Author: David Landon Cole

Opposition response to the state of the blogosphere address

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Like Paul Evans of Hot, Ginger and Dynamite, I hail from Somerset but live in London. Paul has given a ‘State of the Blogosphere’ address in advance of President George W Bush’s final State of the Union address. In anticipation of the final opposition response to a State of the Union address by Bush, this is my opposition response to the State of the Blogosphere address.

Mr Speaker,
Mr Vice President,

Mr Evans began his State of the Blogosphere address by saying that

“Today, we are regularly advised that the blogs are the new fifth estate of British politics.”

The term ‘fourth estate’ was coined by Burke, according to Thomas Carlyle. Prior to the rise of the newspaper, people relied on the priest and the pulpit for news. The power of the fourth estate came from being able to report, independently and verifiably, the news of the day, principally from the galleries above the Houses of Lords and Commons. Here was something genuinely powerful; no longer could time, distance and obscurity protect the powerful in Westminster and Whitehall.

Or so we thought.

Power is not confined to a few acres along the banks of the Thames. It lies also in company boardrooms, and sure enough we see companies – into which I include charities – not only influencing politicians directly but also subverting the press, sometimes with the collusion of members of the press, to promote their agenda, be it sales, policies or influence. Equally, power is not confined to a few acres along the banks of the Thames. It lies also in town halls, devolved assemblies, political parties and any pub or front room where one person sits down to convince someone of something.

News reporting, though, is difficult. You have to check facts, interview, probe and search but most of all, in today’s competitive world, you have to cover an awful lot of ground. While blogs may well be able to highlight what’s going on at the council, they’re not going to be able to say what’s going on in a municipality on the other side of the world; they won’t know if something important is happening. What they can do, though, is act as a filter. I could read, in the New York Times, for instance, about what’s going on in New York city and highlight it for my readers. That is only a worthwhile effort, though, if I say why it’s important or, more generally, why I’m interested in it and why they, the readers, should be as well. Immediately, it is commentary and is filtering (despite the protestations of some about getting rid of the filters) and is biased. None of these things are bad, but they do mean that we should and, I think, do take them with a pinch of salt.

If it is commentary that it is valuable – if it is argument that can change the world – and not reporting the reported, there seems to be little point in half the UK blogosphere linking to a BBC News article on Peter Hain’s resignation. Tell me what you think, tell me why it matters but don’t be surprised if I don’t bother reading your blog if you just tell me that it happened. It would be even better if people wrote intelligently.

‘Intelligence’ comes from the Latin intellego, meaning ‘I understand’. If someone understands the situation, they would, I hope, do more than simply say ‘I like’ or ‘I dislike’. Swearblogs are one of the worst for this; while an acid tongue can help get a point across, many would do well to realise that vitriol is not invective and impudence is not satire.

I therefore question the assertion by Mr Evans about the state of the ‘left’ part of the blogosphere. The Euston Manifesto is changing thinking, for one thing, and I would venture that, as a general rule, more thinking by bloggers, at the moment, goes on towards the Labour end of the spectrum. This is not to say that all is well, or that all is bad on the right; that would clearly be false.

The great poverty of the Conservative-leaning blogosphere is that it did start first, and so it had a few stars at the beginning. Quite why people try to emulate Paul Staines in ‘breaking’ ‘stories’ is beyond me, as he, it seems, blogs more-or-less full time, which most people can’t do, and the stories he breaks are often inconsequential or plain wrong. There wasn’t a second email system and whether Brown picks his nose or not is of supreme indifference. Unfortunately, people seem to be taking the commenting habits of those early blogs as well. What good are fifty posts congratulating an author on a post? If it is a new, struggling blog then, yes, by all means congratulate, but don’t just say ‘good’ or ‘bad’; don’t resort to shorthands like ‘NuLab’ or ‘GuF’. If that’s all you have to say all the time, develop your ideas or get one page on a free host and shut up.

We have here two views of blogging. The one says that politics is best measured by noise; the other says that politics is complex and not measured by a single metric. Mr Evans concludes by saying that “The litmus test of the political blogosphere will be its capacity to sway opinion in the country at large”. On that basis, it will fail. There are too many blogs; they must be aggregated. If it is done by the media, Mr Evans’ thesis falls. If it is done by large blogs, they act in the same way as the media, and Mr Evans’ thesis falls.

Litmus is a crude indicator. Universal Indicator differentiates more finely than lichen extract, and allows us to judge the effects of the political blogosphere not just by its capacity to sway opinion but to improve opinion, to foster debate and hopefully – and this is a lot harder than throwing mud – increase, if not turnout at polls, engagement in civic society. That is something worth blogging for.

