracy theories, but now it’s getting silly.

As for the rest, keep up the (mostly) good work!

Yours,

J Clive Matthews (aka Nosemonkey)
Nosemonkey’s EUtopia
(henceforward to be known as The European Institute for EU Insight and Objectivity – E.I.E.I.O.)
www.jcm.org.uk/blog

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Update: Actually, scrap that. Vote for Created in Birmingham instead. Never heard of them before, but they seem to have the best chance of preventing mad borderline racist Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips from winning. Last year the Best UK category was taken by the barking Stalinist Commie Neil Clark (him of “Iraqis who work for the British deserve to be raped and tortured to death and so do their families”* fame) – let’s not have a repeat of the most idiotic maniacs ruling the roost. There’s enough of that on this here internet already, thanks very much.

While you’re there, check out the Best European Blog poll – where this place is arguably a better fit, and consider chucking a vote to Kosmopolito or Siberian Light. And then lend your support to uber-Euroblog A Fistful of Euros, inexplicably shortlisted in the Business Blog category.

Update 2: At the request of Mr Clark, this post has been amended. He claims not to be a Stalinist and asks me to provide evidence that he has ever said nice things about Uncle Joe. Not being of a McCarthyite mindset – and not having the inclination to read any more of his dross than is necessary – I’ll take him at his word, having merely referred to him as one having seen him described as such on numerous other blogs whose opinions I respect rather more than I do his.

* Mr Clark also seems incapable of grasping the concept of the satirical paraphrase, so to be clear, he has never written the statement “Iraqis who work for the British deserve to be raped and tortured to death and so do their families”. That was instead my own short summary of this horrifically callous and smug article that he wrote in August 2007, in which he strongly hinted that he felt that reprisals against Iraqi “quislings” (that is a direct quote) were justified, and stated explicitly that “The true heroes in Iraq are those who have resisted the invasion of their country” (another direct quote), thereby explicitly giving his support to bomb-throwing murderers of women and children along with those Iraqi nationalists who have used more traditional and less abhorrent methods of armed resistance to the occupying Coalition (and subsequently UN) forces.

It is perhaps worth noting that Mr Clark did not take exception to me calling him barking or referring to him as an idiotic maniac. I think we can now see why…

How exciting. Last time was 2005, when I did singularly poorly in the face of tough competition.

This time I’m up against the usual suspects of Dale and Guido (each with a daily readership that this blog would struggle to get in half a year, by their own accounts), mentalist lefty Neil Clark (who won last year by getting out the Socialist Workers/Respect/We hate Chimpy Bushitler vote), barking right-wing Islamophobic harridan Melanie Phillips, and a bunch of others I’m not familiar with, and which aren’t linked, making checking them out tricky.

In the Best European Blog (non UK) category, good to see Kosmopolito and Siberian Light get nods (though how is a Russia-focussed blog European, and how is it non-UK when the guy who runs it is London-based, like me?).

More details, no doubt, when the proper voting pages are up. And more posts from me at some point soon – it’s been a rather busy couple of weeks…