New Year

With the new year comes a new accolade with local twitter and hyper-local blog Hunsbury Herald highlighting this blog in it's best of blogs page here.
Although it's always good to have praise, I will point out that my blog is a personal one and not connected to my employment at Northamptonshire Rights and Equality Council.

Unlikely bed fellows

Apologies for the lack of posting but life has been busy of late. With the local BNP standing in two by-elections over the next few weeks (Daventry District Drayton Ward) and Kettering Borough Northfield Ward) there has been a lot to be keeping up with.

It was intriguing to find that the Northants Patriot blog had started trying to earn revenue with a Google ad's stream, particularly when one ad related to equality diversity training and another related to bespoke consultancy for equalities work in local government. Seems like exactly the kind of stuff that the blog seemed to spend it's time criticising as 'a waste of money and why don't these people get real jobs rather than using my council tax for something that might be more useful instead' rant. I do wonder what the companies listed would think if they knew the exposure that they were getting.

This all co-incided with the shift in government direction to include far right extremism as part of the prevention of violent extremism agenda. It's been a long time coming but at least it's there now. The recent graffiti attack on the Ramgaria Centre on Craven Street in Northampton which included the National Front emblem is clear evidence of why work in this area is so important.

Change, Risk and Judgement

The Labour Party blogsphere is saturated with discussion of "smeargate" emails from number 10 and now the debacle that is the Erith & Thamesmead selection. Makes Northampton Labour Party politics positively tame.

The bloggers response to this been this , which poses a number of statements about the principles under which we operate.

The chaotic and unstructured environment that blogging can produce is something I find attractive partly because I believe most really good solutions to problems involve an element of risk. The risky nature of blogging in that you don't know who's reading and what kind of mindset they have when they do ready your work, I think does produce possibilities that would not usually be there. I guess it is all about judgement in the end, something Damian McBride and Derek Draper showed little of in this episode.

Of course, it's not really true that I don't have a clue who reads my blog apart from the usual suspects ... even with lurkers, word gets around.