And may Tim Berners-Lee bless the netizens.

xD.

PS – The text of Carlyle I mention above, the Hero as Man of Letters, can be found here. Much of Carlyle’s work can be found here on Project Gutenberg.

Stop the War Coalition and Channel Four

Posted on by David Landon Cole

A group has been set up on Facebook called (in capitals, so it must be important) ‘Vote Stop the War Coalition for Channel 4 News Award’. It reads rather like the headlines of spam emails and the content of the group is similarly inaccurate. The award in question is ‘most inspiring political personality of the last decade’ and the Stop the War Coalition are not (repeat: not) up for the award.

Stop the War Coalition logo‘Anti-Iraq war protestors’ are up there along with Tony Blair, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness, Ken Livingstone, Alex Salmond and the Countryside Alliance. Have a look on the Channel Four website. The fact that the award goes to a rather nebulous group of people rather than one of the organisations behind the protests is interesting. It suggests that the brand identification of the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) is negligible and Channel Four have to copy Time Magazine‘s ‘person of the year 2006’1 in going for a non-entity. This is rather surprising, given that the Stop the War Coalition’s logo is really rather good – easy to remember, easy to identify and easy to reproduce – and its message was supported on a grand scale.

Why, then, has the StWC declined from public view?

Part of the answer is in a previous post of mine:

If the Stop the War Coalition was going to continue as a meaningful force, it needed to attract and retain the soggy left of the ‘Various People Against Nasty Things’ variety. Providing placards that said ‘Victory to the Resistance’ was, at risk of being controversial, not the best way of building a broad coalition. It was a very good way of alienating the people who don’t consider the Socialist Worker newspaper to be some of Fleet Street’s finest editing and putting the few remainders a short step from carrying SWP banners.

although now I would add ‘We are all Hizbullah’ to ‘Victory to the Resistance’. In short, the aim was not to build a mass movement, but to increase the number of members of the SWP, StWC and RESPECT. If the hitrate for long term, useful members was (say) one in a thousand, that would still have yielded two thousand members from the Day X march alone. It made sense to the SWP; given that they believe we are in a permanent arms economy anyway, the war going ahead or not would have been largely immaterial.
Equally, the StWC didn’t represent all of the anti-war movement; it was one of three organisations, the others being CND and MAB, that called the protest. A lot of the people who opposed the war and marched under the StWC’s roundel never felt any particular attachment to it as the representations made by Lindsay German et al. never really resonated with the Chelsea tractor drivers. The messages were about imperialism, when what people felt was either that Britain was a client state or that it was just a wrong decision, badly taken. Imperialism – the desire to cow the Iraqi people – didn’t enter into most people’s opposition because they didn’t believe it to be so.

I am not sure of this point, so forgive me if sounds a bit strangled, but the StWC also sought to forge links with the Muslim communities in the UK. The questions there are which Muslim communities? and who’s linking to them?. Had the StWC really been about preventing a racist backlash in response to the Iraq war, it would have done a lot more to bring groups together. It didn’t, the evidence being the quite common anti-Muslim sentiment we see expressed in the press. I’m not blaming StWC for racism, but I am saying that they failed to do as much as they could have done because they were more interested in building a political movement that wasn’t there to be built.

There was never single set of ideas behind the brand; in essence, there never was a brand. The StWC had an organisational role that it could have used to advance political knowledge in the UK. It squandered the opportunity so that, a few years later, all people remember is that a lot of people were quite annoyed about …something.

There is, at the time of writing, no mention of the award nomination on the Stop the War Coalition website.

xD.

1 – I’m thinking of including ‘Time person of the year 2006’ on my CV.

The fourth plinth

Posted on by David Landon Cole

The shortlist for the new installation on the Fourth Plinth have been announced. They are The Spoils of War (Memorial for an unknown civilian) by Jeremy Deller; Something for the Future by Tracey Emin; One and Other by Antony Gormley; Sky Plinth by Anish Kapoor; Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle by Yinka Shonibare; and Faîtes L’Art, pas La Guerre (Make Art, Not War) by Bob & Roberta Smith. Clicking on a link will take you to the relevant page on the London government website.

Models of the pieces are on display at the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square until 30 March.

One and OtherAntony Gormley’s piece calls for 8,670 people to stand on the plinth for an hour each over the course of the year. Off the bat, I rather like the idea. I’m not entirely sure why, but something about putting ordinary people on the plinth is attractive to me. People could do whatever they want (I would probably take a table, chair and pot of tea) but it also emphasises the person on the street amongst the heroes of Trafalgar Square, particularly as some of the heroes aren’t very well known1.

