All that said, if there is one thing that unites the British blogs of most political positions its a distrust of the kind of centralized authoritarian politics that spews from Blair’s mouth daily.

That’s bang on. Forging any sort of common position on anything more substantial than the basic rules of the game will be impossible here. And a good thing too: “common positions” are antithetical to what we’re about, I think.

Having said all that, Sunny is absolutely right: we should aim to make the most of what we create. We’re probably not doing that. All ideas welcome…

We write well thought out political writing; a lot of people read it. Beyond that, it’s hard to measure.

Sure, The Sun has more readers in a day than The Sharpener will in a century, but I’m confident that our political impact on those who do read us is far greater.

Even trying to tie us together with something about ‘building a better democracy’ would have to have a definition of democracy of such sub-Eustonite wooliness as to be meaningless.

‘Forging a common political agenda’ seems to me to be another way of saying ‘developing a dogma’, and given our worthy promise of ‘debate without dogma’, I think it’s a mistake for The Sharpener to try.

True, we are here because we liked informed comment and articles etc, but politically that means we have no impact, despite the potential. To be honest I see that as a bit of a waste.

At the very least some idea to pull together the myriad of websites that focus on “building a better democracy” etc may also be worthwhile. We need more thinking and discussion on this I feel…otherwise it call peter off pretty quickly.

I don’t come (or, more recently, contribute) to The Sharpener for a unified purpose. I’m here because I want to read intelligent and informed writing about political issues. I cherish the way it is done here, that it doesn’t go into insults and chest-beating but stays respectful and people defend or amend their position.

It’s easy for me to find a load of bloggers I basically agree with and we can spend all day telling each other how right we are. I want my ideas tested.

I presume that we are all labouring under misapprehensions, we are all acting on beliefs that can be proven wrong. I want to find out which bits of my thinking are like that and jettison them. I want to find those bits in other people and make them move on.

The Sharpener is a very rare place where people do get to preach to someone other than the choir, and if we all deal honestly then we help each other refine our ideas and move towards a future that makes more sense.

That, to me, is the closest we can come to the point of The Sharpener. Its diversity, its lack of a defined single political direction is precisely what gives it its value.

How do we move from typing it to living it? That is what I am thinking about, and hopeing to discus with as many as can be mustered, on and off-line…