When blogging meets heckling

WEBLOG WATCH
The Magazine's review of blogs
By Alan Connor

Walter Wolfgang: Talk of the launderette

You might think that a left-wing blogger would be the strongest defender of Walter Wolfgang, the Labour Conference heckler.

You'd be wrong.

Because Waltergate has not only been prize fodder for correspondents covering a previously uninspiring Conference, it's also an issue that gets right into the fissures within the Labour Party, rubbing salt where it goes.

So no sooner had Wolfgang published his own response than there was a post at the British Left's water cooler, Harry's Place, which kicked off by describing his "musings" as "all utterly abhorrent".

Abuzz

Not that you need a lifelong relationship with the Labour Party to get animated by the incident. As Innocent Abroad put it at Political Betting:

"the ladies who work in my local launderette were talking of nothing else this morning - the only other political event that they've noticed in the 15 years I've been using the place was the attack on the Twin Towers! What's that about pebbles and avalanches?"

And given the general tone of responses, and the e-mails to the BBC's Have Your Say, it's fair to assume many of the launderette ladies were sympathetic to Wolfgang.

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It makes sense. You'd expect that Labour supporters would take his side because, well, Wolfgang was a Labour supporter himself; that Conservatives would take his side as an opportunity to denounce Tony Blair as authoritarian, and that Lib Dems would take his side because being ejected by heavies isn't very nice.

The blogs have, unsurprisingly, been abuzz, the general response ranging from not-so-mild disgust to a call to arms.

But there are exceptions.

For starters, we have this charge, from XDA:

"Wolfgang is a geriatric peacenik who probably spent his youth reviling Churchill (Winston not Ward) and idolizing Stalin, and now spends his time abominating the US and, no doubt, Israel"

Not wholly surprising from a bellicose US blog, perhaps. But while the language has been more tempered on this side of the Atlantic, not all Labour bloggers have been apologetic like Richard Sanderson.

BLOGGERS ARE ANGRY ABOUT WOLFGANG Bullies And Jackanapes Ashamed To Be British Don't Mention The War New Labour - New Freedoms They Just Don't Get It, Do They? Freedom Of Speech - New Labour Style Has It Really Come To This? Hell In A Handbasket Beth Yw Terfysgaeth Nawr? Go Wolfie!

Councillor Gareth Davies, for example, was quickly posting to say that "[h]eckling from the visitor's gallery is not taking part in a debate"; in a similar vein, we have Neil Harding from Bloggers 4 Labour defending freedom of speech, with the occasional exception:

"I'm sure most of us would agree that something had to be done about Militant in the 1980s".

Ah, the 1980s! For the benefit of younger Magazine readers who only know that decade from nostalgia shows about Bananarama and sweeties, the Militant Tendency was a Trotskyist faction within the Labour Party - depending on your view, they were either entryist seditionaries or the saviours of socialism.

And as even the youngest readers know, much has changed within the party in the time between then and Bananarama's most recent comeback. But it would be a mistake to think that the arguments over, say, Clause IV have gone away.

Because in the Harry's Place post mentioned above, the conversation starts out discussing Walter Wolfgang, but soon moves on to secondary union action, electability-versus-principles, authoritarianism and most of the rest of the old issues. (A neat echo, in a week where senior 1980s Tories told Andrew Marr that their party was still in "the shadow of Thatcher".)

Rift

One thing has changed since the 1980s, though. Then, the left was lampooned for arguing over divisions so fine that the general public would find the various views indistinguishable. Nowadays, the most important cleavage is stark and seemingly irrevocable: it's between those who defend George Bush and Tony Blair's invasion of Iraq and those who oppose the whole War On Terror.

Pro-Labour, pro-Bush blogger Oliver Kamm wrote the apology he thought that Tony Blair should have made:

"His ejection from the Labour Conference yesterday was a belated recognition of the party's failure to eject him from membership at any time in the previous five decades. For that failure, I apologise once more."

And there's the rift. On the one side, there are those who are flabbergasted to see their former comrades siding with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, Cheney and Perle. On the other, there are those who would define the left as anti-fascist and would identify the most dangerous strain of fascism as theocratic and extremist Islamism.

It's the left's version of "everything changed after 9/11".

And so, as the comments move into the hundreds, so does the temperature. If you're interested in conflict like the one between Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway [mp3], this post covers most of the ground.

There's some new uncomradely language to get your head around, like the abusive term "Stoppers". And if you're familiar with Godwin's Law -

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."

- you'll probably know what to expect from a discussion among anti-fascists about a man who fled Hitler's Germany, and was thrown out of a party meeting for dissent. But it's still a debate that's very much of our time, and occasionally more nuanced than the usual pro-war/anti-war online mudslinging.

So has the war left the left unable to agree on a single thing?

Well, no. The boundaries might be redrawn, all bets may be off and the oddest fellows might have found themselves in bed together, but it's still considered bad form to manhandle a geezer offering mild rebuke.

David Michael Brown, the blogger who kicked this off, stands his corner, barely giving an inch - but he does cede a point to one of his critics when he says:

"I do not have an immense amount of time for Jack Straw. But it seems he does mount the soapbox and hold a street meeting in his constituency at weekends. Unlike all too many of today's politicians he could probably have dealt ably with a modest critical heckle."

Maybe Walter should get himself to Blackburn town centre one Saturday, and we'll find out what the riposte would have been.

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