The Internet Is Part Of The Political Solution

The unofficial blog of the Libertarian party draws attention to a comment made by Matthew Taylor, when he was outgoing adviser to Tony Blair in 2006, about the internet 'fuelling a crisis of confidence in politics'.

The reader (all one of you) may recall I have mentioned Mr Taylor a couple of times before, in his role as CEO of the RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce - though this description has been replaced on the website by the strapline 'Removing Barriers to Social Progress', which I don't think is exactly the same thing).

The article referred to can be read here. Matthew Taylor is a political insider and as such hasn't grasped the fact that there's a vertiginous chasm between people like himself and the rest of us.

His attitude is very much that 'we', ie he and similar-thinking folk, need to be guiding 'us' in the right way to do everything, including using the internet. Hence he opined that:

more needed to be done by the web community in general to encourage people to use the internet to "solve problems" rather than simply abuse politicians or make "incommensurate" demands on them.

Well thank you, Matthew, and fuck off. I think it's up to us to decide how we use the internet. We don't need lessons, lectures or encouragement. Certainly not from someone who was an adviser to one of the biggest shites in modern British politics (only exceeded in shiteness by the present incumbent of Number 10).

The internet is part of the problem for the political class because they don't control it. That's why, for the rest of us, it's part of the solution.