Several political (and indeed other) weblogs have been shut down by their webhost after a businessman planning to buy into Arsenal Football Club used his lawyers to threaten them with legal action.

The Armchair realises that any UK-based internet hosting company can be threatened financially in this way because of our stupid libel laws. Here is how one unaffected blog revealed the news.

And where is our government in all this? In their desperation not to antagonise the rich with big wallets any further than they have already, they are just going to let this one go. The Armchair didn’t normally set up this blog to link to other web pages (you can use the search engines for related articles), but hopes to help the fight for greater internet freedom….

When was the last time anybody paid attention to what was happening in the three main political party conferences? In the past, they were often places where members talked about policy and held their leaders to account. There was also live coverage of them on television and radio, and pages of articles were written about them in the newspapers.

In recent years however, when society almost now become anti-political, the conferences have almost become irrelevant to peoples’ lives. The Armchair used to watch them and read about them, because they helped to shape one’s political views, but what is left of them today are small cliques of people who believe in their own self-importance. Most of the people who represent the main parties really don’t have a clue about what is going on outside their little bubbles.

It’s often been left to the fringe organisations to bring public attention to a particular issue. One obvious example was how the march against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was organised. Whatever your view of the war, one had to admit that the protest was successful. Most of the people who went on the march weren’t necessarily anti-war, but they feared that the invasion would lead to disaster. Events since shows that they have been proved right.

Then there is the threat of global warming. It was again left up to the fringe organisations to tell the public bluntly of the facts, by researching and complying their information on topics like slowly melting icebergs, and the depleting of the ozone layer. The mainstream politicians have been forced to play catch up with public opinion.

War. Immigration. Poverty. Terrorism. The environment. Taxation. Major issues of our time that need great solutions, but don’t expect them to be discussed either on the conference floor, or at any fringe meeting.

There are plenty of reasons why The Armchair hates many political memoirs. They often attract the hype and positive publicity they don’t deserve.

The current focus of attention has been on Cherie Blair, the wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who plans to write about her own experiences of being at Downing Street. No doubt there will be some commentators who will attempt to verbally trip her up at the first opportunity. Do we really need another memoir, which would inevitably be filled with information that most people had known about already? In fact, the real meaty stuff in any memoir would never be revealed to the public domain because of the writer’s constant fear of being sued for libel.

Perhaps the only way to deal with this nonsense is to either dismiss it with a pinch of salt- or maybe shove it down the toilet!