A Mekon’s response
- Matthew Taylor
I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted – my old friend, John Prescott, has launched an attack on me on his website which has been picked up in several other places.
JP describes me as a ‘pointy head’, a policy wonk’ and ‘the type of person I would describe as a Mekon’. I am flattered by the suggestion that I am an intellectual; I have never really got over someone introducing me as ‘Matthew Taylor – he runs a think tank, but is more tank than think’.
Unfortunately, JP, in attacking me, is misleading his readers. He says that I said that Labour should ‘host the white flag’ and ‘give up’. In fact, what I advocated in my blog was what I saw as Labour’s best chance of staying electorally competitive – to focus on the economic crisis and try to put party politics on the back burner until there is some good news.
Maybe John’s definition of a Mekon is someone who tries to understand an argument before attacking it. On this basis many more of us would qualify as being ‘pointy headed intellectuals’.
All of which reminds me of the old Soviet joke:
A: One who can read, one who can write and one to keep an eye on the two dangerous intellectuals!
The self importance of the printed word
There is a rare opinion column by me in today’s Independent. The comment editor was interested in my blog last Thursday and asked me to do a version for the newspaper. But I find reading the piece in print makes me feel uncomfortable, and it’s not just that the sub-editing has taken away some of the balance of the piece. As regular readers of this blog know, I only write about party politics occasionally, and while not disguising my own progressive leanings, I try to be pretty even handed in my praise and criticism. I guess the problem today is that to have a prominent piece in a national newspaper seems like I am shouting ‘look at me I’ve got something important to say’. Just transposing words from on-line to print makes them seem more self-important.
There are plenty of criticisms of the blogosphere. As I often remark at RSA events, if people in the Great Room responded to ideas they oppose in the shrill abusive tone of many blog comments I would slap them down. Blogging still tends towards polarisation, and few of the many attempts to create constructive deliberative spaces on the net have so far succeeded. But, as I realised this morning, there is also an informality, discursiveness – even modesty – to communication on the net which gets lost in the black and white of print.
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