This post by Steve Guy got me thinking.

Labour are now determined to press on with ID cards, regardless of the views of their opponents. The Tory cave-in (MatGB has a round-up of the heroes and villains of the piece) has demonstrated their lack of commitment to opposing them. This piece at ConservativeHome gives the impression, not backed up by hard quotes, that this is some cunning ploy to postpone the battle until the next general election, where voters will be given a clear choice - vote Labour in and get ID cards, vote them out and (presumably?) don't.

What boggles the mind is how the Conservatives can go into the next election arguing against ID cards when they've just compromised to get this very Bill through Parliament. If they're at all bothered by the accusations of being opportunistic flip-floppers, they've got a funny way of showing it - these are precisely the kind of mixed signals that leave people wondering what the Tories stand for.

For the Liberal Democrats, the position is clear. ID cards are to be opposed until the last breath, and if they are to be imposed then they will face scrutiny and opposition all the way. As a party member, I've got to say that I feel proud of the principled stand taken. I think this also sends a wider signal, that the Liberal Democrats are now often the only party concerned with protecting those traditional liberties that have been carefully cultivated in Britain over a period of centuries. The Tory love-affair with being 'modern' has, it seems, led them to forget what it is that they're supposed to be conserving.

This has left us with a collusion of two modernist, managerialist parties. Some Tories eloquently make the case for liberty, but for every Boris Johnson or Danny Finkelstein, there's a Michael Gove - a Cameronian compromiser who, one suspects, rather admires New Labour and would be more than happy to countenance adopting their line of interfering, illiberal busybodying so long as he's the one in government implementing it.

For voters, the choice is clear: only the Liberal Democrats will oppose ID cards fully. Only by having more Liberal Democrat MPs at Westminster will there be a chance of overturning this legislation. If the Liberal Democrats hold the balance of power in the next parliament, defeat of ID cards becomes a genuine possibility.

The Guardian has launched a new site, called Comment is Free.

This site is billed as a fusion of old and new media, where traditional commentary meets the brave new world of blogs. It follows the example of The Huffington Post in combining the blog format with professional contributors.

So, does it work? In my opinion, leaving aside that it may be too early to say for sure, it doesn't quite work.

The Guardian's main website has long been one of the best news sites in the UK and possibly the world. Whatever you think of the opinions expressed there (and I generally find more to disagree with than agree with) it has to be admitted that they've embraced the internet. Whereas other media outlets overload their sites with advertising, or restrict content to subscription-only, The Guardian has been making their content available for free, with tasteful quantities of advertising, for years. This has, in my opinion, been a shrewd move; it has made their site one of the most linked-to news outlets. The Guardian's profile amongst internet media consumers (that's us!) has been boosted considerably by this.

It's with this in mind that I find myself somewhat confused by CiF. Most of the people contributing to it are either Guardian writers or people who already have well-established blogs. Whilst the main Guardian site adds to the sum of available content, CiF doesn't feel like it's giving me anything I couldn't find elsewhere. I already know that Polly Toynbee wants Gordon Brown to lead the Labour party leftwards, Francis Fukuyama thinks that US success in Iraq is vital and that Madeleine Bunting has never had a coherent thought in her life.

Worst of all, in my opinion, are posts like this. In this case, it's a post by Glenn Reynolds, the closest thing the blogging world has to a superstar. His blog Instapundit is one of the most linked-to in the world and he is recognised as a leading figure in the blogging world. He is, therefore, a 'big name', and that's the only reason he's on CiF. I should point out, too, that I do think he has a point in his post. But there's something about reading it which leaves me, as a reader, cold.

For a time, I couldn't put my finger on it. CiF ticks all of the right boxes - both technological and content-wise. It's a proper blog, with RSS feeds, comments and all the rest. And the contributors are good, with the general standard of posting being higher than what you'd find on many (even any) other blogs.

Then the penny dropped. CiF is essentially a compilation blog, not unlike those 'Greatest Hits of 2005' CDs. In this analogy, Glenn Reynolds is Britney Spears, Polly Toynbee is 50 Cent and Madeleine Bunting is Beyonce Knowles.

What this removes is any real sense of context. CiF puts lefties like Toynbee and Bunting on the same platform as libertarians like Reynolds and David Boaz, without making much of a distinction between the two. The blog format, with generally snappier, shorter posts, gives little opportunity for the authors to expand on the larger themes behind their viewpoints. So we see that Reynolds thinks that self-defence would be good for citizens of Darfur, but not much of the principles which he derives this view from. Neil Clark posts an 842-word apologia for Slobodan Milosevic, free of the context of his own blog where his other views can be examined.

