PoliticsHome is a reasonably good site for finding the best of the mainstream media news and staring deep into the dark abyss that is Westminster Politics. Admittedly, I don’t use the site very often, thanks to its numerous usability issues1, but I have always appreciated its existence as an example of how non-partisan, politically independent projects can be made into monsters on the internet, as long as everyone pulls together as a team.

Yesterday, PoliticsHome announced that they had ‘secured funding’ from Tory Deputy Chairman Lord Ashcroft, and as a consequence Andrew Rawnsley, the Editor-In-Chief of the site, announced that he would be resigning, having lost confidence in the political neutrality of the site.

Later on in the day, Liberal Conspiracy announced resignations en masse from the site’s daily survey and opinion tracker2. And Tom Harris also withdrew from the panel shortly after that.

Iain Dale has attacked the resignations as ‘the worst kind of gesture politics’, but really there is more to it than that. One wonders how Tim Montgomerie would have reacted, for instance, if PoliticsHome had been bought by Unite – I’m not certain such a change of ownership would have been met with a simple shrug. It seems the biggest issue (for the more serious people) isn’t the money from Lord Ashcroft but the fact that Andrew Rawnsley and Martin Bright have withdrawn their support from the project.

The problem is, what they’re doing will create a self-fulfilling prophecy. The primary consequence of leftist commentators resigning from the panel on the basis that they’re worried the site might swing rightwards, is that the site will swing rightwards, since fewer people from the left are involved.

Look out in coming months, then, for people on Liberal Conspiracy’s list using this now-inevitable swing as validation for the decision to resign in the first place.

You know what? I see this as a real shame, and though I do somewhat understand the position that Andrew Rawnsley and Sunny Hundal and the others are taking, I think it ought to have been worth giving the site at least a chance under the new owners. This feels like a knee-jerk reaction, and an unnecessary one when there isn’t (so far) any evidence that Lord Ashcroft’s money will have an influence on the editorial line. After all, the site has, up until now, been owned by Stephan Shakespeare, who’s a prominent Conservative and also provides the financial backing for the ConservativeHome blog. His ownership hasn’t so far noticeably impacted the impartiality of PoliticsHome, and I don’t see why that would change with Lord Ashcroft involved.

One thing is for certain, though: without the participation of the left, PoliticsHome cannot claim to run a politically neutral opinion tracker; and because there will be bias in the tracker, fewer people will trust the political neutrality of the site’s editorial line3. Unless somebody very good can come in to replace Andrew Rawnsley, there’s little chance of PoliticsHome continuing in its current form as a useful aggregator of mainstream media opinion.

The saddest thing to my mind, though, is that this sets a bad precedent for other non-partisan projects. When PoliticsHome began there was reason to believe it could influence more sites to break away from party politics. Now that it’s ending so acrimoniously, it’s easy to imagine this becoming an oft-cited example of how such projects inevitably end in tears. It’s a shame Lord Ashcroft felt he had to buy such a large stake in the project, and it’s also a shame that so many on the left have been unable to rise above their dislike of him and give the site itself a chance to prove itself.

So let’s chalk another one up to the corrupting influence of partisan politics; the only people who lose out, after all, are those who actually wanted to use the site. You know, the ‘readers’.

  1. First off, yes, the site is ugly as sin and I’m a snob. More annoyingly, though, they don’t put enough of their content in RSS feeds. I want a daily update with links to the ten articles in their PHI10 roundup, at least. [↩]
  2. The comments thread on that post is unusually good for Liberal Conspiracy, too. Thank you to Sunder Katwala for getting what I was on about! [↩]
  3. Hopi Sen made the very good point that nobody cares about the tracker anyway, but it’s all about a matter of confidence and trust in the site as a whole. Their news agregator will suffer as a result of the tracker being compromised. [↩]