About

Welcome to my blog. I am Harriet Anderson, a party political activist in northern England and Postgraduate student at the Sheffield University school of Journalism. I have been active in politics since I was 14, and have worked in Westminster, in Washington and most recently for the Labour party. In between I have occasionally had a life, but then a by-election has always come and taken it from me.

As this is a crossover between my polemical scrawl and some disciplined commentary, I might as well be open about the underlying assumptions of this blog. For a start, I am sure that politics is the answer. It is the only thing that has intentionally changed the world for the better, because it is in everything people do to relate to each other.

But sometimes we forget what it is and how it affects us. It is not what those of us who work in politics do, or what people do only when they are elected to do it. It is everything people do which interacts with their neighbours, wherever they are. It is involved in nearly all the decisions people make, large and small, from what they eat for breakfast and where they buy it to who they mix with, who they decide to marry and what they decide to do with their lives.

It’s all politics because it has an impact on other people. It may not all be party politics, but the chances are that at some point a party politician has made a decision that affects it, and they will have been informed in that decision by their general view of how people should relate to each other and what power base should define it. This probably isn’t the temperate language I should be using to describe political activity, perhaps it will put some people off, but we are doing people a disservice if we present politics as an area of life which some people do and others don’t.

So this blog will try to emulate some of the best blog writing out there. There are some excellent blogs in politics and by journalists, and I will be linking to those that I think best. Most of my political views will be the same as those of other bloggers, partly because I have a strong belief in party politics and have grown up in the Labour party. But this one has a slant of looking at whether politicians and journalists are, mainly with the best of intentions, boxing themselves off from the people they both need to engage with. I will be commenting on both these areas of public life, but I will also be thinking about how we both need to communicate better to bring people inside the tent. And just so that I am sure it’s really unscientific polemic, I’ll be spending at least one day a week knocking on doors to see what people really think!

PRESIDENT BARTLET: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens can change the world. Do you know why?”

WILL BAILEY: “It’s the only thing that ever has?”

PRESIDENT BARTLET: “Go figure”.