If CiF is a compilation, most blogs are like 70s progressive rock concept albums - built around a central theme, with issues explored from an explicit viewpoint. We might not agree with the point, but it's explicit and we can dip into this world for a time. Moving between, say, Harry's Place and Samizdata means being presented with more than differing opinions; it means being presented with differing fundamental mindsets.

Compilations work if their content shares some context. 'Greatest hits of the 70s' works because there is something tying the songs together, even if it's just nostalgia. 'Pop hits of 2005' works for similar reasons - they're the songs you've heard on the radio for months. But CiF feels like a mish-mash of content with no shared viewpoints on which dialogue can proceed. The content is presented as a set of articles for consumption, not mindsets to be explored. If someone else had launched this site, I might not have been surprised to see the Guardian itself lamenting the commodification of opinion, its decontextualisation from its source.

I may turn out to be wrong. CiF may develop into something truly wonderful, bringing genuinely disparate viewpoints together for dialogue. There's something quite refreshing about seeing such disparate commentators brought together. But the test will be whether they can debate with each other, not just produce rehashes of their greatest hits in isolation.

I must admit that I've never been too fond of Charles Clarke. Despite his efforts to play 'good cop' to Blair's 'bad cop' over the 90-day-detention issue, he often comes across as a man with little time for the concerns of others. This is, of course, a useful attribute in a politician charged with pushing through measures such as ID cards, reductions in jury trials and the whole swathe of illiberal 'anti-terror' legislation.

It is therefore disappointing, though unsurprising, to have that impression confirmed by this story. Follow the link if you want the details; suffice to say that it shows Clarke in a very poor light.

Paul at Not Little England has a new post up about voter apathy.

He begins with a story about 'Fairtrade Fortnight', something I knew nothing about until I read his post, and something he knew nothing about until he saw it advertised in Sainsbury's. He draws a parallel between this and democracy, in that both things are things that we 'should' participate in and yet, often, we don't. For the sake of brevity, I'll leave alone the assumption that Fairtrade is a good thing, as it's a pretty reasonable one.

I agree with the broad thrust of his argument - that greater involvement in politics is a good thing and that efforts undertaken by the likes of They Work For You to open the political process up are wholly admirable. However, I do partly dispute the notion that turnout is a measure of the strength of a democracy.

I should begin by saying that I don't like the FPTP (First Past The Post) system and think that it should be replaced with something more proportional. I also believe that a side-effect of a proportional system would be to increase turnout, since individual votes would - in most seats - increase in importance. But I don't believe that increasing turnout is an end desirable for its own sake.

Karl Popper is mostly remembered for his philosophy of science, in particular his belief in 'conjectures and refutations', the idea being that science puts forward likely hypotheses and attempts to falsify them. We can never be 100% certain that a hypothesis is true, but we can accumulate evidence that it is not false. He applied a similar principle in his view of democracy: that political manifestos are hypthetical answers to problems, which can be falsified by evidence. Once falsified, people generally vote them out. A democratic governing majority, therefore, exists until the majority of the electorate no longer believe in it.

Various political parties put their hypotheses forward and, as an electorate, we choose which hypothesis we want to test. Only when it has been refuted will a majority of people choose to vote that party out of power. Until that point, it is likely that turnout will fall. The low turnout at the last election probably reflects the fact that people simply don't know whether the present government has failed or not. Some people believe it has, but not enough to unseat it from power yet.

Under this view, the 'don't knows' - the apathetic, the 'floating voters' - are crucial. Only when they are persuaded one way or another will they come out to vote. It is, of course, the goal of opposition parties to persuade these people that there is a case for voting the government out. Partisans on all sides have, largely, already made their minds up. It could even be argued that they are no longer objective observers. The floating voters are important because they have no real preference for any of the parties, but judge governments based on empirical observations - the 'pound in their pocket', perceived crime rates, how long they waited for NHS operations and so on. This infuriates the partisans who generally have a rationally-constructed case for voting the way they do, but in the end it may be that the floating voters apply the necessary common sense that prevents political agendas being carried too far.

Paul concluded with this:

The issue, I suppose, it getting people interested in and educated about politics, and not in some cheesy politix for kidz crap either. Perhaps the internet is a good way to do this, maybe blogs and so on really do give access to 'the common man' in a way that previous media hasn't. I guess we have a few more years to the next election to find out. Here's hoping.

