Blog

Show us a better way

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Via Tom Watson, I’ve found out about the Show Us a Better Way project. The idea is very simple; I quote from their website:

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated

I have three entries.

Entry the first: Free our bills! The wonderful MySociety.org people who brought us TheyWorkForYou.com are spearheading this campaign; I encourage you to read the why and wherefore at theyworkforyou.com/freeourbills. More generally, better use of RSS across government is needed. For instance, I’ve been tracking the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Bill. It would be really nice to be have an easier way of tracking all the documents, like amendments, as they come through. The same could apply to the GLA, Senedd, Holyrood, Stormont and local councils. A central website to keep track of them all would be nice as well.

Entry the second: Following on from that, it would be good to be able to find out what’s going on in your area or that would be of general interest. To that end, anything be done by any arm of government could be tagged with an area of interest and the postcodes it would affect. You might only be interested in recycling in your immediate area, and so might ask for anything that matched ‘recycling’ and ‘SW1A 0AA’ to be emailed to you while for transport, you might want to look a bit further afield and would have ‘transport’ and ‘SW1, EC1, EC2’ or somesuch.

Entry the third: The Consolidated Fund is the Government’s bank account. It’d be nice to have a website that shows the state of the Consolidated Fund and where money comes from and goes to; simple pie charts, updated relatively often, would do the trick. The same thing – again – could be done for different levels of government, ideally down to the ward level.

I think entry the second is the best of my ideas. I might work it into a proper proposal.

xD.

Unintended consequences

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Nadine Dorries MP (Conservative, Mid Beds) complains about the ‘deluge of liberalising amendments’ proposed by various MPs.

Unfortunately, Ms Dorries is continuing in her wilful ignorance of, er, reality.

Let’s clear up a minor point. Dorries says

against the backdrop of statistics which show that we now have children aborting

That is a misleading sentence. The key word is ‘now’; this is nothing new. I showed (using clever sums and everything!) that there is no statistically significant rise in the number of abortions by people under sixteen. To say that ‘we now have children aborting’ suggests a recent change or, at any rate, a change. There is no evidence for that.

Moving on, the deluge is somewhat misleading. Below the fold you can find, by MP and date, all the amendments proposed by Evan Harris, John Bercow and Nadine Dorries to the HF&E Bill. Of the three MPs, Evan Harris has submitted the great bulk of the amendments. Very many of them deal with relatively technical details and the like; almost all deal with developments in fertilisation and embryology. No great surprise, there, as we are talking about the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Bill.

Ms Dorries has no comeback when people wish to amend the Bill to liberalise abortion; it was she who took the Bill beyond its original purposes with her amendments to restrict abortion.

I think the amendments tabled by both men amount to a form of legislative abuse of women. They display no care or attention to the effects of abortion on women and a complete disregard towards any moral direction of our young people.

I could, of course, say that the amendments tabled by Ms Dorries (her sex being largely irrelevant) amount to a form of legislative abuse of women by stripping them of rights over their own bodies. When Dorries talks about a lack of care and attention, I presume she is moving forward to this passage in her post:

His [Bercow’s] amendment seeks to criminalise any doctor of conscience who provides counselling or guidance to any woman seeking an abortion, with two years imprisonment.

Fortunately, it is such an outrageous amendment which would almost certainly result in the imprisonment of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh and Hindu GPs everywhere, that the Speaker is very unlikely to accept it.

I read it differently. I think it says that doctors should be doctors, not proselytisers. If (say) a Jehovah’s Witness were to become a surgeon, would we allow them to refuse to administer blood transfusions? If a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster were to become a psychiatrist, would we allow them to Talk Like a Pirate on September 19th? As I and Unity have said before, Dorries’ arguments about absolute religious objections to abortion are weak.

If we are allowed a debate on restricting abortion, I don’t see why we shouldn’t have one on liberalising abortion. I’d add that liberalising abortion doesn’t necessarily mean raising the twenty-four week limit; it can mean making it easier to have an abortion up to (say) fourteen weeks.

xD.
Continue reading “Unintended consequences” →

Blog Nation part 2: qu’est-que c’est le blog?

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Last night’s Blog Nation gathering at the Guardian’s offices was interesting. Two main things came out of it for me.

1. There’s no such thing as blogging

Or rather, there’s no one thing called blogging. It’s a clever piece of software, coupled with the internet, that allows people to do different things. Just ‘political blogs’ covers sites that explicitly politically campaign and organise, discussion areas for groups and communities, sites for self-promotion, personal musings, ranting, communication with interest groups of all shapes and sizes and more besides. This is exacerbated by Labour being in government, meaning that there is no common enemy on which to focus. Even if, though, the Tories were in power, they would not be the focus of even the majority of blogs.

