The ultimate in New Labour’s middle-of-the-road focus-group oriented politics - Your Party. It’s a political party with no initial policies or manifesto and directed entirely with the will of its members, seeking to “try a non-adversarial approach to politics”.

But surely politics is, at heart, adversarial. To set up a party with no founding principles at all renders it completely ineffective, it has no base position from which to make its decisions on any issue. Parties are (well, usually are, despite Blair’s best efforts) collections of like-minded individuals. By allowing anyone to join and hoping for some sort of consensus across the board, will result in a lack of internal agreement and produce neutered, timid policies. Either that or it will get taken over by extremists. It could well just turn people off the political process even further.

The site’s FAQ says that it will answer questions like whether it’s possible for the Internet to promote greater engagement in the political process, but that’s a very big, multi-faceted issue and this venture is not the only way of using the Internet for political participation - there are plenty of other ways out there, either involving the electoral process directly like these guys or providing alternative means - Fax Your MP, the Howard Dean campaign, the BBC’s iCan are all good examples.

But despite my opinion that this will be ineffective, at least it is a response to declining political participation, something the mainstream parties have been slow to pick up on. One of the most common reasons cited for apathy is “all the parties are the same, all they do is talk”, so new political movements (not necessarily parties) that break this mindset are part of the solution (like the Stop the War coalition and the Countryside Alliance) but they still have to based around the specific interests of the people they represent, not just try and mash them all together, otherwise we would just end up with the “same old” politics again.