"Take Conservativehome.com. It’s an on-line community of Conservative activists that engages in a constant commentary on what the Conservative Party leadership is up to. Thanks to them our attempts to keep our new A-list of candidates secret lasted about 24 hours – not because it leaked but because individual candidates were identified one by one by friends and friends of friends on the network. My first reaction was to be annoyed. And then I paused and thought about it, and realised something exciting was happening. There was a vibrant, noisy, irreverent Conservative community out there. Our party was alive not dying. Although I am sometimes the target of members on Conservativehome.com, it is unambiguously a good thing that it exists. For it – and other websites like Iain Dale’s blog and the new conservative internet TV station 18 Doughty Street - are sure signs of the health of the Conservative movement. That’s why my fellow Shadow Cabinet colleagues and I regularly take part in interviews and discussions on websites like these. Nothing like it exists on the Government side. Why? Because you simply couldn’t imagine the current Labour leaders working with a website where Labour supporters took pop-shots at them. They haven’t yet realised that in a bottom-up age, a top-down government is unsustainable. The days when party leaderships and governments handed down decisions from on high is long over."
Taken from tonight's speech by George Osborne on 'Politics and Media in the Internet Age'.