During the parliamentary debate on the BSkyB bid there was one such moment. At 6.25pm Dr Phillip Lee stood up and spoke to a now mostly empty chamber. This was a shame, because what he had to say was, in my view, extremely relevant and highly important. (Hansard)

He spoke on the fact that a lot, if not the vast majority, of the news people are getting today comes from not the mainstream media, the newspapers, magazines and TV, but from the “new media”, the social networks, sites like LibDem Voice and search engines.

I certainly get most of my news online and if I want more detail on an issue than my usual sites provide I turn to a search engine.

Companies like Yahoo!, Microsoft/Bing, and Google are the new arbiters of our news. They have it within their power to shape what we see, to shape our views on a subject, indeed to drive a specific agenda and we might never even notice it’s happening.

It could be deliberate, calculated, or it could simply be accidental. If the top search results all returned sites with a conservative outlook then what you read may well influence your views, or it might be liberal, or maybe just those sites that are favourable to the current agenda.

The algorithms the search engines use to generate their results are commercially secret and how would we know that they haven’t been tweaked so that news sites favourable to the engine’s owner don’t get weighted higher than those unfavourable? How often when searching does on go past the first page of results?

A recent example, something that might have been missed by many in the UK, is a court case Google lost in Belgium. A number of Belgian papers decided they didn’t like Google linking to their websites without permission or paying compensation and sued under copyright legislation. Then the law of unintended consequences kicked in. The papers didn’t want Google showing article extracts or photos as links, but Google interpreted links in its fullest sense and removed all the sites from its search results entirely, since the sites don’t appear they can’t be linked to, and hence Google doesn’t have to pay the fines. The papers of course suddenly aren’t happy that they got what they wanted. (Yes, the irony of that link was deliberate.)

Given my own views on copyright, I can’t help but laugh at those papers getting their comeuppance. Yet this is exactly the same problem we are now in crisis over, the close relationship between those needing exposure and those providing it. As far as Google users are concerned, those Belgian newspapers no longer exist. What if instead of newspapers, it was a political party?

With over 90% of the searches from the UK going through Google, that’s a lot of power concentrated in one place. We don’t want to end up in a situation where we finally remove the need/ability of politicians to suck up to the likes of News International to make sure they get favourable exposure only to shift this to companies like Google. Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and all the others.

I wish the people spouting all of this would take a step back and realise just how silly they sound. I’ve voted LibDem since I could vote; three different governments, one Conservative, two Labour were the result. I voted LibDem and I got Tory, then I got Labour, then I got Labour again. I truly voted for one thing but got another.

If I were anything like those disaffected members I’d have quit the LibDems right after that first Tory government. I’d voted for LibDems and got Tory. Totally betrayed by the party; they failed me, they failed to deliver their manifesto, they betrayed members; all the arguments I’m hearing ad nauseam in the press but this time with some actual truth to them.

What nonsense.

I voted LibDem this time and what I got was much more LibDem than I’ve ever had before. Yes, I could have voted LibDem and got Tory (again), I could have voted LibDem and got Labour (again), but instead I voted LibDem and I got… LibDem!

It’s not 100% LibDem it’s about 40% LibDem. Considering we have a 1/5 of the seats that the Tory’s have that’s a pretty good deal. We didn’t get everything; we didn’t get a LibDem PM; nor every single manifesto pledge, but we got something that’s much better than what we’ve ever had, certainly in my lifetime, probably in most people’s lifetime. We get our policies in government, if just one of those policies is implemented this will have been the most successful LibDem election since long before I was born.

What arrogance these “disaffected members” show in thinking that having only the third highest vote (both seats and percentage) we should somehow be entitled to get every single one of our policies implemented. We’ve always been third in my lifetime, but unlike every other time, this time we actually get some policies.

I do feel sorry for those policies we wanted but didn’t get; I feel sorry for those people whose pet policies weren’t possible in this coalition (a number of mine didn’t make it). But let’s stop all this nonsense about voting one thing and getting another. This is the reality of coalition government, the norm should we ever have a true proportional voting system.

I voted LibDem this time and I actually get to see LibDems in the Cabinet and LibDem manifesto promises on the Parliamentary schedule. For the first time ever in my lifetime I voted LibDem and I actually got some LibDem!

The paper bemoans the lack of diversity, where are the women, the ethnic minorities? Let’s consider something radical here; could it be that those men are actually the best for the job, regardless of ethnicity?

Just because a judge might be a white male doesn’t mean he cannot have an appreciation of issues and views of minorities or of women; there are people he can ask for this information, and surely the most important thing for a high court judge is to know the letter and the spirit of the law and how to apply it? If everyone is supposed to be treated fairly and equally under the law, then a white-male, ethnic, religious or gender perspective should have no actual bearing on it? I accept that our world isn’t perfect and while we ought to strive for such a system we will never achieve it, yet if we need a white, black, male or female judge because each would apply the law differently, then haven’t we’ve discovered a flaw in our system that needs to be fixed?

The issue raised is a more fundamental one. Do we want the best qualified people, or do we want a representative mix? If we aim for the latter, in our current society, what we end up having is positive discrimination, and that leads to resentment and political parties like the BNP screaming about how white people are disadvantaged “in their own country” as less qualified and experienced minorities are promoted over equally or more qualified white people. Discrimination, of any flavour, is bad for a society.

Equally, having only white men as High Court judges makes the minorities (and women) feel as though they are being discriminated against, they don’t see any of their “own people” in the important jobs. If we start accepting people as High Court judges to meet some demographic need, instead of by merit and experience, does that not lower the quality of the people we select, and hence the quality of the institution they represent and serve? Does that not lower the quality of justice in our country?

Ideally, in an egalitarian society, when we choose the best qualified we will, on average, also get a representative mix of the population as a whole. Yet that’s not what we are seeing. Why is that?

We only need to look at the various statistics for education to show that privately educated, white people are those most likely to get the best results. If whites get the better education and hence the better opportunities then if you place the CVs of a white and a black person next to each other, with all ethnic and gender references removed, then selecting purely on merit you’ll mostly end up choosing a white person.

You cannot impose diversity from the top down, you need to create it from the bottom up by giving everyone equal education and opportunities to all. Yet until we solve those ills of our society, how do we go about choosing our judges? Should the selection be done blind? Remove the names, the gender, the race, the names of schools, and the names and addresses of residence, in short remove anything that might give a clue to race or gender, and then have our judges selected on merit alone?

Even if we do all that, I predict people will still be complaining the selection process is unfair when we again end up with only white men on our list. They’d be both right and wrong; it is unfair, but it’s not the selection process that’s at fault.