As part of an exclusive online feature, every week Total Politics interviews a key figure in the British blogoshere. This week is the turn of Sunder Katwala, the General Secretary of the Fabian Society. He speaks to Total Politics about bitching in blogging, the Fabian Society and going into elected politics.

Favourite current politician

Ed Miliband

Least favourite politician

Chris Grayling because of his absolute disregard for facts

Favourite blogger

A guy called Dom Paskini of Liberal Conspiracy

Least favourite blogger

Tory Bear

Favourite political story of the past year

The Conservatives being unable to oppose higher taxes on the top as they know they are popular

In the film of your life who would play you?

Barack Obama

If you could change one thing about British politics what would it be?

I would fund vast reductions in child poverty by redistributing the money we currently spend on pension tax relief.

Why did you get into blogging?

If you are involved in a think-tank you are trying to frame debates for political audiences. Blogging is one of the places where a lot of the audience is. Increasingly I think the debate within parties is less, so you have got to be there.

What are the most popular topics?

What gets the most discussion on the Fabian blog Next Left is actually when we go into the high theory of political ideas — the slightly more wonky stuff - that perhaps reflects the niche base that we're in. We have Stuart White, who is political philosopher at Oxford, blogging for us. When he is doing stuff on the high theory of political ideas you get very, very hyper-engaged discussions and feedback.

You get feedback on contemporary political things as well. The most popular post I ever did was the one saying all Top Ten Tory bloggers were climate sceptics. That went all over the place, a bit of a one off. In terms of what seems to engage the audience in talking back to us, it is the slightly high-level stuff.

Do you think that bitching element of the blogosphere can be constructive?

I think politics is about debate, argument, disagreement. Being the head of a think tank we try to have a fairly respectful tone but it is a chance for people to argue about ideas, politics and people. There ought to be quite a lot of cut and thrust. I don’t like the tone of anonymous ‘hit and run’ commenting you get in some blogs, especially newspaper blogs, because it strikes me as quite sexist and doing down debate. You can have quite lively disagreements without it getting really snighty. Arguing is part of politics.

Jessica Asato from Progress is going into elected politics. Is that something you would ever consider?

It’s not something I have planned to do or I have tried to do. I think different people take different approaches to how they try and influence politics. I have always found that being in think-tanks and the media provides you with a platform where you can try and shape debates, partly because it is your job to speak out of turn and not to be part of the parliamentary troops.

In terms of the Fabian Society, do you find your immense history weighs on you? Last year Geoffrey Robertson talked about the Fabian Society providing the intellectual justification for eugenics in Australia. Do you think that people think they know what the Fabian Society is about even without giving it a fair shot?

No I don’t think that. We are proud of the Fabian Society’s history because it has always led debates on the left. That doesn’t mean that you are proud of absolutely everything in a 125-year history but it is a test of a political tradition to discuss those issues openly as I have certainly done: on issues like eugenics. But you are also talking about the organisation that first had the idea of a national health service and campaigned for many things that were utopian ideas like universal suffrage and decolonisation long before they became political common-sense.

One of the issues for New Labour was that it was unsure of its relationship with the party’s history and tried to cut itself off from it. I think it has now got to the point where it has a healthy relationship with the history: you draw on the history, you learn from the history, you are not trapped in it.

You talk about how the Fabian Society have pioneered things that were off the agenda in the past. What are the big things that the Fabian society is pioneering now that aren’t being discussed?

We will need a very different type of politics to deal with climate change; we will need a different kind of capitalism. We have reached the end of the road on a certain way of dealing with poverty and inequalities, so if this isn’t as good as it gets we’ve got to go and build new campaigns to create demand for more equality. We can’t do that quietly behind the scenes in government.

There are ideas like a basic minimum, living wage campaign, that have radical potential and will change politics. I think people underestimate how quickly ideas can become the mainstream and common sense. Fifteen years ago nobody would have thought we would be where we are on civil partnerships. So I think we should be ambitious about the possibilities for social change. We also need to be rethinking the methods of democracy and how they connect because I think we have hit a trust crisis.

Who do you think will win the next election?

It is wide open, partly because of the political arithmetic. The polls are putting us back into hung-parliament territory. The reasons you can’t predict what is going to happen is that this is the first election since 1992 when the question of who might govern is up for grabs at the election. It is very hard for the Labour party to win an overall majority. If you look at the 2005 result it is a difficult starting place but it is also quite difficult for the Conservatives to win an overall majority.

How would you describe Cameron in a sentence?

He has delivered a masterclass in political ambiguity

And Brown in a sentence?

Much substance but risks being outspun

Last week: Slugger O'Toole

Next week: Dizzy Thinks