Until people move away from the idea that there is only one effective model of blogging – the trivia of day-to-day politics – the medium will not achieve its full potential. That conflict was highlighted in a panel discussion with Sadie Smith, Kate Belgrave, Zohra Moosa and Cath Elliott when various people raised the disconnect between feminist political blogs and other political blogs. While I don’t doubt that there is a disconnect, I don’t think it’s unique to feminist blogs; as I pointed out, there are lots of blog communities that focus on an abstract issue that have varying amounts of engagement with the generalist blogs.

In terms of making a political difference, a blog that only reaches twenty people may have as much impact as a blog a thousand times as large if those twenty people happen to be party activists who feel it gives them a connection to their local councillor (or whatever) as it can help to improve responsive campaigning and keeps those twenty motivated to knock on doors and hand out leaflets.

A point made by Mark Hanson of Labour Home was that all this new, social media may herald a return of sorts to the halcyon days of town hall meetings; unlike the television, it allows for responses. I do hope so; it strikes me that we’re not there yet.

All the above feeds into commenting. As we all know, there are a lot of unpleasant and fatuous comments out there. This feeds off and gives rise to the somewhat combative, adversarial feel of contemporary UK blogging. For my part, I feel this to be negative as, although there is a place for strong words, it seems to be drowning out engagement on a lot of blogs. This comes from the preponderance of the aforementioned style of blogging.

The indomitable Dan Hardie made a point that was picked up on by Mr Phil ‘No2ID‘ and others; if online campaigning is the visible tip of the iceberg, the greater part – offline campaigning – is there under the waterline. I agree with them; emails, websites, blogs, YouTube and the rest are the tools, not the objective.

My blog is a generalist blog. I hope that I have not given the impression that there is something inherently wrong with that style of blogging; that is neither my intention nor my belief. However, there is nothing inherently right either.

2. There’s no such thing as the left

There’s no such thing as the right, either. I dislike the use of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ as they are, at best, of low descriptive and predictive value. I would go as far to say that thinking in terms of a single axis is damaging for debate in the country, but that is a theme for another day. What was clear was that at this gathering of the liberal/left/progressive/’various people against nasty things’ caucus, there was not a single, unifying leitmotif. You might have been able to find twenty issues that four-fifths of people would have agreed on fourt-fifths of the time, and you would certainly have found groups with greater correlations than that. There will be particular issues and particular campaigns that bring people together from time to time, but to say that there was harmony and concord would simply be inaccurate. If the progressive (I can’t think of a better word) section of the British polity is going to effectively use the online domain, it must remain diverse and, crucially, campaign effectively offline as well.

I would tend to say that the same is true of bloggers who wouldn’t have fitted in at last night’s gathering. There was talk of the ‘right’ being a monolithic entity on the blogosphere (I think the description of choice was ‘pyramid’). Given the range between UKIP, libertarians, wets, dries, Tories, Young Turks, Englishers and so on, I don’t think that the description will hold (if it even does now) once their common enemy – Labour – is out of government.

My thanks to Liberal Conspiracy and the Guardian for organising it and to everyone there for the pleasant evening I had. There are some write-ups and so on over at LC, and I hope more will be appearing soon.

xD.

Blog Nation part 1: thanks, Cath

Posted on by David Landon Cole

I attended last night’s Blog Nation event hosted by Liberal Conspiracy and the Guardian. I’ll write it up later, once I have my thoughts in order, but I wanted to quickly thank Cath Elliott, who writes for Comment is Free, for linking to my post on Nadine Dorries’ use of statistics1 from this post of hers on CiF, entitled ‘It takes two to make a teenage pregnancy‘. Thankyou to everyone else who links to me from time to time… it’s just nice to be picked up by the Guardian.

xD.

1 – ‘like a drunk using a lampost, more for support than illumination’

Too little, too late

Posted on by David Landon Cole

The news that the UN Security Council has issued a statement condemning Robert Mugabe with the support of Thabo Mbeki’s South Africa is good news. After condemnation from Rwanda’s premier, Paul Kigame, and others, it seems that no-one in Africa, at least of any political substance, supports the Mugabe regime.

I think statements like this can make a difference. True, the protestations of the UK are batted away by Mugabe as propaganda from a would-be irredentist colonial power. It is much harder to dismiss that message if it comes from an African leader; the means by which some criticisms are deflected become useless. For such things to work, however, the criticisms need to reach the mass of the people. With no free press, poor electricity, hunger and flight across the country, it is of little surprise that the messages coming from Tshwane, Luanda and New York will not reach the people who need to hear them most.

Had Mbeki spoken out more forcefully while it could have made a difference, it might have encouraged Mugabe to leave. I may be being unfair; there was quiet diplomacy between Tshwane and Harare and it is impossible to know, until the history books are written, whether it was an idea that was never going to work or a gamble that didn’t pay off. It looks, though, like too little, too late.

xD.

