The full 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, with more recent links weighted more heavily than older links.

As with previous months, I’ve pulled out the Lib Dem blogs from the top 100, although this month I’ve included them all rather than just the top 10.

Lib Dem Voice manages to climb to 5, which considering how fixed those top slots are that’s a remarkable achievement for the team there. Mark Thompson’s blog jumps 10 places and gets inside the Top 20, something I thought impossible just a few months ago – whatever it is he’s doing, it’s working! A great month for Mr Quist, too.

Liberal Vision are starting to creep up there too, which is reassuring. Alix Mortimer’s wonderful blog continues to slide, but then she so rarely blogs which does make it difficult for other bloggers to link to stuff she writes. Making sure that she can’t win Lib Dem blog of the year more than once has robbed her of competitiveness, I’m sure of it

It’s a week for exceptions, it seems. I don’t normally write about gender, but I did that recently. I don’t normally write about internal party matters either, and yet, here I am writing about it.

One Lib Dem blog you’re not going to find on libdemblogs.co.uk is the Agent Orange blog. That’s because you need to provide your membership number to Ryan Cullen if you want to be on it, and Agent Orange wishes to remain anonymous.

For starters, back in July Agent Orange accused Ros Scott, the party’s president, of a cover up over investigations into Lib Dem Parliamentary Expenses. The problem comes from a unwillingness to publish the reports and evidence on which Ros has made her decisions, forcing us to trust her word alone.

This situation continues, with Lord Shutt of Greetland (a local chap, actually – whom I’ve met although cannot say I know) doing a private, internal investigation which came to the conclusion that all claims by Peers were “within the rules”. Ros later explained to Liberal Vision that there was no regulatory definition of “main residence” which screams of a technical loop hole and is pretty disappointing from my point of view.

The Federal Executive will not publish the detail of Shutt’s investigation (I think the clue is in the ‘private, internal’ bit), so all the party can do at this point is cross its proverbial fingers and hope that the Parliamentary investigation of Lord Rennard comes to the same conclusion as the party’s internal investigation. I suspect it will, although that’s mostly because I can’t believe that the Federal Executive would ever be stupid enough to risk declaring that all claims were “within the rules” unless they were pretty confident Parliamentary authorities and/or the Police would come to the same conclusion.

You’d also have to be pretty mad to put the reputation of one or two individuals ahead of the reputation of the party as a whole, wouldn’t you?

If Parliament does come to a different conclusion to the party, there’s going to be some pretty awkward questions to answer, especially when we’re trying so hard to be seen as pushing for greater transparency and tougher rules.

It’s been something of a privilege to watch better minds than mine tackle the issue I raised in this post about my friend Joe and the ‘social contact’.

The issue was fairly simple: How do you counter the idea that the Government can get you to do anything it wants because, by remaining in the country, you’re implicitly agreeing to abide by a  ‘social contract.’

IanB got stuck into the idea that you can ‘just leave’ because this is the standard response that you always get from collectivists – “if you don’t like it, leave”

This argument creates the illusion of a contract being voluntarily agreed with. You go into a pub, you’re agreeing to abide by the rules set out by the landlord. You come into my home you’re agreeing to abide by the rules that I set out.

But being born into a Nation and living in a Nation is not the same as ‘going into a pub.’ Under international law you cannot deprive someone of their nationhood. He concluded that the Social Contact would be valid if you could leave the state whilst physically remaining where you were. As in, Milton Keynes deciding to secede from the United Kingdom. If this were possible then the collectivist’s argument holds up. If it’s not (which it’s not, not anywhere) then it does not.

This question of personal sovereignty was tackled by Jock Coats, who writes that a ‘Social Contract’ is inherently totalitarian unless it can be explicitly agreed to by individuals, and reasserts what IanB said about ‘leaving’ meaning being able to reject the social contract without physically leaving the geographic bounds of the state. He explains how the principle of self ownership is the only one that can be universally applied (without creating two classes of people, ones who are owned by others – or slaves, or ones who own others – the state), and that a ‘social contract’ denies the possibility of self ownership. Very clever stuff.

Counting cats takes a different approach by ripping apart the idea that you can ever be said to be agreeing to a contract that you can’t actually read, or see before you sign it. The more repressive a Government, the less information people have about the contract they’re signing when they elect each successive Government. In other words, you can have a social contract but only one that ensures complete freedom, because this is the only circumstance under which individuals within a state can be said to have a full, comprehensive understanding of what ‘signing the social contract’ actually means. If you’re forced to sign a contract you cannot read, is that enforceable?

