The 'culture of cynicism and despair' will disappear when we get pols and civil servants who are professional, insightful and forward thinking.
Shooting the messenger is hardly an answer here.
However, I don't see it happening... once trolls are bedded in, they are really hard to get rid of. Besides, the Guardian is purposefully choosing articles with a right wing stance to:
a) Generate more flame wars (more hits) b) Please the American audience (many of whom are "libruls" but on things like foreign policy that puts them on the right-wing for the UK.
I guess my hope is that once Labour loses the next election, the "opposition effect" plus the poisoned state of CiF should help some decent lefty blogs to emerge.
there really is no non-Marxist based liberal socialism in this country. nobody understands co-operatives, nobody remembers methodist leftism. Just crappy watered down leninism for the believahs. keep to the Fen Causeway
dKos and the rest are industrial cash machines. I can imagine a lefty blog collecting cash to buy media time - rather like the atheist bus campaign - but that's a very indirect way of getting your point across.
Direct campaigning on specific issues is largely useless. You can have your camping holiday and your fifteen minutes of media attention, but the effect on national policy will be zero. Local issues may be more successful, but the anti-populist mindset is so entrenched in government that the faintest whiff of attempting to define policy will have the police opening a terrorist file on you.
What's missing in the UK is direct political accountability. It would certainly be possible to increase that, but none of the ways I can think of are likely to be popular with their targets, and some of them are likely to be very unpopular indeed - even though really all we're talking about here is basic investigative journalism.
