I did not make the Orwell Prize ‘longlist’.

Sigh. You’re right. I am twisted and bitter about it.

A good number of the blog entries submitted by the Longlist winners have little if anything to do with politics, and in certain cases little if anything to do with good writing. Where among the longlisted is sustained, terse, beautifully turned work showing us the wry, biting yet profound individualistic insight which Orwell epitomised?

Plus I wonder if it is quite in the informal start-from-nothing amateur/outsider spirit of blogging to give Orwell longlist acclaim to two prominent BBC journalists and two more senior journalists from the Times and Guardian. Would, horror, the grand Orwell Trust people – perhaps without realising it – have instincts towards rewarding members of the existing media establishment?

Maybe so. And why not? It’s their prize. Plus George Orwell was an Etonian.

Ho hum. Try again next year?

Of those listed it would be a disgrace to the Blogging Ideal if a mainstream journalist won, climbing to glory from an already high readership base.

So I vote for Heresy Corner. See this neatly done slicing of the current British Government’s policy on free speech:

Geert Wilders has been visiting America. He has given a major speech at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York and appeared on Fox News. He had no trouble passing through immigration, it would seem, though since the United States is not part of the EU he has no automatic right of entry.

Nor have there been any reports of rioting or the civil unrest whose spectre our own Home Office invoked as justification for forbidding him entry to Britain. Ten thousand angry Muslims did not descend on the venue; indeed, a relatively small percentage of New York’s population was even aware of his presence.

Puzzling, that. It cannot simply be that Lord Ahmed was otherwise engaged…

Lots more where that came from.