I have to say that I entirely agree with him here. Where voters can scrutinise the political process and come to their own conclusions, democracy is strengthened. But if they still choose to reserve judgement and withhold their vote, we should not begrudge the fact that they choose to do so.

This post by Peter Black highlights the latest twist in the neverending journey of the Conservative party in their quest to find a tax policy that is neither up, down, left or right. As another well-known Vulcan might say, this is "most illogical".

Not so long ago, mainstream Tories backed the flat tax. Shadow Chancellor George Osborne:

"The rest of the world is responding to [globalisation] by reducing taxes - in this country we are increasing taxes and making our tax system more complicated.

"It is out of kilter with the rest of the world. It's not good for the British economy, and I think it shows that my opponent, Gordon Brown, is stuck in the thinking of the past, whereas the Conservative Party is open to thinking about the future."

Evidently not far enough into the future, or they would have seen the u-turn coming.

It has been remarked by some that Cameron regards it as necessary to confront his party; if they appear incoherent it is simply because the party is not yet 'on message'. To bring the matter to a head, Cameron launched his 'Built to Last' document, proposing a debate within the party which will be followed by a ballot on the acceptance of its contents. The Times:

"David Cameron will today challenge his party to back his radical personal manifesto for the new-look Conservatives, in a move designed to convince voters that he has made a decisive break from the Thatcherite past.

In a move billed as his own �€œClause Four�€? moment, Mr Cameron will put his eight core aims to a vote of all 253,000 party members to test their acceptance of his vision of the �€œModern Compassionate Conservatives�€?."

Invoking the Clause Four comparison is a clear sign that the modernisers in the Tory party see this as a battle they must fight against the traditional right of the party. As Blair has done to the Labour party, so Cameron intends to break with the Conservative party's traditions.

But hold on one minute! Surely such a move would be deeply unpopular, not to mention un-Conservative. Surely, if they had known it would come to this, they would have put a stop to it. But did they know? Step forward once more, Mr. George Osborne, circa 2004:

"It's normally the kiss of death to be identified as a rising star, or someone to watch. Both David and I have to put up with this.

"But, you know, both of us are not in remotely the same situation as Brown and Blair in the 1980s, where they had to repudiate everything they believed in to get themselves elected."
...
"Where I would disagree with him (Portillo) and why I would be reluctant to give myself the moderniser label is I don't think you achieve those things by going to war with the existing membership of the Conservative Party.

"I don't think you achieve those things by having some great internal battle."

Call me a cynic (many people do!), but it does look rather like what Cameron and Osborne say when they want your vote is rather different to what they say once they've got it. Tories who voted for Cameron in the leadership election were rather surprised to discover afterwards that he opposed a return to grammar schools, for example.

All of this seems to have left the Tories in some disarray. Thatcherites like Norman Tebbit are distinctly unimpressed with Cameron's embrace of the New Labour agenda. Tebbit, Redwood and others on the Tory Right will doubtless be unamused to have been declared dead by Jackie Ashley in today's Guardian. Love them or (more likely, I think!) hate them, yesterday's Tories stood for something. They cannot be pleased at hearing left-wing commentators declare that:

"And here is the real case for a quiet cheer: parties may be congregating on the centre ground but the right in Britain has virtually collapsed. That truth has been hidden by the spectacular media love-in for David Cameron, and the (modest) revival in Tory fortunes now that the party is led by an affable young moderate. But I cannot be the only one beginning to wonder whether Cameron knows what he is doing - and what he has already, in part, achieved. He may be slightly more of an electoral threat to Labour. But he is no ideological threat of any kind, not now."

Meanwhile, Cameron presses ever onwards. 'Change', although nobody is quite sure what he's changing into from one day to the next. Is it the liberal Conservative today, or the man who thinks that compulsory national service is a good idea?

The simple fact is that nobody can tell. I have to say that, at this time, I can say with full confidence that when Menzies Campbell describes himself as a 'gut liberal' it is not simply a soundbite. He's not saying it because he thinks it will play well with 'Middle England' or some elusive breed of floating voter. He says it because it's what he believes, and it's what the rest of his party believes in too. As for Cameron and the Tories, it's hard to know what to believe.

Following in the footsteps of a number of blogs I read regularly, I've added a BlogCode box to my blog. This system is designed to show links to other blogs which are similar in theme and content.