Finally, Costigan Quist drives the final nail into the coffin of the social contract, pointing out what should have been screamingly obvious from the start – there is no social contract. It’s just a metaphor, and one that doesn’t actually hold up. He points to the exceptions of non-violent direct action, to conscientious objection – all things tolerated and allowed under a modern western democracy, but that the ‘social contract’ does not allow for. At this point the whole thing just quietly falls apart, and forms the basis of a very simple and effective retort to even the most stubborn lefty.

I quote,

As a rule of thumb, when your political philosophy comes up against reality and fails to explain it, reality is declared the winner.

This summary of the debate doesn’t really do justice to the comments people have left on these 5 posts, and in most cases calling them comments is a bit of an insult. This is what makes blogging worthwhile and shows that blogging is sometimes at home to Mr Reason and Mrs Logic and not just bluster, gossip, rhetoric and dogma.

Here’s the sneak preview of August’s UK blog rankings, provided by those kind people at Wikio. This is the overall ranking, although typically political blogs still dominate.

No change in the top two, again, but then Iain’s much better at generating incoming links than Guido. A shake-up of technology blogs means Boing Boing and Engadget jump to 3 and 4, and Blah! Blah! Technology drops out of the top 10.

Further down it looks like my (very) brief stint as Lib Dem number two is at an end. I’d better update my sidebar. Congrats to Mark Thompson of the ‘Mark Reckons’ blog who can now lay claim to be one of the very few Lib Dems ever to set foot inside the Top 20. Obviously it’s only because Mark’s a man. I’m telling Harriet Harman on you, Mark! Just you see if I don’t!

People who want to become British citizens could speed it up by becoming active members of political parties and trade unions, under government plans.

(source: bbc news online)

Non-EU immigrants – the only immigrants that the Government has any power over are a source of revenue (the fees charged at each step are repulsive in their rapacity, says Devil’s Kitchen), a source of headlines – a collective punching bag for Labour to demonstrate how tough they are and how completely unnecessary it is to vote for the BNP and now, it seems, a handy source of party funding.

Now I could get into a philosophical debate with Labour at this point – explain to them that by pandering to the BNP they’re admitting that the BNP have a bit of a point, and that they do, in fact, have to do something about it. Ah, well, I’ve started so I may as well continue:

They’re trapped. Having conceded the point that there’s something wrong with immigrants and that something ‘must be done’ they are now incapable of defining when enough is enough. It doesn’t logically stop if the number of non-EU immigrants reduces to zero – if immigrants are a strain and a burden then we need to then think about revoking British passports and doing a bit of deporting, don’t we? There’s no reason to automatically assume this will happen, but the logic of the argument in favour of the Government’s current policy does not define these announcements as the final solution, but rather a step along a particular path that, history tells us, doesn’t end well.

Back in 2005, on the single issue of immigration, I would rather have seen Labour win than the Tories. I feel strongly about not treating immigrants any differently to people born here – but then I’m not a Nationalist – I’m a Free Trader. My mistake was in assuming that Labour wouldn’t engage in this sort of thing. Silly, silly me. Fooled again!

This misdirection towards immigrants deflects attention away from the difficult question that Labour won’t touch: What do we do to be able to accommodate everyone that wants to come and work here?

If it’s true that our tectonic planning system, massive regulatory framework and overly ‘generous’ public services are preventing this country coping with growth then this is a big problem for our country, isn’t it? This points to Bad Government, because all these things sit within their domain. They’re ultimately responsible, and rather than accept their failure they’re choosing to blame the demand rather than accept fault for acting as a barrier to supply.

One idealistic alternative for Labour might be taxing people more to cope with the increase in demand: “You’re making us pay for all these immigrants? I’m telling the BNP on you!” They can’t use that option.

Another option looks even worse for them: If the public services as they’re currently structured can’t cope with the demand then let’s scale back what public services are supposed to supply, so that what each person ‘gets’ is reasonable, affordable, sustainable and so on. Try telling a Labour voter that you’re cutting his incapacity benefit so that you can afford to give incapacity benefit to all the immigrants that need it and you’re going to get a swift, “I’m telling the BNP on you!” to that too.

Stamping on the immigrants then seems the obvious politically convenient choice for a Government desperately trying to avoid becoming even more unpopular whilst, at the same time, cutting off any possible opportunity to be described as ‘soft on immigration.’ What’s troubling me is that I think they may well have calculated correctly, and there’s no pesky kids around to stop them ‘getting away with it’.

Of course even if they turn their ideas into law, they’re doomed to failure – having made the case that they needed to accurately quantify the number of immigrants in order to plan public services and infrastructure better – they’ll be expected to deliver once they have it. Nothing to hide behind at that point, at which point the only logical response will be to make immigration even harder. The reason the policy has failed is because immigration isn’t hard enough, they’ll tell us, and two parties will get into a bidding war over who can be ‘toughest.’

Heads they win. Tails you lose.