It seems that Iain Dale has clearly forgotten Denis Healey’s First Law of Holes - when in one, stopping digging - and has taken a stab at a defending the Tory Party’s attempts to get young people to connect with their inner tosser.

What those of us over thirty have to remember is that this is not aimed at us. It’s aimed at what David Davis last year called the iPod Generatioon - Insecure, Pressured, Overtaxed and Debt-ridden. So before we have a knee jerk reaction [fnarr] against the words used in this innovative campaign let’s just remember who its target is.

Iain, my eldest son is fourteen years old - too young to be overtaxed and debt-ridden, certainly, but within what one might consider the ‘iPod Generation’ and with GCSEs on the near horizon, certain pressured and insecure at times.

In other words, a member of the generation that this is supposed to appeal to.

So, naturally, when I got home from work last night I took the liberty of showing him your vision of what it means to connect with people via the internet, to obtain his opinion as to whether it really was just the kind of thing that would engage his attention…

…

…around 10-15 minutes later, when he’d managed to catch his breath and stop laughing, he finally succeeded in rendering his considered opinion.

“It’s a pile of patronising shit!”

The problem with the site is not that its critics are too old to understand what really appeals to young people but that the site is crap.

A blinged-up, chaved-up Ooompa Loompa is not, in the eyes of young people, a means by which one can teach social responsibility but a suitable candidate for a happy slapping and your entire internet stategy a complete joke from start to finish going right the way to Gideon’s recent speech on ‘Politics and Media in the Internet Age’ in which he begins by stating:

I want to talk to you tonight about Nick and his world.

Nick is a 25 year-old teacher. He doesn’t really watch much TV, except for episodes of Scrubs he downloads using LimeWire and then watches on his PSP. He met his girlfriend, Susie, through MySpace. She lives in Canada but they talk every day using Skype. They both love music but neither of them listen to the radio. They download the latest tunes from BitTorrent and send each other funny videos they find on YouTube.

Look, let me illustrate the problem by annotating Gideon’s comments for you.

I want to talk to you tonight about Nick and his world.

Nick is a 25 year-old teacher. He doesn’t really watch much TV, except for episodes of Scrubs [he has no taste in comedy otherwise he’d be downloading The Simpsons, The Daily Show or Curb Your Enthusiasm] he downloads [illegally] using LimeWire [wrong system, he’d use BitTorrent for video] and then watches on his PSP [with its tiny little screen, as opposed to watching Scrubs on his 19″ LCD monitor, laptop with its 15″ screen or burning it to DVD to watch it on his 42″ Plasma Screen TV]. He met his girlfriend, Susie, through MySpace [He’s a socially inadequate loser]. She lives in Canada [far enough away not to have figured out yet just how a big a loser he is] but they talk every day using Skype. They both love music but neither of them listen to the radio [really, one might think they’d use internet radio]. They download the latest tunes from BitTorrent [illegally, again] and send each other [links to] funny videos they find on YouTube [so they’re into videos of cats falling into ponds and idiots falling out of shopping trolleys and trying to make their own home made versions of Jackass. Most of YouTube is no more than ‘You’ve Been Framed’ on steroids and you don’t even get paid £250 for videoing someone making a complete arse of themselves].

And my point is?

Simply that Gideon hasn’t got a fucking clue what he’s talking about and his researchers are shite as well.

Look, Iain. I’m a firm believer in giving people fair warning so I should point out that shortly after posting yesterday’s missive on your party’s invitation to find my inner tosser - no thanks, btw, it make the keyboard sticky - I toddled off (figuratively speaking) to my domain registrar and picked up the domain name ‘twat-it.co.uk’. You can guess what’s coming next…
In any case, if anyone’s the expert on the internet and tossers it’ll be your own Party Chairman. Don’t suppose he’s got a few copies of “Anally Yours”, “When The Boyz are Away the Girls will Play”, “An Ass Lovers Dream”, “100% Anal # 2″, “Giving Ass”, “100% Interracial #3″ or “Asian Divas #5″ going spare?

It all happened quietly and without fanfare but for those of us who care about such things history will recall that this was the week the the Independent bowed to the inevitable and dismantled their subscription firewall, having finally come to appreciate what us humble bloggers have been saying all along; that the value in being talked about freely far outweighed the (presumably) meagre sums of money that the Indy were eeeking out of their pay per view system.

The upside to this new arrangement should be immediately obvious - if you’ve a few minutes to spare, go and catch up with the musings of the excellent Matthew Norman and the ascerbic wit of Simon Carr immediately, you won’t regret it.

It also means, joy of joys, free access to possibily the best serious columnist currently writing in any of the upmarket dailies; Dominic Lawson.

Dominic Lawson? Praised by a lefty? Has the world gone mad?

Not as far as I’m concerned.

I like reading Lawson’s columns for the Indy, not because I necessarily agree with his opinions (often I don’t) but simply because I find his to be a writer who invariably puts up a good argument based on a strong, logically constucted narrative. I respect that and, reading his work, am always left with the impression that one could have a very good, if challenging, debate with Lawson. A real debate. An exchange of ideas and genuinely, and forthrightly, held opinons.