There is also a comparison to be made with Tracy Emin. Gormley is known for his metal body casts that have been on the skyline around the Hayward lately, but moved on to come up with something new, particularly as something similar to the ‘Gormies’ had already stood on the Plinth – Ecce Homo. Ms Emin did not.

Something for the FutureI am not a fan of Tracey Emin. I have no problem with conceptual art, but I think the concepts Emin chooses to explore are uninteresting and her methods derivative. In fairness to Ms Emin, I was probably biased against her from the start. The rubric for Something for the Future reads

For some years Tracey Emin has been interested in the social behaviour of meerkats, small mammals that live together in an egalitarian order in the Kalahari Desert, southern Africa. She has noticed that ‘whenever Britain is in crisis or, as a nation, is experiencing sadness and loss (for example, after Princess Diana’s funeral), the next programme on television is Meerkats United’. Emin proposes to place a sculpture of a small group of meerkats on the empty plinth as a symbol of unity and safety.

This is an example of selection bias, as there are events as tragic that affected one person that did result in the meerkat effect (the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, for instance). It also misses the fundamental point about meerkats – they’re permanently at risk and so are always on guard. Meerkats are an example of perpetual terror, danger and flight, not unity and safety and certainly not anything I would like to feature in my future. Meerkats also have a hierarchical society, with alpha males leaving their scent on subordinates so that everyone knows who is in charge. It is also effectively nicking the aesthetics of a previous statue on the Fourth Plinth, Ecce Homo.

Make art not warThe Smiths’ piece could have been very interesting. Its size would rival Nelson’s Column and I like the idea of highlighting an anti-war message on a square named for a great battle and with statues and busts of military leaders, particularly as Trafalgar Square has been the culmination for several large rallies opposed to various wars over the years. I also like the idea of powering a dynamic installation with solar and wind power. However, it falls down on one significant point: aesthetically, it’s rubbish. It is displeasing to the eye and looks like a child has cobbled together some Meccano. I don’t see why it has to be in French, and the message could be slightly more subtle than ‘make art, not war’, particularly as the presence of a huge piece of art suggests that war isn’t preventing people from making art.

The spoils of warThe Spoils of War is trying to do the same as Make Art not War, but isn’t (to my mind) as interesting. Where Alison Lapper Pregnant or Hotel for the Birds challenge preconceived opinions, I don’t think people, given the amount of televisual and pictorial reporting, think that war is not destructive. It is interesting, though, that the shortlisting committee chose two pieces directly related to war, which I suspect is because of Trafalgar Square’s return to prominence as a place of protest following its pedestrianisation and redevelopment.

Sky plinthAnish Kapoor’s Sky Plinth could work and could offer some interesting photos, but I feel that something less abstract is needed following Hotel for the Birds. I would add that a brief examination of the model did not reflect the ceiling.

Nelson's ship in a bottleNelson’s Ship in a Bottle presses all the buttons for me. It is aesthetically both striking and interesting and has multiple layers of interest – the bottle, the ship and the sails, which will be made of designs based on batik. The sails are, apparently, presumed to be of African origin, when they are more accurately a product of the mix of cultures in London and it will fit in well with the history and name of the square. The ship in a bottle also appeals to me as something quirky, which seems appropriate for eccentric London.You can leave comments on the London government website as well as here. It will come as no surprise that my preferred choices are either Yinka Shobinare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle or Antony Gormley’s One and Other. I would very much like to hear what other people think in the comments.

xD.

1 – While everyone has probably heard of Horatio Nelson, James II and George Washington, I wonder how many have heard of Henry Havelock, Charles James Napier or Andrew Cunningham.

Photos from Paris

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Alice and I went to Paris shortly after New Year for a few days and had a lovely time. Although a bit cold, damp and grey, we thoroughly enjoyed it. A few photos follow below for your delectation. Clicking on a photo will bring it up full-size.
The Louvre pyramid

Louvre Reflection

The pyramidal entrance to the Louvre is fantastic. As well as being attractive, it works well as an identifying mark for the Louvre and is functional, pouring sunlight into the basement hall beneath. The reflection of the pyramid on the edge of the fountain caught my eye; it just happened to have been drained, showing what I think is polished granite.

Veiled statues

A night at the museum

I peered through the wooden gate you can see at the back of the photo and saw this scene from behind, but couldn’t find a decent shot. I was delighted when I could get this from the other side. Despite the Louvre being quite busy, this seemed like an ocean of calm. The sign said that it was a set of statues that had been put there to protect them from flooding. There was something very strange about these statues; they almost seemed to object to their treatment.

