Blog Awards

We’re delighted to be shortlisted for the Best UK Blog 2017 in the Politics section. We’re down to the final six. The other five nominations are:

Conservative Home (staff of seven): “ConservativeHome is edited by Paul Goodman, and the team is: Mark Wallace (Executive Editor), Peter Hoskin, Harry Phibbs (Local Government editor), Andrew Gimson and Peter Franklin. Tim Montgomeriecontinues to contribute to the site.”

Labour List – is the mirror of Conservative Home  – sponsored by Unite and Unison.

Guido Fawkes’ – a kind of hate-blog on steroids run by ‘libertarian’ Paul De Laire Staines. His site goes under the strap line: “tittle tattle, gossip and rumours about Westminster’s Mother of Parliaments. Written from the perspective of the only man to enter parliament with honest intentions”. Posturing as a sort of rebel-trouble-maker his background is from the far-right, describing his politics as “Thatcher on drugs”. He relates that he went on “to work in the various right-wing pressure groups and think tanks that proliferated in the late eighties”. Wikipedia tells us:

“Staines has been active in the Libertarian Alliance. He was pictured at the 1987 Libertarian Alliance conference with a T-shirt supporting UNITA, produced by his Popular Propaganda enterprise (while at college), which produced posters and T-shirts. Staines worked as “foreign policy analyst” for the Committee for a Free Britain, a right-wing Conservative pressure group, alongside David Hart. Staines acted as editor of British Briefing, a long-standing publication by the group that was a “monthly intelligence analysis of the activities of the extreme left” that sought to “smear Labour MPs and left-leaning lawyers and writers”.

Wings over Scotland
&
Political Scrapbook “Known for our tabloid, muckraking style”, its pretty good knockabout stuff.

You can see the full shortlist at Vuelio here.

Given the financial backing or party political support behind these other sites we’re astonished to be nominated. But thanks to all our readers of reading sharing and contributing.

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Comments (2)

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  1. Bert Logan says:

    Nice to see two Scottish politics blogs doing it. Overrepresented?

    No. Simply broader thinking going on in Scotland.

  2. Del says:

    Interesting that Bella can’t do more than mention Wing’s presence in the top 5. A shame two blogs, dedicated in their different ways to independence, are reduced to this scrappiness.

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