ON THE LIST

www.socialistunity.com has put me on a list of top 100 leftist bloggers. I have been placed directly beneath Peter Tatchell, which is not a place I had imagined I would ever find myself. I was however placed above George Monbiot and can only assume this to be an oversight on the part of the compilers. 

This list was done in response to 2 other lists. One was compiled by the daily telegraph (which is a Murdoch paper, or at least should be) and has the supposedly most 100 influential leftists in Britain. Some of them can not even be described as left-ish.

For example, the top 10 is…

1. Gordon Brown

2. Tony Bliar

3. Alex Salmond

4. David Miliband

5. Ed Balls

6. Jack Straw

7. Ken Livingstone

8. Douglas Alexander

9. Harriet Harman

10. Derek Simpson

The rest is mostly a baffling list of New Labour and ex-new labour people and a few token journalists (whereas a real journalist like John Pilger just manages to sneak in at number 100).

Well, it is only baffling if you don’t realise that they are trying make  telegraph readers think that New Labour are what qualify as screaming communists and freeze out the ideas of any supposedly more ‘radical’ elements from any discussion. You know, ‘radicals ‘ the sort of people who believe that bombing the shit out of other people for profit is wrong, the sort of people who believe that there are other choices other than letting the profit hungry rampage through hospitals, schools, universities and other institutions – those kind of freaks. Even worse are the kind of people who don’t want to wave the Union jack at every opportunity and don’t believe that the purpose of the British Empire was to civilise the world – its best just not to mention them.  

The second list in question was by Iain Dale and co. who did the same thing for bloggers. Dave did a good little critique of it at a Complex System of Pipes.

I don’t usually fuss about lists of this sort but since they were lists of british bloggers I thought honourable mentions should go to a couple of people I noticed weren’t on any of the lists, namely the curmudgeon who makes me laugh and cry in equal measure, flying rodent and the fanonite.

Also, Kenny Sheerin, who has an excellent post today and the Disillusioned kid, who seems to have given up but was very good.