So Labour loves these sorts of initiatives – making the lives of immigrants just that little bit harder. It scores them Brownie Points with the Daily Mail, after all.

It’s the “Life In Britain” Citizenship test for non-EU immigrants wanting to live in the UK. The link to the official practice version of the test is currently doing the rounds on Twitter, and you can take it yourself. Note that every single link on the page other than the one to begin the test takes you through to the TSO bookshop where 3 books are available to help you prepare for taking the test, costing £9.99 for the book version and £8.99 for the PDF version – but then that one has VAT added, so it also costs £9.99.

What’s interesting is that most people, those sacred ‘Indigenous Britons’ can’t pass the test. I failed it myself, getting just 16 right. Toy Liberal failed it, despite having an A* GCSE in Citizenship. I didn’t even know there was a GCSE in Citizenship. If I had, I’d have had a good long rant about it long before now, rest assured.

The questions on this special super-hard test for immigrants, including “what year did women get the right to divorce their husbands?” and a remarkable number of questions about parliament, expose this test for what it is – a hoop, for the sheer sadistic pleasure in having made someone jump through it.

Labour like to argue that the reason they do things like this is because they need to take account of the fact that people want them to be sadistic towards immigrants, and if they’re not then someone else will win power and be even more sadistic.

If I was thinking about coming to live in the UK, and this was my introduction to the UK’s Government and “Life in Britain” I would probably reconsider. But then, that’s the point isn’t it? Hoop, monkey: Jump through it or piss off. Daily Mail loves that sort of crap.

New Wikio Blog Rankings are out. Wikio doesn’t measure how many visitors a website has – it measures the number of reactions they get from the rest of the blogosphere. It’s odd being marked as ‘more influential’ than the BBC’s Nick Robinson, but that simply suggests that excluding readership gives very strange results indeed.

It’s becoming sort of traditional for me to extract the Lib Dem blogs from their list to see how well we’re doing in ‘reaching out.’

As a side note, we’ll have to see if Nick Clegg’s piece in Labour List is a good example of “reaching out” – he did promise to do exactly that when he ran for the leadership, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise when it happens.  I had a chat with Matthew Hanney, Nick’s political advisor, to find out what was going on – was reassured that it’s not the end of “equidistance” and that Nick would write a piece for Conservative Home too, if they’d have him. Personally I find any sort of association with Labour pretty hard to stomach, but then as we’ve all established I’m not a politician.

I don’t need to spell out that any sign of a coalition with Labour would be the end of my relationship with this party though.

This months Wikio rankings show good progress for some – especially relatively new blogger Mark Thompson who’s showing a very canny knack of growing his blog very quickly through rather cunning use of social networking (and being prolific and energetic, which always helps!). In fact this month marks a bit of an upset to the Lib Dem ‘Top 3′ that’s been fixed ever since the Wikio Rankings started.

I certainly don’t think this list reflects the ‘Top 10′ blogs in terms of what exclusively Lib Dems read and enjoy – something, perhaps, for Ryan over on LibDemBlogs.co.uk to think about while he’s scraping all our feeds?

I’m potentially blowing my chance at more freebies (I’m still reading “When the Lights Went Out“), but when organisations get in touch with me I tend to blog about the fact they’ve got in touch rather than covering the story straight. I don’t think this blog’s readers would care if I got paid to talk about something, but I know they’d rather I was upfront about it, and I think parroting press releases whoever they’re from is the last thing people want.

I don’t sell advertising space either. The simple reason for that is that the content is the product, even if there’s no price attached for you. When a blog sells advertising space then you are the product – access to you eyes is what’s being sold to advertisers. The content becomes little more than bait.

I refuse to be bait. But I’ve digressed. The point is that every now and again people do send me stuff. For example, today I was given a sneak preview of the Economist’s new advertising campaign, which I presume as gone live now, featuring a man taking a tour of a city via a network of tightropes. It’s quite cool – done by the same guy that made that free-running ident for BBC, dontchaknow, but that’s not what interests me.

What interests me is that the Economist itself is trying to grow and expand its readership – despite the recession, despite the doom and gloom surrounding print based media – and that new media is clearly important to them in trying to reach the ‘intellectually curious’. In other words, they’re doing exactly what everyone should be doing in difficult times: Trying harder – this goes down well in Gore Towers.

They’re hoping that because of the increase in numbers going to University there’s potentially another 3 million people out there that could be readers. I don’t imagine for a second they expect that kind of readership, but for a fleeting moment it feels like there’s a glimmer of hope for a fightback against fetishisation of … well… stupidity. Time for a bit of geek pride?

We’re here! We’re intellectually curious! Get used to it! I’d actually quite like to live in a world were listening to Radio 4 and reading magazines like the Economist wasn’t considered deviant for people like me, but then if it wasn’t I probably wouldn’t do it. Ho hum.

Whether the Economist’s New Media strategy goes beyond using political bloggers as a very direct way of reaching their target demographic to sell paper magazines or they can use their enthusiasm for liberal economics – and hunger for growth – to begin that all important migration to making the online content profitable remains to be seen. I’ll leave that sort of industry speculation to Guido, I think.

Hand me the razor blades – Brown’s still Prime Minister. It means, on the one hand, I win the £10 I bet against Mark Thompson who thought Brown would be gone before the end of June. Mark pays his gambling debts, if anyone’s interested

At the time I thought this bet was a win-win for me – if Brown went then, hell, Brown went! If Brown stayed, woo, £10 for me.

Yet, on this particular occasion, having my own particular impression of Brown’s psychology validated like this isn’t something to be celebrated. It doesn’t feel like win-win. It feels like we’ve both lost, except in addition to Mark losing I’ve kicked him in the nuts and stolen his wallet.

It seems that Brown, above all else, values being Prime Minister. Nothing else matters. That’s what I bet. I wish I was wrong.

He cannot be forced out of the job by his party without the party political equivalent of mass suicide, and he won’t go of his own free will. Ho hum – great news if you’re a Tory. Hell for everyone else.

Barnacle Brown will never step down.

Inspired by the downfall of the Nationalised banks, that old favourite of the lefties is back: Nationalising the trains! The strategy is the same: Wait until a train operator is on the brink of bankruptcy then swoop in.

To help the process along (after all, train operators might not go bankrupt on their own) the Government’s got a few tricks up it’s sleeve. Their key weapon is fuel duties, combined with Quango controlled pricing and scheduling. If the train operators can’t control their costs or prices, then to bankrupt a train operator all you need to do is make sure their costs are greater than their income and blam, ‘save’ the rail line from those greedy Capitalist bastards.

Dream come true for the hard left though. Glad someone’s happy!