A rose by any other name

Talking of melancholy, this statue caught my eye. The grey days didn’t make for good photos, but you can just about see that the flower she holds is a live rose placed by someone. She seems to be choosing between love and wealth, judging by the dog next to her.

Rose statue

Colours

These three are just random colours together; the first is a stack of berets in a touristy shop near Notre Dame while the other two are from shops selling material in Montmartre.

Stacks of berets

Materials

Rolls of material

xD.

Video killed the radio star

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Tom Watson links to a fascinating article on Rolling Stone magazine’s website about the deleterious effects MP3s are having on the quality of music, both in terms of fidelity and whether it’s worth listening to at all. The article, which is worth reading in full1, essentially says that people want to make music with more loudness2 so that more people will listen to it (or rather, notice it) and, because of the technical restrictions on MP3s, this can only be done at the expense of sound quality. It is an interesting thesis, but it doesn’t quite give the full picture.

MTV logoThe problem started with MTV. Video may not have killed the radio star, but there’s pretty good evidence for GBH3. The first problem is the ‘tele‘ part of Music Television. Quite apart from television being a chimera of a Greek and a Latin word (and so no good could ever come of it), it is designed for speech, not music. This affects how the signal is modulated, transmitted, received, decoded and – most importantly – reproduced. The speakers on televisions are, as a rule, not of particularly high quality. They are more than adequate for speech programming, but they’re not going to faithfully reproduce every nuance of music; they’re not designed for it. As MTV grew, the ‘vision’ became the problem. A record label only has so much to spend and so an increasing amount is spent on the video; after all, that’s what the kids want, as they’re watching MTV. This means less spent on the recording and mastering. The easy (read: cheap) workaround to making your song good is to make it noticeable by increasing the amount of loudness.

There is another problem; music is played in pubs. I don’t object per se to music being played in pubs, but I object very strongly to music being played so loudly that I can’t have a conversation with the person opposite me without raising my voice or the choice of music being discordant with the surroundings. I have been in otherwise lovely, Victorian pubs with happy hardcore playing over the speakers. Whether or not you like DJ Sharkey, he doesn’t go well with a pint of stout. The result, though, is an increased demand for (and, through royalties, reward for) music that, in essence, sounds alright over okay-ish speakers in a loud room.

All this means that people come to expect a certain quality of music and are quite surprised by how rich music can actually sound. There is no desire to look for better quality because there is no awareness of its existence, and, where there is, no means to access it.

Deutsche Grammophon logoThis process continued with the advent of the MP3 format, but it did not start the trend; indeed, one of the songs used to initially assess the quality of sound recorded as MP3 was Tom’s Diner by Suzanne Vega. Whether you agree with me in liking Suzanne Vega is irrelevant; Tom’s Diner is a detailed song. MP3 became popular because of limited storage space and download times; the sacrifice of quality for small size seemed attractive. This isn’t as much of an issue now – iPods and the like store huge amounts of information in a small box and a terabyte (a thousand gigabytes) drive is available for £150 – and so MP3s encoded at higher rates are more realistic. Sufficiently realistic, in fact, that Deutsche Grammophon are now offering MP3 downloads of their entire back catalogue. Given that DG place a high value on the quality of their sound recordings, I think it suggests that MP3 does offer viable, good sound quality.

However, people don’t have the means, as I mentioned, to access that quality. A good example of this is the habit some people have of playing music on their mobile phones on the bus. The speakers are rubbish and any sound that comes out (quite apart from the lyrical delights of Soulja Boy’s wonderful hit, Crank Dat (Soulja Boy), which exhorts us to watch him do before cranking it ourselves, possibly without the necessary safety equipment) will be offensive to the ears. It appears to be an increasing norm or in-group signifier amongst some subgroups to engage in this behavior. I’m sorry if I sound sanctimonious, but it is inconsiderate and ill-mannered behavior. If you’re playing your music on your phone, there’s no way for you to appreciate decent quality music. Equally, a lot of music seems to be written so as to go directly to the lucrative ringtone market; quality is not important but catchiness – loudness – is.

This process has been going on since before 1994. I hope that the advent of digital broadcasting, faster internet and larger, cheaper storage means that more people will become aware of how good sound can sound. A better solution than MP3 is FLAC, which aside from being open source (with all the benefits for free software, in both senses of the word) is lossless; it’s been taken on by EBU (the people behind Eurovision) for their radio broadcasts. I’d venture that DG isn’t offering FLAC because people aren’t familiar with it (yet) as MP3 stole a march.

xD.