A slight anomaly is that it seems to find my own blog as being related to itself! I think this is because it is accessible from two different URLs (though I only provide links to one, so I'm not sure how the other one got there). Anyhow, aside from that it seems to work properly.

I'll be adding a few more bells and whistles over the next few days, as well as some new sections to the site as a whole, and the sharper-eyed amongst you may have noticed some tweaks to the page layout and fonts.

Stay tuned!

Today saw the announcement of the new Shadow Cabinet. There are relatively few surprises and most of the media attention has been on the widely-tipped appointment of Chris Huhne to the Environment post.

Some have suggested that this is a meagre reward for a man who gained 43% of the final vote in the leadership election. After all, Environment is not generally considered to be one of the 'great offices of state', and to shadow the Environment minister is not, perhaps, one of the most glamorous jobs in politics. But I think that this view gets it entirely the wrong way around; it is a measure of how seriously the Liberal Democrats take the environment that they are willing to spend the considerable talents of Chris Huhne in this area.

The environment has been the great neglected area of politics in the last few years. Despite making considerable noises about international issues like the Kyoto treaty, the Labour government has done little to promote green measures at home. As Huhne himself pointed out, environmental taxation now accounts for less, as a percentage of total taxation, than it did in 1997 under the Conservatives. This must partly be because the overal level of taxation has risen since then, but it proves that, whatever Gordon Brown's priorities are, the environment is not one of them. Where Labour have succeeded in meeting emissions targets, it has been because of the natural decline in manufacturing rather than any adoption of greener alternatives.

Now the Tories are attempting to take advantage of this. They have recently been making the case that they are the party of the environment. I take a similarly dim view of this as I do of their liberal credentials. But they have thrown down the gauntlet, and the Liberal Democrats must pick it up. To do so will require clear policies, setting out achievable aims and the means of achieving them. After demonstrating his willingness to formulate and promote policies during his leadership campaign, there can be no better person to do this than Chris Huhne.

His background in economics will, I believe, be crucial. Solving environmental problems is largely a matter of changing behaviour; encouraging individuals and businesses to take up green technology and abandon old, over-polluting methods. This will require a system of incentives which offset the cost of 'going green' in the knowledge that we will reap the rewards in years to come. Huhne's economic experience should enable him to craft a credible, clear and honest set of policies designed to achieve these aims.

Armed with such policies and the political will to make the case for them, he can challenge Labour on the grounds that they have failed on the environment, and the Conservatives on the grounds that they lack the detailed policy to compare. The environment is an issue that requires a sensible, practical approach rather than warm words and vague homilies. Chris Huhne has an opportunity to create an environmental agenda that genuinely tackles the problems we face.

As I've previously posted, I voted for Ming in the leadership election, so I am pleased to see that he won. After observing his first few days, I feel vindicated in my choice.

It has been remarked by some that Ming had hoped for a "coronation", with no leadership election to fight. Indeed, he did at times appear uncomfortable during the campaign. It has been said that he dislikes losing and picks his battles carefully; in many ways, standing for the leadership was a huge gamble. His reputation, carefully cultivated over the years, as a universally respected figure of authority and gravitas, would have been tarnished by a defeat. So it is perhaps understandable that he felt under significant pressure. However, as Jonathan Calder remarked, "being party leader will be far more to Sir Menzies Campbell's taste than campaigning to be leader was".

From the moment his victory was announced, his confidence appeared to multiply. He has made numerous television appearances since the result was announced, culminating in his speech to the spring conference. Having (I think) seen most of them, I was struck by how assured and determined he appeared. It is clear that, now installed as leader, he is prepared to lead decisively.

I believe that the challenge has been good for the party and has allowed a broader discussion of the issues facing the party than would have been possible with a coronation. Ming now leads with a majority of the party having given him their support. He can, however, learn lessons from the campaign, particularly Chris Huhne's campaign. Huhne showed that it is possible to make bold commitments on issues like the environment and reducing taxes for the least well-off. The party will need to do more of this in the next few years in order to build up the case for voting Lib Dem.

The Tories' decision to fight on Lib Dem territory could prove to be a tremendous boon - the liberal agenda is guaranteed centre stage in media coverage as a result. Now, more than ever, there is a huge opportunity to communicate what being a Liberal Democrat is about and what Liberal Democrats would do with power at Westminster. It is an opportunity that may not come again, and it seems that Ming Campbell is determined to seize it.