Everything that’s wrong with local politics

It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with Labour blogger Tristan Osborne, but his summary of the frankly childish Not The Medway Labour Blog as representing ‘gutter politics in Medway’ could not be truer.

Someone (clearly not a fan) has taken it upon themselves to create a primitive, perhaps, one might say, neolithic attack blog against councillors who have been democratically elected, and Tristan himself, as probably the most vocal Medway Labour activist online.

Earlier this week, the anonymous author of the blogger accused Medway Labour of stealing yet another British National Party slogan. Osborne hit back, saying (correctly, as it happens) that the term did not originate from Medway, but has, in fact, been used by Labour throughout its conference, and accepted and widely used by the mainstream media.

Mystery blogger was not happy. Osborne had, in the same article, accused him of being close to the BNP on the political scale, and (s)he was having none of it. ‘Not content with stealing the BNP’s slogans’, they continued, ‘it seems the Labour party are also stealing their policies’, before listing the example of supervised homes for single mums.

Osborne promptly updated his previous post, to include the “fact” that supervised homes are not as unpopular as mystery blogger would seem to make out.

Well this blogger is not impressed by either petty-minded mystery blogger or seemingly-obsessed Osborne, and suggests both parties should meet together, and proceed to bang each others’ heads together until it hurts (and please, God, let it hurt a lot!).

Mystery blogger’s below-the-belt, potentially offensive comments portray just about everything that is wrong with local politics, and should, in this author’s humble opinion, have their computer subjected to one of the DVLA’s fearless car crushers to stop the continuous churning out of small-minded, and often misinformed, trash that destroys the image of local politics in Medway.

(Note to mystery blogger: if you do overstep the mark, and someone wants to take action, the High Court on Thursday ordered the issuing of a writ to an anonymous user via twitter, so just because you are hiding behind your anonymity, does not mean that you are beyond reproach!)

Similarly, Osborne (and I know you’re reading, so do, please take note!) has every right to reply to negative comments made by opposition bloggers and commentators, much as I myself would in the same situation. But please, surely you cannot lower yourself to reply to such a low-life who clearly has no time to spare but for launching pathetic attack after pathetic attack on (in most cases) people who have no real power anyway (no offence)?

Osborne, please stick to your higher-quality posts attacking my side of the political spectrum – at least they had some grounding and some merit within them. Perhaps if we ignore mystery blogger for long enough and not give him/her the time of day, (s)he will return to rummaging around the bins behind his/her local?McDonald’s and leave?the world of local politics alone.

P.s. I accept that this post is slightly hypocritical, but it is all I have to say on the matter. Mystery blogger just infuriated me too much this time, and I had to say something!

Update 15/10/09 @ 21:56

Since the above post was written, the Not The Medway Labour Blog has gone offline.