Facebook and Twitter empower all groups—not just the pro-Western groups that we like. To put it in a more formal framework: not all social capital created by the Internet is bound to produce "social goods"; "social bads" are inevitable as well. The political scientist Robert Putnam, who was instrumental in promoting the notion of "social capital" in popular discourse, was not blind to such possibilities. In "Bowling Alone," his most famous book, he explicitly cautioned against the "kumbaya interpretation of social capital," stating that "networks…are generally good for those inside the network, but the external effects of social capital are by no means always positive."

"As the ship of New Labour tilts precariously in the waters, and the Conservatives struggle to define what they stand for other than a change of personalities at the top, various attempts are being made to define a new politics to fill the void.

This post makes a stab at trying to map the new ideological terrain that is opening up. Needless to say, ideological positions are fluid and imprecise things, and any effort of this kind is going to risk some oversimplification. In addition, by no means all interesting thinking going on at the moment can be fitted into categories like those I am about to use. But, caveats aside, here goes…"

"Uniform policy is increasingly taking an absurdly draconian shift in its approach to the decisions kids make about how they wear their hair, banning any style more interesting than that you would ordinarily find on an Abbey National correspondence clerk clad in a Next business suit. Uniform policies nowadays are uniformly filled with such pitifully and vehemently ignorant statements as "patterns cut into the hair are not acceptable". Not acceptable to whom? Or, "hair colour will be restricted to that found in normal hair". And normal means what, exactly?"

Five months in, Nick Clegg gets mad.