1 – if for no other reason than that, on page four, it has scientific proof (illustrated with pictures) that the Arctic Monkeys are rubbish and that U2 have become rubbish.
2 – which is not the same as loud music; have a look at the Wikipedia entry on loudness.
3 – I know of at least one barrister who reads this blog, so I’d appreciate it if m’learned friend could correct me if I’m wrong on this, but I believe, although there was no intent, that as there was foresight and recklessness and the harm occasioned is particularly grievous, a charge of GBH is more appropriate than ABH.

New EDM for the Iraqi employees

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Lynne Featherstone has tabled a new EDM on the situation around the Iraqi employees. It reads:

That this House recognises the courage of Iraqis who have worked alongside British troops and diplomats in southern Iraq, often saving British lives; notes that many such Iraqis have been targeted for murder by Iraqi militias in Basra, and that an unknown number have already been killed, whilst many others are in hiding; further recognises that many Iraqis who have worked for fewer than 12 months for the UK are threatened by death squads; and therefore calls upon the Prime Minister to meet the UK’s moral obligations by offering resettlement to all Iraqis who are threatened with death for the “crime” of helping British troops and diplomats.

To date, it has been signed by eleven members of the Labour Party, two members of the Conservative Party, eleven Liberal Democrats, one member of the SDLP and one member of the DUP. The text of the EDM and the up-to-date list of signatories are on the Parliamentary website.

If your MP doesn’t appear on the list I link to above, please write to them asking them to sign the EDM. It’s number 401; there’s more information on EDMs in Parliament’s glossary. If you don’t know who your MP is, you can look it up with your post code on Write to Them. Their address is House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA. Be polite and be courteous.

Further information is on the indefatigable Dan Hardie’s blog.

xD.

A Blogger’s Manifesto by Erik Ringmar

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Erik Ringmar, a good friend of mine from the LSE, has written what, to my knowledge is a double first with his book, A Blogger’s Manifesto. It is the first academic study of blogs and it is the first book about blogging that isn’t about how public relations people should take advantage of blogging, how you can make money from your blog or presents a collection of articles from blogs.

For me, A Blogger’s Manifesto has three themes; one, that saying that ‘blogging is good for free speech’ only fits in with one of the three interpretations of freedom of speech; secondly, that the implications of blogging range far beyond the (somewhat self-important) political blog; and that blogging can make our world better, but that it requires people to be less sensitive and a bit more in touch with reality.

Erik has, unfortunately, experience of being ‘dooced’. The story is recounted on Wikipedia and The Guardian, but I would like to say again that I think George Phillip and Howard Davies massively over-reacted, damaged the LSE’s reputation and cost its students a good lecturer and a good teacher. It colours his interpretations, but not unjustifiably so. As I have said in the past, freedom of speech, if it means anything, means having to hear things you don’t want to hear. It also means that other people have to hear what you don’t want them to hear.

1. Three promises
Erik very succinctly describes three variations on free speech justification; the republican rights of man, the liberal against restriction of freedom and the radical that emphasises access to information as much as freedom of speech. The great improvement that blogging brings is not that anybody come say what they want, but that anyone has access to unmediated information if they want it; unmediated by politicians, companies, editors or anyone else. It requires an educated citizenry, but it offers the chance for people to find about what matters to them, be it transport policy or embroidery. It is a fascinating way of looking at free speech and implicitly asks what anyone who restricts access to information and the internet has to hide.

2. Blogging beyond politics
The political bloggers tend, I think, to overstate their own importance. We are on the verge of unseating the ‘dead-tree press’ and heralding a new era of political engagement. We are not there yet, and the changes will most likely occur from the bottom-up rather than by a decapitation of existing filters.

The modal average blogger is, it would appear, a teenaged girl and people blog about everything – literally, everything. Whatever it is that someone finds interesting, someone will be blogging about it. One of the things people do most often is work and so it is not surprising that work comes up a lot in peoples’ blogs, whether it be Petite Anglaise, Dooce or, indeed, Erik Ringmar. The way companies react tell us a lot about them; they seek criticism in general and blogs in particular as a threat to be jumped on. The case of the LSE is instructive. I did my undergraduate degree at LSE and had a great time. I would recommend the LSE to anyone. That does not mean it is perfect; there are areas where it could improve. Erik highlighted some of them; the response to his speech was instructive; the fact that someone would give a warts-and-all representation of the LSE made the good more believable. Consumers, as students are increasingly treated, can see through PR but find honesty appealing. This applies to all consumers, broadly defined.

