Duncan Stephen makes a very important point: Joe Blogs and Joe Public are very different.

The range of political opinion emerging British blogosphere subculture is emphatically not representative of public opinion in this country: bloggers from left to right have a liberal (or libertarian) streak that leads to a broad oppositional consensus to things like ID cards and 90-day detention without charge.

Not so the British public as a whole, which is much more sympathetic to the more populist and authoritarian view of the Sun and New Labour.