LabourList: where "exciting" = "fucking dull"

As many people have noticed, Derek Draper's thrilling answer to the right-wing blogs has been launched—LabourList.org. It looks, and operates, like shit; the articles are the usual fucking po-faced, poorly-researched wank that attacks the Tories rather than concentrating on what NuLabour have done right (a difficult task, admittedly) or what better ideas they may have; further, the roster of writers looks to be one of the most tedious line-ups since Take That reformed.

Obviously, your humble Devil will be adding it to his RSS reader—well, he will be when they've actually got their RSS feed working properly—in order to be able to mock them with monotonous regularity. Possibly.

Anyway, lots of people on the Right and the Left have been wishing the very best of luck to LabourList.org, which is nice. Personally, I hope that they fail miserably and, with the standard of writing so far displayed, I am fairly confident that this collection of wittering nitwits will be dead in the water in about six months—although I could be wrong.

It could be sooner.

Anyway, it's late and my burning boudoir beckons, but I thought that I would leave you with the biography of one of their A-List writers, Sarah Mulholland.

Sarah Mulholland is the National Chair of Labour Students. Sarah worked full time in the health service before graduating from Leeds University where she studied Politics and Parliamentary Studies. Sarah sits on the National Policy Forum, and is a member of the Women’s, Race and Equalities Committee. She is a proud member of Unison and Unite the Union, and is originally from the North East.

I ran this paragraph through my super DK Left-Speak Translator, and it came up with the following:

Sarah Mulholland is a terrific bore who has never held down a proper job in her entire life, and who can be safely dismissed as a total fucking moron who couldn't write elegantly or pertinently if her life depended on it.

I thought that this must be a mistake—after all, her wonderfully insightful article on university top-up fees, despite not answering her own question and adding precisely fuck-all of any use to the debate—is surely one of the must-read Lefty tracts of the century—so I ran it through the DK Left-Speak Translator again and again and it just kept spitting out the same response:

Sarah Mulholland is a terrific bore who has never held down a proper job in her entire life, and who can be safely dismissed as a total fucking moron who couldn't write elegantly or pertinently if her life depended on it.

Damn! I thought that I'd got it right: I'll just have to check the algorithms in the morning...

UPDATE: on a slightly less flippant note, Jon Worth has a number of valid concerns and it is this one that I rate as the most important.

If the contributors to Labour List are incapable of doing it themselves then the editor(s) should make sure articles are full of links to background information, links to other bloggers’ articles…

Linking to research or, at the very least, reputable media sources to back up any figures or assertions is incredibly important: this government have been adept at deception, lies and spin and the writers are going to have to work hard to overcome this and gain some kind of reputation for honesty (I'm not holding my breath).

So far the results are... Oh, for fuck's sake, the articles are just tedious, partisan bollocks; further, the contributors have obviously been told that the house writing style is one that...

"should make the reader feel like they are wading through a lake of the world's most turgid treacle: you must bore them into submission."

These fuckers make Polly look good...