3. Hear my voice
There are risks associated to blogging. It gives a platform to anyone, not just people we are willing to be heard. Not only does this allow this allow the deeply unpleasant to express themselves, it means that the vulnerable can be targeted. The answer to both problems is education. In the case of the vulnerable, it is education about the risks of the internet and, given that people tend to ignore advice, how to remain as safe as possible. In the case of the deeply unpleasant, the most effective countervailing force is an educated citizenry with the ability to critique information presented as fact; these are skills that should be developed in school but can be developed later.

If there is more information out there, it is more likely to concern any given person or organisation; this seems to explain the paranoia among some companies and the raft of PR companies offering services for blogging and other social media. The message that comes through for me from Erik’s book is that blogging is not ‘there’… yet. It is growing and finding its voices – and it’s voices in the plural, not voice. The utilitarian justification for free speech that Mill outlines in On Liberty stands and organisations would do well to foster constructive criticism. They have much to gain.
Erik has an engaging style of writing and his breadth of knowledge and natural inquisitiveness, coupled with some sour personal experiences and the resultant support, make it a book that starts firing t. I thoroughly recommend that anyone interested in anything more than the superficie of blogging read this book. It is available for free download on Erik’s website and is published by Anthem Press and is available on Amazon.

xD.

PS – I declare a relevant interest here, as I sent information to the author for the book and was firmly ‘on his side’ during the disagreement at LSE.

Political party funding

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Over at Liberal Conspiracy, Sunny asks four questions.

1) Is Labour still the vehicle for liberal-left ideals?
2) Or is that only because it is in power?
3) What should be the future for party financing?
4) How can any grass-roots liberal-left movement have impact?

Here are my answers.

1. Is Labour still the vehicle for liberal-left ideals?

Yes. It has the history, the recognition and the systems in place. If we look at one of the alternatives that has been mooted on LC, the
Green Party, we see that it is only starting to make serious headway in electoral terms and that it continues to struggle with finding a
consolidated public voice.

Equally, the emotional attachment to Labour for many people is strong. Some people have the opposite emotion, and would quite happily go to a
Respect or SWP, while some would go for an Orange Book flavour of LibDem. There can be no doubt that trying to change vehicle would lead
to the liberal/left going in lots of different directions and giving the Tories almost free rein.

It does not mean that it cannot be the only body, but the single issue campaigns that I suspect many of us identify with stand a better chance of having effect with a single party to promote them at Parliament.

2. Or is that only because it is in power?

The Government is starting ? just starting ? to give the impression of being in Government but not in power. However, devolution to Wales,
Scotland, Northern Ireland and London, and to a lesser extent local councils, means there are other things for which to fight. I would say
that it is a lot easier to make changes when in power than when out of power. Even if Labour were out of power at Westminster, it would remain the best chance of regaining it.

3. What should be the future for party financing?

I am not an expert on the law, but I’ll give some thoughts; they largely follow on from Hayden Phillips’ report.

Firstly, there must be a hard cap on expenditure; donations are a trickier issue, but the arms race that drives the search for donations
could be limited and so make concentrating on a strategy of more, smaller donors more attractive. Labour would like to see less corporate donations to the Tories, and the Tories less to Labour from the Unions. As these are red lines that the parties won’t cross, it seems to me that the funding issue is only going to move slowly and with tinkering at the edges; expenditure is a different matter.

Secondly, if there is to be further state funding, it must be on a capped, donation-matched basis. I remain very dubious about the effect
that state funding has on preventing political parties dying out and being formed.

Thirdly, spending outside of elections must be included in a cap. It is too easy to saturate an area before a Parliament is dissolved.

Fourthly, the parties must realise that they are going to have to change their advertising strategies and see that they will not have
the financial wherewithal to run campaigns like a commercial organisation would. This means less money on billboards and more on
supporting local parties to go door-to-door.1

I was Treasurer of my CLP for two years and had to report certain donations if they fell above a given value. It is a time-consuming job
and one consideration must be for any changes to be practicably implementable by volunteers.

Ultimately, it must be connected to a cultural change in campaigning for it to have effect.

4. How can any grass-roots liberal-left movement have impact?

The grass-roots liberal-left movement should be the Labour Party. I think there is a degree of putting the cart before the horse on this
one. The question is one of engagement; how does the Labour Party get more people to give small amounts of money? I would say that
The Labour Party probably can’t, but that the Anytown Constituency Labour Party can. Achieving this requires members of the
Labour movement – the Party, the Co-Op movement, the Unions – to turn up to meetings, to take an interest in internal party democracy and to show that there is a ‘market’ for this. It also requires people nearer the top of the Labour Party (and here I’m thinking of the elder
statespeople of the PLP) to convey both the message and the weight behind the message.

