"Smeargate": a distraction from real problems

Why self-referential poison is bad for all political blogging.

My old friend Adam was right. I think of all the conversations we had when he told me he's not interested in politics because "it's boring and full of dirty tricks", while I was trying to persuade him that that bit is just a smokescreen to keep people nicely tame and apathetic.

And so when you look at the latest scandal (oh-my-god) concerning a couple of Labour Party spin doctors who were trying to smear some Tories and were caught red-handed by someone who smears politicians for a living and now is acting all prim and prissy, the surprise is not that there was a scandal.

The surprise, instead, consists in the tons of undeserved attention being given to this perfect example of the cannibalistic hoity-toity back-stabbing feast that is exactly what puts people off politics.

Ask most people outside the inner circle and the perception is that politics remains a self-perpetuating exercise for the very few, which has absolutely FA to do with the daily issues affecting workers, the increasing ranks of non-workers and their families.

'Blogging' was routinely hailed as a new tool to bypass the machinations of professional 'spin doctors', an alternative to the tired favour-trading world of conventional journalism.

For the last twenty-four hours, however, while people in Britain have been losing jobs at a rate of 138,000 a month and the crisis is being used to stage an unprecedented attack on workers' pay and conditions, the greatest majority of UK blogs, left right and centre, have been gawping at this latest, completely futile backroom-gossip centred around a handful of self-important rumour merchants gagging for increased website traffic.

So how to best sum up this 'circle of smear'?...Gutter politics? Middle class problems? Irrelevant back-stabbing? The 'discovery of hot water', like my dad would call it?

No, perhaps, more to the point, just boring crap.