Anthony Barnett (London, OK): A new website, PoliticsHome will be launched on Monday, the brainchild of Stephan Shakespeare and others it aims to up the game of the web with fast, aggregating coverage of politics. Stephan may not remember talking to me in the hubub of Carol Stone's Xmas party, but he told me it would be the "Bloomberg of politics" covering political power as seriously as Bloomberg did financial clout. Leading the service will be its PoliticsHome indicator or Phi100, which measures the daily responses of a balanced spread of political "insiders", from the front-benches of the Commons to charities and think-tanks, including yours truly. Our views are gathered, I assume anonymously (if that is ever possible on the web) in a brief, morning on-line survey, which I have found very interesting to do. It is a brilliant because an intelligently uncomfortable use of the internet. Here is one result that might interest readers of OK,
Political insiders do not need the media or the voters to tell them that our political system is in trouble and requires radical, even revolutionary, reform. Well over half of expert and informed opinion agree that it's broke and needs fixing.
Asked to consider the state of the British political system, less than five per cent considered that it does not needs any significant reform. Just under a third- 32%- thought it would benefit from some constitutional tweaks, but nothing more.
The biggest group of respondents- fifty per cent- agreed with the statement that 'we need to make some fundamental, far-reaching reforms.' That's not to say, of course, that they would all necessarily agree on what those reforms should be. Twelve per cent of the panel agreed that 'we need something like a revolution in our conception of how British democracy should work.'
For me the most interesting of the first results is the overwhelming indication that the Tories have "captured the national mood", or rather, because they score so much lower, that Labour has simply lost it.
PS: This reinforces my sense of fin de regime that I think applies across the board. I did what I thought was a clever diagnostic post on this, suggesting Heathrow's T5 was a symbol of New Labour's project ridden form of government. Only to realise that calling it UK5 was so clever no one knew what it meant and it went unread! Now its re-named Terminal UK.
