Comment: twenty years on

By Richard North - April 22, 2024

Unlike a jail sentence, there is no time off for good behaviour when publishing a blog. The sentence is indeterminate, although self-determined. One stops when one can no longer continue or when there is no longer any value in so doing, and the will to continue evaporates.

I can’t say that any of those conditions apply at the moment, but today is a special day, the 20th anniversary of the day I started the EU Referendum blog, following Tony Blair’s promise to hold a referendum on any EU constitution that was agreed.

Running jointly with Helen Szamuely, now sadly deceased, we both felt that the reporting on EU matters in the national media was so poor that a new blog was needed as a corrective, filling in the gaps.

Blogging was not totally new at that time but, having started off in the United States, it was slow to take off over here. And, although both of us were active in politics at the time, it still took us over a year before we reached a regular readership of over 100 a day.

The persistence paid off and, at its peak, the blog was recording over 100,000 hits a day for a short period while we covered Qana in Lebanon – perversely mainly speaking to an American audience.

In those early days, there was a real sense of excitement and camaraderie in blogging, and we would share stories with each other, seeking to increase our reach in competition with what we were dismissively calling the mainstream media (MSM).

The MSM hated blogging and did its best to undermine what effectively became a movement, as the multiple, allied bloggers cross-linked with each other to create a mutually supporting entity known as the “blogosphere”.

The Telegraph in particular, took a very proactive line, launching its own blog platform, seducing independent bloggers to join it on the promise of greater exposure through the newspaper – which never materialised – and by using staff writers to create their own blogs in competition.

Serious independent bloggers – those covering politics and allied subjects – were studiously ignored by most of the established media, while the likes of the BBC and others sought to trivialise the genre by featuring blogs carrying beauty tips for girlies, cooking and other lightweight activities.

There was very little money in it for ordinary bloggers, and no ready means (as with Substack) for monetising the work, and gradually – against the determination of the establishment media to shut us up – many bloggers dropped out.

But what I think did for many of them was Twitter – originally known as “microblogging” which made the process of posting less laborious and promised bigger audiences and greater reach.

With EU Referendum, though, we stuck to our original intent. But, as the promises of a referendum waxed and waned, there were times when the prospect looked impossibly remote. Perforce, we started to cover a wider range of issues.

Given that British troops were fighting a vicious counter-insurgency in Iraq, in June 2006, I broke new ground, launching a campaign against the use in Iraq of the dangerously vulnerable “Snatch” Land Rovers, which had been introduced by the MoD as a cut-price means of providing protected mobility,

This combined the reach of multiple blogs, with the MSM – we got a front-page story in the Sunday Times – and the Booker column, together with direct political activism. The campaign was successful. Within two months, replacement vehicles had been procured and were on their way to Iraq.

The interest in military affairs led to a spin-off blog, the Defence of the Realm which I kept running into the Afghan campaign, covering many other military issues as well.

The theme was not entirely detached from our original aim, as the spectre of a European Army, under the control of the EU was by then a very real issue but the strain of running two blogs became too great and I reverted to EU Referendum in 2009, with only sporadic posts on DoR after that.

By then, although I hadn’t realised it, I was very ill with a serious heart condition. I’d actually started experiencing symptoms in 2003 while working in the European Parliament, but I put it down to tiredness and stress. But, by end of 2011, I took a few days off blogging for a brief interlude while I had open heart surgery.

This, apart from the one time when I had been sent to prison for refusing to pay the police precept on my Council Tax, was my very first break in what had become a 24/7 regime which, until very recently, was to continue without interruption.

The following year brought The Harrogate Agenda and a reform programme for a UK liberated from the EU, but that was soon to be subsumed into Flexcit which I started working on when what was to become known as Brexit began to look like a reality.

The 2015 election and the success of Cameron turned that into a certainty, and the blog became a high-intensity effort to do what it was first intended to do – fight a referendum campaign, working alongside Booker and his column, and with other bloggers in what became the Leave Alliance.

There was much to do after the referendum, so the blog didn’t immediately disappear. But in the years after the turn of the Century, it became apparent that the EU Referendum title was no longer appropriate for what had become a more general political blog.

By 2021, therefore, we had fully transitioned to Turbulent Times with the spadework done by Pete to give us a completely independent platform. We lost some readers in the transition and, with a different statistics package, comparisons with earlier hit rates are meaningless.

With the current package telling me that we are peaking at about 5,000 hits a day, I feel we are marking time as we enter a new period of uncertainty, and a time when many people seem to be withdrawing altogether from the political process.

Thus, after 20 years of near-uninterrupted blogging, it seems a good time to review the fate of the blog. I don’t think we’ll ever repeat the glory days and with the death of Booker – who is still much-missed – I no longer have my back-door access into what I now call the legacy media.

However, with the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel – and the potential for escalation – the uncontrolled and vastly excessive immigration into this country, which is threatening the very fabric of our nation, and the accelerating disintegration of the institutions of the state, there is too much happening to walk away just yet.

When we were campaigning for Brexit, we always knew that leaving the EU would be a process, not an event, and I hazarded the view that the process would take at least 20 years.

The process so far has been a success, in that it has exposed the derelict nature of our own government and the shabby performance of its institutions, while robbing it of the excuse of EU membership. This has highlighted the extent of the problem we now face, in reconstituting the semblance of a democracy – a state which, in the UK, now exists only in theory.

Having been a small contributor to the process that brought this about, I suppose the very least I can do is stay with it for a few more years – or for long as my health and spousal tolerance allows, and for as long as I have the support of my readers and ever-generous donors.

Like it or lump it, I will continue to inform and annoy, and occasionally to entertain, blissfully ignored by the legacy media, in the fond hope that, even if we cannot make a difference, then at least we can for a while more accurately chart our decline.

With that, normal service will be resumed tomorrow, assuming that anything on this blog has any relation with normality.