British Politics Dives Into the Web

A Party of Parties

While Conservatives and Labor nearly always take the top spots in an analog to the Republicans and Democrats and the Lib Dems take the "third party" title, Britain is a truly multiparty polity and there are many other groupings with all sorts of variations and differences. Check out this Web site for a list of links. Among them is the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, not to mention a party built around marijuana legalization . And as many people know, English is not the only language of the British Isles. Fewer people over the years speak the various Celtic languages ( Cornish and Manx have been declared dead, though each has a dedicated coterie of non-native speakers keeping it alive), but Wales's pro-independence party Plaid Cymru offers a Welsh homepage, and Northern Ireland's political parties offer Irish Gaelic pages as well. I have not been able to find any pages offering Scots Gaelic options except for the Scottish Socialist Party. As for pages in the "Scots" dialect of English, I'm not so sure there's a demand these days. What kind of MacMillan am I?

Fleet Street, the Election and You

The Washington Post's London correspondent, Glenn Frankel, shows up in a Daily Telegraph article which confirms my fear that some of you might never get this far into this scintillating column. Frankel -- at considerable length -- answers this fundamental question: Are Americans paying attention to this race? His answer, I'm sorry to say, is, "Not very much, I'm afraid."

He notes ongoing coverage from The Post, the New York Times, and Time and Newsweek magazines, but says for the most part that newspaper articles are few and far between. "As for television news coverage, forget it," Frankel says. "Most Americans have never heard of Michael Howard, and might mistake Charles Kennedy for a distant cousin of the late John F. Kennedy. Even Gordon Brown barely registers on the name-recognition scale."

Fortunately, there is plenty of coverage from London's big dailies and tabloids and news services:

* The BBC has an elections page that should be the envy of the rest of the press. It contains the latest news, as well as special features such as a newspaper roundup, poll tracker, voting guide, videos, a glossary of elections terms and a reader feedback section. It even includes a games section with the Swingometer, a journalist blog and exhaustive profiles of every seat in the nation.

The Guardian's elections page contains a great seat-by-seat map, as well as profiles of every MP, a cartoon gallery and plenty of other coverage.

The Times of London has my favorite activity, a game that allows you to rate your own political affiliation based on a set of questions. The best part is that the game, provocativly titled "Mandela or Mussolini," allows players to see where each questions lands them -- toward left-wing, right-wing, liberal or authoritarian. Sample question: "You are watching the television with your mother-in-law one evening. Flicking channels by accident, you see that the BBC is showing the latest X-rated movie 'Lots of People Copulating at Once' well before the watershed. Are you: outraged, embarrassed, intrigued, entertained or asleep?"

The Daily Mail's elections page promises live results as they come in, along with a Whitehall Blog by editor Bennett Brogan, and a breakdown of the individual party platforms or "manifestos." This is particularly welcome as the manifestos are easily available online, but make for extremely boring reading.

The Sun, one of Britain's most notorious tabloids, contains a surprising amount of elections news. For those who might find it all a bit dry, there are plenty of photographs of naked women. It's a non-sequitur, but some viewers probably will enjoy the chaser.

Far from languishing in thrall to the "MSM" (Main Stream Media), the run-up to Thursday's elections has been tracked in loving -- nay, obsessive detail by hundreds of bloggers. Oxford's Coleman may be a big cheerleader for the Internet's role in campaigns, but he does not exaggerate when he suggests that this is the year of the blog in U.K. politics. Rather than hold forth on their value or credentials, I'll provide comment-free links to three sites that provide perhaps more reading material than the Bodleian and British libraries combined.

Blogherald.com's roundup, with links to news organization blogs and more;

Keele University professor Richard Kimber's election blogs list; and

The U.K. Poli Blogs site.