We have been round this particular track

Part of this evening was spent at the Adam Smith Institute's annual blogger bash, which I have not attended for a couple of years. There have been a few changes in the meantime. Some people I had seen there have given up blogging, others decided not to show up. Possibly they felt that this was a case of déjà vu and, even, déjà entendu. Instead, there seemed to be a lot of people who do not blog but came along because they are quite interested in what is going on.

Then there were people from the Adam Smith Institute and the IEA so only about three independent bloggers took part in the open discussion, one of them being the American candidate for the US Senate in the State of Maine, Andrew Dodge who blogs on Dodgeblogium.

The panel consisted of Tim Montgomerie, Editor of Conservative Home, Douglas Carswell, MP and blogger and Harry Cole, formerly Tory Bear, now News Editor under Guido Fawkes. Astute readers will perceive a certain commonality there and that is a great part of the problem.

The discussion went round and round: lots of self- and mutual congratulations, assurances that politics has been changed by the blogosphere for the better (to be fair to Mr Carswell, he did admit that he hoped it would be changed), but, somehow and for some reason, no real popular movement or significant changes can be discerned. People in politics are still the same, maybe even a little worse; the big issues are still pushed out of the way; and there is no sign of anything even remotely resembling a tea-party movement. One can produce all sorts of reasons for the last of those but one of them would be that perhaps the blogosphere should stop concentrating on the Conservative Party.

I talked afterwards to The Englishman who had left his Castle to come to London and he mentioned his particular interest in the whole global warming scam, which is the one issue that has been righted by a number of bloggers that include the Boss on EURef. Yet not one of those highly important and influential bloggers was present, let alone on the panel. And no, since you ask, there was no suggestion that the European Union was an important enough subject to blog about.

One can never quite predict the future but my suspicion is that they I might forget about attending this bash next year.