Its that which makes his columns so appealling, even if one disagrees with his views.

It certainly hasn’t hurt his standing in my eyes, either, to discover this in his current column:

I rather enjoyed the retort of the blogger known as Mr Eugenides, who commented: “Personally I find it pretty grotesque that a couple of dozen Cabinet ministers can spend £550bn of hard-working families’ money between them. I think we need a debate about that, not the bonuses paid to some private-sector bosses. Their remuneration, however exorbitant to the rest of us, is none of Peter Hain’s fucking business.”

Not only is Lawson aware of bloggers, always a good start, but he’s actually read and is quoting, in his own article, the estimable Mr Eugenides.

That - other columnists take note - is how to begin a new era of online openness on the right foot.

It seems that your humble correspondent has inadvertantly found themselves drawn into a dispute between Oliver Kamm and Neil Clark which his gone far enough to result in a minor bout of legal ‘fisticuffs’ courtesy of a one-time visitor to MoT (or possible its predecessor, TalkPolitics) who styles himself as George Courtenay.

For those seeking to understand the backstory to all this, these are the relevant posts.

Oliver Kamm - Neil Clark (21 November 2006)

Neil Clark - A Very Tawdry Affair and The mysterious Mr George Courtenay

As far as the genesis of this matter is concerned my understanding is that Mr Kamm and Mr Clark harbour rather divergent interpretations of certain events that took place during the course of the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s and have, on occasion, debated their difference of opinion in an open and rather robust manner.

As a great believer in free expression this is, I consider, an entirely healthy manner in which to address matters of dispute and take no issue with either party.

The actions of the pseudonymous “Mr Courtenay” are, however, a rather different matter entirely - as some may recall I had the rather dubious ‘pleasure’ of his company on a small number of occasions, having made critical remarks regarding articles written by Kamm, and found him to be an insufferably arrogant and ill-mannered troll.

Whether Courtenay has any direct association with Oliver Kamm I cannot say with any certainty, in part for the simple reason that I have never felt the need to query the matter with Kamm, but mainly because Oliver has never once struck me as the kind of man to rely on others to fight his battles for him and, as such, I am confident that were he to have anything to say on the subject of my own comments, he would make use of either the comments facility here, or his own blog, to post a response.

I should also note that despite the rather creative suggest made at Neil’s blog as to the possibile origins of the name ‘George Courtenay’, I do not for one second accept the suggestion (made in comments and not by Neil) that Mr Courtenay may be David T of Harry’s Place, or indeed any of the other regular contributors at HP. Again, it is simply not their ’style’.

If Kamm and Clark wish to debate their differences online, or even in a court of law, that is a matter for them, and them alone, and not not in which a third party has any real business in interfering, a principle that is seeming lost on Mr Courtenay, who appears to have taken it upon himself to contact the editor of a newspaper for which Mr Clark writes (he is a professional journalist) by email, as follows:

From: George Courtenay [mailto:georgeco@gawab.com] Sent: Monday, February 20, 2006 1:33 PM
To: [email omitted]
Cc: Neil Clark; Oliver Kamm

Subject: Neil Clark sources
I see you have published an opinion article by Neil Clark today. That’s all good to print a range of views but you may be interested that Oliver Kamm of the London Times has been investigating Mr. Clark’s use of sources.
http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/02/more_on_balkan_.html
http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/02/balkan_claims_r.html
Mr.Clark doesn’t say the same thing in his new article but as he’s lied to other editors I’m bringing it to your attention.

G. Courtenay

(Gawab.com, Courtenay’s email provider, is an Egyptian-based free webmail service and, therefore unlikely to be of relevance to efforts to ascertain his identity).

Neil also notes in the same post:

UPDATE: Within hours of Kamm’s allegations being posted on his blog yesterday, the editor of the Australian newspaper received another such email, linking to Kamm’s piece. I’ll leave readers to draw their own conclusions as to such a remarkable coincidence.

If there is a sensible conclusion to be drawn here it is only that Courtenay is, first and foremost, a troll and, second, that his general mental state must be considered potentially dubious. I doubt very much that Kamm appreciates his attentions any more than Clark, and all the more so if he’s even seen ‘Play Misty for Me’.

In all, there is a dynamic here that I do not like. Courtenay has, in his actions, exceeded the bounds of acceptable behaviour, not least the long-standing convention amongst ‘netheads’ that disputes that start online should stay online and not cross over into the real world.

Having crossed that line, I have no qualms if offering what little assistance I can to Neil should he wish to pursue further action against Courtenay, being in possession of both the times of Courtenay’s comments on this blog and, more importantly, the IP address from which the comments were posted, one of which is clearly his home address and another almost certainly his place of employment. If Neil would care to leave an e-mail address at which I can forward the information to him, I will be only too happy to do so and I would suggest that he then either raises the matter with the Police as a issue of harassment or makes an application to a relevant court for an order instructing the ISP’s in question to disclose Courtenay’s real identity, or at least the identity of his employer, as a necessary precursor to a civil action.