Loic Le Meur has put up a helpful page listing all the bloggers in Davos and in Porto Alegre for the World Social Forum. Given the numbers of people involved at both events, I’m sure this must be only a fraction of the bloggers out there.
For reasons I can’t yet explain, my posts from yesterday seem to have been lost. In fact, when I logged on this morning, I received a totally blank page from Davos Newbies.
For my own pedantic reasons, I have reposted yesterday’s items below.
I have a lot of friends who will be arriving in Davos today for this year’s Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum. Although I seem to be well outside the club now, I hope they all have a great time.
I’ll be watching the Forum’s own weblog, which has not yet caught any of the spirit of the place or the event. But there are some very good bloggers who will be posting to it, so I’m sure the quality will soon rise.
Certainly the art of blogging has advanced in many ways since I first blogged the Forum five years ago. And the uber-blog pioneer was there, too.
If there was any doubt about the likely nature of the coming British election, the last couple of days would have dispelled it. The Conservatives, with their war cry of controlled immigration, have ensured that the nastiest, most brutish instincts will crawl from the dark recesses of the British polity.
I’m hoping it will backfire badly, although polling data does suggest that people are concerned about immigration and asylum seekers (two very different things which too many people muddle up). We’re certain to be treated to more spectacles like last night’s Newsnight which featured a ludicrous racist alongside the head of a refugee NGO and a near-comical Tory frontbencher.
The Guardian, of course, exposes the facts behind the Conservative bluster:
| In 2003 the largest single group of the 519,000 EU citizens who were working in Britain were the 185,000 from Ireland, followed by France, Italy and Portugal. |
| OECD figures for the rest of the world show that Americans top the list for countries of origin followed by India, Australia, South Africa, the Philippines and New Zealand. |
| Data from the International Passenger Survey sh<ows that the overwhelming majority of Britain’s migrants — 80,000 of 118,000 net new arrivals in 2001 — are in professional and managerial occupations, and they outnumber those who come to do manual and clerical jobs. |
There are two consolations to be had. The first is that I am still utterly confident that Tony Blair will win a third significant majority in the election, and the Conservatives will be as humiliated as ever (but remember I thought Kerry would win). The second is that, whatever happens, by American standards the campaign will come and go in a flash.