Welcome Britblog Roundup fans to the first BBRU hosted here on my site.
 
To get into the right frame of mind in compiling the roundup I decided to look back to 20 February 2005.  On that momentous day Tim Worstall launched the first ever Britblog Roundup. Here it is.
 
One of the links was to a strident piece by Europhobia (now writing as former Eurosceptic turned critically pro-EU centrist Nosemonkey’s EUtopia) grumpily saying that UK blogging was officially a pointless waste of everyone’s time:
Apart from a determined few, [a]round 80% of the rest seem to be either single-issue obsessives, vindictive arseholes or nowhere near as educated and clever as they think they are. The remaining 20% is made up of people – like me – who really just want to be columnists on a national newspaper. Why the hell do our opinions matter? Precisely.
 
Well.
 
Yet here we are, thousands of new blogs and gazillions of postings later.
 
It depends what you mean by a waste of time. Is chatting to people in the pub and self-opinionatedly airing all sorts of mutually contradictory opinions a waste of time? Or writing a personal diary which you share with people you like?
 
At the ASI political bloggers gathering in London last week I put this point to Brian Micklethwait, who here combines in one post subtle thinking about the history/theory of Scottish banking with cat blogging. Brain argued that the great virtue of blogging was its spontaneous democratic character – individuals creating small communities emerging and dissolving around all sorts of esoteric subjects, in a way quite impossible before. He concluded (Micklethwait’s First Axiom of Blogging?) that human freedom, energy and creativity in action must never be despised or patronised.
 
Take this rather lyrical posting from View from the High Peak about the end of winter in a remoter part of England as experienced by a southern softie. Or Alan in Belfast about subtle handling of pain and consequence in Five Minutes of Heaven which viewers from elsewhere in the UK might miss. Or this simple but effective account of Jade Goody’s life and death, written by K T Dodge to explain the Jade phenomenon on a major US website.
 
Or the finely acronymed NoPoScoBloRo, (the Non-political Scottish Blog Round-up). Scots of course have the Scottish Sun: this distinguished member of the MSM has made an unpleasant fool of itself in respect of Jamie Ross, whose mightily testicular blog shares with us his fracas with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
 
Or Philobiblon urging us to read up on the herstory of Matilda of Canossa – a strong European woman leader 1000 years ago.
 
Or Jess McCabe grappling with the issues raised by a Hollywoodised Oliver Twist with a dark-skinned Nancy (Exam Question: No trace of a dark-skinned Nancy in the novel, so is this casting good, bad, irrelevant and if so why? My answer: They would not have given Oliver to a dark skinned actor, so a supposedly arch trangressive ‘racialising’ of Nancy smells patronising and trivial.)
 
Or Jonathan Calder asking why young people are turned away by classical music. (Note: not so in Poland – classical concerts have plenty of young children at them. It’s all about Values.)
 
Not to ignore Random Acts of Reality on a new book about the London Fire Service which helps explain why “they sometimes seem excessively destructive” (something to mull over as you have that last sleepy cigarette in bed).
 
How many of you have visited Belsize Square synagogue? Ed Fordham takes you there, prompting a creepy little comment from the courageous publicity-seeking Anonymous about the ‘holocaust’ in Gaza. (Message to Anonymous: I was at the ceremony at Auschwitz where Pope Benedict XVI prayed for forgiveness – these issues are momentously morally and politically complex, so don’t be a jerk.)
 
Imagine finding that lot in a single magazine left on the Tube (with a pigeon) and reading it to take your mind off your claustrophobic London breakfast. You’d be delighted, impressed and enthralled.
 
Blogging also allows sharp and/or amusing things to be published which in the long empty decades since scurrilous pamphleteering gave way to the oligopolistic MSM would never hope to reach a wider audience. For example, here is Something Completely Different coming our way: the NuLabour plot to end all NuLabour plots.
 
Reeling as you will be from that one, join Anna Raccoon as she sets sail into uncharted waters, her sails billowing with a fine opening sentence:
 
Just off the coast of Free Speech, across the Bay of Good Intentions, lie the Isles of Enforced Government Regulations…
 
But it is not all quite so light-hearted. What to make of the demonstrations around the G20 Summit in London?
 
James Graham invites people to email him at semajmaharg&at&gmail&dot&com. In the ensuing absence of emails, he asks whether the police caused a riot to prevent one.
 
Further out on the “Jobs, Justice, Climate” Left are Random Blowe and his elegant toes making the case for a militant workers bloc at the G20 protests.
 
Round on the Young Feminist Left we find Penny Red astride an apocalyptic hobby-horse, claiming that the London G20 protests have seen:
 
… the British people calling down the doom of the seasons and reminding the Men of Property that they rule only at our behest.
 