A brief note; over at Liberal Conspiracy, there is mention of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act. It has only a few lessons
for the UK because candidates rather than parties attract funding in the US; because of the winner-takes-most effect of the presidential
system; and because of the Supreme Court’s ability to overrule decisions made by the Congress. There is also greater public acceptance of large donations. The main thing to learn, as McCain said at the time, is that it is not possible to ever come up with a definitive set of laws as people are always looking for loopholes. Vigilance and adaptability are key.

xD.

1 – I think measures to reduce the distortion towards marginal seats would be useful, but that is a different kettle of sustainably-caught fish.

The Oxford Union, a Racist and a Holocaust Denier

Posted on by David Landon Cole

The Oxford Union is a private debating society; only members can attend its proceedings. Its appeal for speakers is in being able to influence some of the top minds in the UK and the world and, of course, being recognised as worthy of such an opportunity. It does not matter a hoot whether people outside the intelligentsia have heard of it, particularly as it is frequently confused with OUSU, the Students’ Union, and that its finances are secure thanks to the formation of the Oxford Literary and Debating Union Trust.

The invitation to Nick Griffin and David Irving were not ever about free speech; they were about raising publicity for the current administration of the society. There was no facility for Messrs Griffin and Irving’s comments to be disseminated; consideration was not given to those who would speak against this pair of pukes – viz. an email from Luke Tryl of October 15th – beforehand.

Equally, Griffin and Irving are the worst people to choose to argue for freedom of speech; not because of their repulsive politics, but because they are too easily open to arguments against the person rather than the arguments they propose. Furthermore, they well know that few people at the Oxford Union will give two hoots for anything that a thug of a politician and a poor historian will say; however, the boon to the BNP and its fellow travellers will, I think, be substantial. If the Oxford Union wanted to have an informative debate for its members on freedom of speech, I would have thought that John Gray, Inayat Bunglawala and Ayaan Hirsi Ali would have been better speakers; controversy for its own sake is a poor substitute for radical thought and honest learning.

I said at the beginning of this post that the invitation was about publicity, not free speech. Perhaps that is unfair, and I should attribute it to incompetence rather than malice. Either way, I hope that Mr Tryl, who appears to have a nascent political career, takes a step back to consider the effects that the actions he and his associates have undertaken will have. The message that will be taken away from this is that a bad politician and a bad historian are people who are worth listening to.

Oxford Councillor Antonia Bance has one take on it; Skuds has a rather different one.

xD.

Letting them die

Posted on by David Landon Cole

As many people will be aware, the Government has made only the barest of concessions towards helping Iraqis employed by British forces in Iraq who are being hunted down by death squads who view them as collaborators. Regardless of your opinion or lack thereof on the war in Iraq (for the record, I opposed it), Britain has a responsibility to these people that it put in harm’s way. I’m asking you to read this post, blog about it yourself and write to your MP.

Dan Hardie, the campaign co-ordinator, has had emails from three people claiming to be Iraqi former employees of the British Government. The ISPs confirm that one email was definitely sent from Damascus, the others from satellite networks serving the Middle East. He have spoken to two of them on the phone, using Iraqi telephone numbers. A Times journalist in the region tells Dan that two of them are certainly authentic: she has been in contact with them herself. The other has sent Dan scanned copies of his British Army IDs, and photographs of him with smiling soldiers. I believe all three are who they say they are. All three say that they and their former colleagues are still hiding from the death squads or dodging Syrian policemen.

The most eloquent arguments come from the Iraqis themselves. Here’s an email exchange between Dan and one of the Iraqis.

1) Are you still in Iraq? (I know that this information must be kept secret so that you are not put at risk.)
‘Yes, I’m still hidden in somewhere in the hell of Basra.’

2) Is there any reason you cannot travel to the British Army base at Basra Airbase to ask for asylum?
‘Of course, we cannot travel to BIA (Basra International Airbase) due to the militia keep watched all the ways to BIA and they got their own fake check points there although, we claimed for asylum through the internet (we sent our application to the claim office at BIA) . But we afraid that the British are going to take a long time to process our claims also we are very worried if they will offer just some money instead of asylum, please sir inform all the British people that we looking for asylum and just the asylum will save our lives, also we can’t travel to Syria anymore to claim for asylum there as the Syrian government issued new conditions for Iraqis who want to travel to their country.’

