Britannia Radio

Lefties feel threatened by the internet

Posted By: Daniel Hannan at Apr 3, 2009 at 18:22:34 [General]

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blogs, Gordon Brown, Guardian, Michael White, MSM, New Statesman

Peter Wilby thinks I'm "a fool". According to the former editor of the New Statesman: "The online success of Daniel Hannan's speech about Gordon Brown to the European Parliament - it reached the top of YouTube's 'Most Viewed' list and has 'gone viral' - proves what we knew: the internet lacks quality control."

Yup. That's the thing about the internet: it turns the quality filters off. Until very recently, few of us could get political news direct from source. It had to be interpreted for us by a BBC man with a microphone or a newspaper's political correspondent. Now, though, people can make their own minds up. The message has been disintermediated.

It is striking that those who seem most upset by the development - pundits such as Mr Wilby and The Guardian's Michael White - tend to be on the Left. Perhaps they sense that the Left has the most to lose. What Mr Wilby seems to mean when he complains that the internet "lacks quality control" is not that my speech was ungrammatical or shoddily constructed, but that its content was disagreeable. The quality filters he evidently has in mind would screen out points of view that he considers unacceptable: that taxes are too high, that present borrowing levels are unsustainable, that Britain would flourish outside the EU, that we could do more to repatriate illicit migrants.

As The Economist remarks of the incident: "For the British Left, it was painful confirmation of its tardiness in mastering new media." So it would seem. No wonder Lefties are so tetchy.

Incidentally, if you think I'm being a bit ex post facto about all this, I should point out in my defence that this blog has been making these points for years. I even extended the thesis into a book. But I never expected to be its exemplar as well as its proponent.