Ho hum. Where I live the people of Britain and Women of Property were trying to earn a living and dismissing the G20 militants as spoiled brats. Plus, when the real Left insurrectionists take over in the UK it will be clever people with slinky capitalist designer glasses who find themselves among the first to be murdered in Khmer Rouge-style re-education camps built on Hampstead Heath. You have been warned.
 
And let’s be serious for a moment. ‘Capitalism’ is nothing more or less than human creativity in dynamic action. As we have seen in every socialist/collectivist society ever invented, less capitalism = fewer people being creative = greater poverty and repression. So if the Left really want more Jobs and more clever new ways to help the Climate/Environment such as these (and some Justice to help keep things in order), why do they think that less human creativity will help?
Or am I missing something?
 
Way across on the other side of political philosophy and style, Devil’s Kitchen looks more deeply into the Put People First group who helped organise the G20 protests. The result? A bonanza for those looking for organisations which purport to be charities but in fact appear to be vehicles for sucking in huge dollops of taxpayers’ money for Quite Left and Very Far Left causes.
 
See also the helpful Devil’s Kitchen list of Swearbloggers, people who use lots of rude words in a loud voice to express their perceptive, nuanced views. For example, here is The Vented Spleen in full vent, pointing out that MPs have banned smoking in so many places but not, strangely enough, in Parliament. Does he detect a whiff of hypocrisy in this? Yes he does!
 
As BBRU regulars know, my former FCO colleague Craig Murray sells himself as another energetic hypocrisy spotter. His book Murder in Samarkand has just crept up to five stars on Amazon. Fear not Craig, I’ll review it for you and gently tug its hot-air balloon ratings back to earth.
 
As for the Summit itself, the British protocol and organisational work which went on behind the scenes to pull off this one will have been colossal. Well done FCO chaps and chapesses.
 
The actual Summit outcome? The matey Alpha-male self-congratulation of the throng of World Leaders themselves struck a deeply disturbing note for me, but I am hard to please. Plus watch those headline numbers evaporate in the cold light of reality.
 
However, the whole business is all about those world leaders borrowing heavily from the future, purportedly on our behalf. So the future needs to be a damn sight richer than we are now to generate all that wealth for us and itself, which will happen only with financial confidence and more capitalism today, which this Summit plus Michelle Obama’s capacious wardrobe and charm as displayed in Islington helped to propel. At least for a few minutes.
 
One huge success of the Summit is said to be its concern for poorer countries in Africa. Blood and Treasure brings us up to date with Spanish efforts in this noble direction (and see also this site’s excellent links to all sorts of China resources).
 
Meanwhile, and perhaps in a Summitish spirit of positive political reconciliation, Green activist slop-thrower Leila Dean has joined the Conservatives to run as a Parliamentary candidate in Hartlepool – so said world news on 1 April.
 
Blogging creates new communities – and energises existing ones. Take the campaign to make Wales a full independent member of the United Nations. Welsh Independence pools ideas on how that might be done and how an independent Wales might be run.
 
I have mixed views on the countries splitting into smaller units after seeing the calamities in the Balkans. Good fences make good neighbours? Chicken or Egg? Peace of Justice? That said, things like this awesome video fiasco do not help the cause of those arguing that England and Wales are better off staying together under the current government’s munificent and wise rule.
 
Nor is the wider Labour cause helped by the Prime Minister’s defence of hapless Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and her expenses claim, which Hatfield Girl ruthlessly fisks. Could a friendly cabby help out her husband discreetly, as long as the cash is not claimed back from the taxpayer?
 
Archbishop Crammer sums it up:
 
Men who need to indulge in pornography manifest the underlying problem of an addiction to ‘high intensity pleasure’ … They are invariably lonely, even if they do not know it. Quality time with the family is neglected; intimate honesty with one’s wife becomes infrequent … The Home Secretary ought to resign – in order to ‘spend more time with her family’.
 
And on the tedious subject of sex, back to the f word where Laura Woodhouse gives a revolting meretricious Channel 4 programme about Sex Education v Pornography a searching feminist analysis it richly does not deserve.
 
* * * * *
 
As a self-proclaimed Old-Fashioned but Creative Libertarian Realist, let me end BBRU 216 with this posting at Samizdata by Johnathan Pearce and the comments it produced.
 
It is a superb example of a group of clever people from round the planet gathering via the spontaneous Hayekian emerging orders of the Internet then engaging on a subject both highly technical and all-important for civilisation, yet also profoundly interesting from a moral and philosophical point of view: what exactly is banking, and how does/should it work? The human species becomes a tad richer as a result.
 
An uplifting (if we are allowed to use that adjective in the presence of Jacqui Smith’s husband and his adult movie tendencies) note on which to end G20 Summit week.
 
Next week’s BBRU is hosted by Philobiblon. This is a democratic community exercise, so please do send your suggestions to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com.