3) Can you tell me how and when the militias threatened you?
‘In 2006 I have threatened by militia that hated me because I work and help coalition forces in Iraq, I told my bosses about that but they said we can’t do anything for you because we have nothing to do with civilian and we don’t have any army rules or orders to help you, then I continued my daily work with British army, few days later the militia attacked my house trying to catch me but I was at the work at that time, they beaten my family and told them: we want your son or we will kill all of you!!!!

Since that day I decided to leave my job and change my home place but until this moment the militia trying to find and kill me, I’m always changing my place trying to hidden from them, they know that I left my job but they don’t care, they just want to kill me they called me collaborator and traitor and they asked everybody know me about my place, they told them: anyone know anything about [name] he should tell us immediately and also they said: we will never give up until we catch [name].

‘They work for ministry of interior so they controlled most of government departments and they work under that cover.’

4) Do you have any family members who are also threatened by militias or who depend on you? If so, how many of them are there and how old are they?
‘Of course, my family depends on me especially in the finance side as I’m the older son between seven sons and daughters they got, on other hand my parents cannot working as they are very old.’

5) Do you have written testimonials from British Army officers saying that you have worked for them? What are their names and what Regiments do they come from? Can you send me scanned copies of the testimonials? What date in 2003 did you start working for the British?
‘Yes, I have recommendations from high ranks British army personnel and I will send it for you in the next few hours and you will see in your eyes all the details you need.
I started in the beginning of the war with Commandos (in 30 of March 2003) then continued with 23 Pioneer Regt, and in 08 / 07 / 2003 I have joined the Labour Support Unit (LSU) as an office Manager.’

Another employee is in Syria, and is applying for aid from the British Embassy in Damascus. He can prove that he has worked for the British for over 12 months, after the magic date of 1st January 2005. But he isn’t safe, either. He is staying illegally in Syria, having considerably over-run the 15-day visa on which he entered the country. He tells me ‘If I see any syrian officer i really get fear , becuase of my expired visa.’ Colleagues of this man are also hiding in Damascus and are even worse off than he is, because they don’t meet the perverse and arbitrary time stipulations. The British Government, which asked us to accept that it was invading Iraq in part because of its horror at the brutality of the Ba’athist dictatorship, is now perfectly happy to leave its own former employees to the mercies of Syrian Ba’athists. One of his emails follows.

‘I know 4 former interpreters worked less than a year (for the British: DH), but they went to the embassy and they filled the paper with out telling the guards we had worked for less than a year. The syrian guards have got instructions from the embassy (British Embassy in Damascus: DH), that (they) do not give that form to any interpreter who worked for British less than a year or any former interpreter who worked in 2003 and fled to syria before 2005.’

You’ve heard this before, but it’s now more important than ever. The last round of emails, letters and pestering meant the Government acknowledged the problem exists, but its response was ill thought-out and grossly inadequate. It only takes a moment to contact your MP. Below are some talking points that you might like to use in an email and/or print letter; do chase them for an answer. Remember to be polite and courteous; an insulted MP will not raise this matter with Ministers, and that will lead to more avoidable deaths. When you get an answer, email Dan at danhardie.blog@gmail.com and let me know what they said. Dan is in direct contact with Iraqi employees.

Your MP’s address is The Houses of Parliament, Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA.
His or her email address is probably SURNAMEINITIAL@parliament.uk (eg BROWNG@parliament.uk ).

Talking points:

  • On October 9th David Miliband announced that the British Government would assist former employees in Iraq, so long as they had worked for it after 1st January 2005 and for 12 months or more. That abandons several hundred Iraqis who have been targetd for murder because they worked for the British before that date- and in 2004 fighting between the Mahdi Army and the British was at its peak- or because they worked for less than that period, often leaving their jobs at the end of a British battalion’s six-month tour. The British Government must help Iraqi employees on the basis of the risk they face, not according to an arbitrary time stipulation. This only affects a few hundred Iraqis, whom we are well able to shelter, and for whom we have a direct moral responsibility.
  • Even those Iraqi employees who qualify for assistance are not being properly assisted. Iraqis in Basra are not able to apply via the British Army in Basra Interational Airbase, since it is ringed with militia checkpoints. Iraqi ex-employees in Damascus are being screened by Syrian policemen guarding the British Embassy and delayed by lengthy bureaucratic procedures when they apply for asylum, although many of them are illegally overstaying their Syrian visas and face deportation back to Iraq.
  • A blogger called Dan Hardie is directly in touch with a number of Iraqi employees via email and phone. He is willilng to brief MPs- as concisely as possible- either over the phone or via email. He can be reached at danhardie.blog@gmail.com

xD.