James Crabtree
Yes, its yet another poll about twitter
In the new edition of Prospect—in shops tomorrow, but on subscribers’ doormats today—we have a new poll as part of a fun feature about the politics of Twitter. The claim is that Twitter is an oddly liberal tool: a mouthpiece for what we have (not entirely originally, I must admit) dubbed the “twittering classes.” The killer bit of the poll is where Twitterers lie on our scale of liberal/authoritarian groups—way out to the extreme, see the graphic below. It also has some lighthearted stuff about Twittering figures from history too—more on that later tomorrow. You can find it on page 37 of the print edition, inside Evgeny’s wonderful piece on dictators and the web.
We’ll put all this up on the web soon, along with responses to Evgeny’s thesis from Clay Shirky and others. But given the Guardian and Telegraph did stories on our Twitter poll today I thought I’d just put up the text of press release for people to see. Obviously we’d be grateful if you could tweet this, mentioning @prospect_uk when you do so!
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PROSPECT PRESS RELEASE: NEW TWITTER POLL
Often seen as little more than a harmless waste of time, the much-hyped online social network site Twitter is increasingly being used as a tool by liberal and left-wing political campaigners. Twitter users are among the most liberal groups in Britain, a new national poll of 2000+ people by Prospect magazine and pollsters YouGov reveals.
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Leo Hornak
Pinned down: the politics of social taboo
Ever considered sticking a pin into a child’s hand? How about kicking a dog in the head, hard? What about undergoing plastic surgery to add a two inch tail to the end of your spine?
Surprising as it may seem, your answers to these questions may throw some light on your political loyalties and affiliations. Recent research from the US has produced surprising data about differing attitudes towards social taboos across the political spectrum. The authors include Jonathan Haidt, whose thoughts on the moral and political choices facing Barack Obama are featured in this month’s edition of Prospect in an essay that is free to read online.
According to the study (pdf), published this Spring in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, conservatives are likely to feel more strongly about social taboos revolving around purity, authority and ingroup loyalty, while liberals feel a stronger sense of obligation around issues of harm to animals and other people. Libertarians, those rootless individualists, scored lower in every moral category. Read more »
James Crabtree
Red Toryism: missing the point?
As avid Prospect followers will be aware, this month’s cover story by Phillip Blond, heralding a the birth of the “Red Tory moment,” has sparked heated debate in many quarters. For instance, in the Guardian this morning, Madeleine Bunting has the best part of a page given to discussing Phillip Blond’s ideas. Bunting doesn’t mention Prospect, which is fair enough. Perhaps more surprisingly, though, she doesn’t even manage to find the space to mention Blond’s employers, the think tank Demos. Indeed, she has to go into quite a contortion not to mention them: talking about Blond’s previous job (but not his current one) and quoting a speech from a (Demos) event without mentioning that either. Far be it for us to speculate, but the reason seems rather too likely to be lingering bad feeling over Bunting’s abortive couple of weeks as the head of the very same think tank a few years back. She arrived at Demos, and—so the rumours have it—quickly engendered a staff revolt, had a set to with the trustees, and promptly walked out herself. The official version—still on the Demos website—is a little more generous towards Bunting than she seemingly wants to be to her former employers.
Such minor tiffs aside, Prospect this month will continue its gavel-to-gavel coverage of the debate about Blond’s intriguing ideas with a week-long symposium of response articles: a different response from leading thinkers every day this week, to which Blond himself will respond to—and readers should weigh in likewise. Today’s article is from academic and Tory watcher Kieron O’Hara, author of After Blair: David Cameron and the Conservative Tradition. O’Hara takes Blond to task for sending Adam Smith to the “naughty step, along with Mill and Gladstone,” and warns of the dangers of ignoring the merits of liberalism. “We want the new communities to turn against banks and faceless business, not gays or those from ethnic minorities,” O’Hara writes says. “Will this vision worry women who feel liberalism has helped advance their independence?” Let us know what you think. Later this week, former Conservative advisor Rupert Darwall, David Green, director of Civitas, and Catherine Fieschi from the British Council will all elbow in on the debate too.
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