Fourth Plinth: and the winner is…

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Model of Nelson's Ship in a Bottle by Yinka Shobinare MBE, courtesy of london.gov.ukThe next two installations for the Fourth Plinth have been announced; they are Antony Gormley’s One and Other and Yinka Shonibare MBE’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle. I’m delighted than Shonibare’s entry was chosen – I wrote about it here. As I said then, I think a model of HMS Victory would be particularly appropriate both because of the obvious links to Trafalgar and Nelson, but also because of London and Britain’s maritime heritage. The fabric used for the sails will be based on an African design, which seems to reflect the modernity of the city well, as does the irony of literally being ‘in a glass jar’ in an area used for demonstrations, festivals and, of course, statuary.

Model of One and Other by Antony Gormley, courtesy of london.gov.ukGormley’s entry, which consists of a series of members of the public standing on the plinth for an hour each, will only be installed (for want of a better word) for a hundred days, meaning 2,400 people will be able to take part. I’m tempted to have a go myself, mostly so I can take my camera and tripod and take some unique photos1. One of my projects at the moment (moment in the loosest sense of the word) is to try to photograph every statue in London and put them onto a searchable map; it would be fun to be part of the database.

I wonder how many people will use their hour to make a political or commercial point. ‘Vote for Me’ and ‘Eat at Joe’s’ on either side of a sandwich board seem like a good idea to me.

xD.

I’m thinking of getting a panoramic head anyway. Anyone have any experience with the Panosaurus?

Two cheers for Tom Watson

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East and Parliamentary Secretary to the Cabinet Office, has released a code of conduct for blogging civil servants. It reads:

1. Be credible
Be accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.

2. Be consistent
Encourage constructive criticism and deliberation. Be cordial, honest and professional at all times.

3. Be responsive
When you gain insight, share it where appropriate.

4. Be integrated
Wherever possible, align online participation with other offline communications.

5. Be a civil servant
Remember that you are an ambassador for your organisation. Wherever possible, disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency.

There are a couple of particular points that I want to flag – reasons why Tom deserves a cheer – and one big omission from the code.

First cheer

Tom attracted some controversy, and quite a lot of blog-inches were given over to the subject, when he talked about a Code of Conduct for civil servants who want to blog in March of this year. The early version read:

1. Write as yourself
2. Own your own content
3. Be nice
4. Keep secrets
5. No anonymous comments
6. Remember the civil service code
7. Got a problem? Talk to your boss
8. Stop it if we say so
9. Be the authority in your specialist field – provide worthwhile information
10. Think about consequences
11. Media interest? Tell your boss
12. Correct your own mistakes

That is the reason for the first cheer. While the thrust and many of the specific ideas remained, there are clear changes. He asked the experts (and I’m well aware of the irony of calling bloggers experts), listened to the debate and came up with a very sensible policy. I hope people take note – it is possible to have a pretty good debate on a policy in the online world. While I’m sure that the Civil Service had a great deal of input, as is only right and proper, I think we can see the effect of the informal, online consultation as well.

This isn’t just bloggers getting terribly excited at the merest sniff of actual politics (well, it is, but not only). The method of consultation seems to have worked rather well and is novel; rather than just a consultation where you submit responses and they’re collated, people were able to engage in a discussion about the policy.

Second cheer

Greville Janner’s Complete Speechmaker has a wealth of stories and anecdotes at the back. One of my favourite is on brevity:

“We have lost the ability to be brief. The Lord’s Prayer consists of seventy words; the Ten Commandments, three hundred and thirty five word. The EU Directive on the Importation of Caramel – 26,211”

If for no other reason that that the Civil Service Blogger Code is, in total, seventy-nine words, Tom Watson deserves recognition.

However, it is not just the appeal of the style that merits a cheer. As Matt Wardman points out, it encapsulates principles rather than individual rules. That will give it greater longevity and covers some of the problems with the original draft – client confidentiality, for instance, is covered under ‘5’. I know that the civil service code would still apply and that this acts as an addendum to it, but it’s easy to see how someone could, ahem, get confused.

But why no third cheer?

I commented on Tom’s original post to point out the big thing missing from his draft – protection for bloggers. Unfortunately, there are many instances of bloggers being fired from their employment for blogging. The creation of the Code of Conduct emphasises that the medium is new; people don’t know how it works and don’t know what their rights and responsibilities are. This Code of Conduct was an opportunity to establish, in principle, that ‘a right to blog’ is a subset of ‘the right to speak freely’. I’m afraid that, for missing that opportunity, Tom only gets two cheers.

(But they’re quite loud, Tom).

xD.

Sir Keith Park

Posted on by David Landon Cole

ACM Sir Keith Park, GCB, KBE, MC & Bar, DFC, RAF, photo courtesy of WikipediaAir Vice Marshal Sir Keith Park, later Air Chief Marshal, commanded No. 11 Group RAF from April to December 1940. No. 11 Group had responsibility for air defence of the south-east of England, including London, and so Park was in charge of the group that bore the brunt of Hitler’s attacks in the Battle of Britain.

There has been a movement to commemorate Park on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Boris Johnson initially indicated that he supported the idea, but in the end has decided to continue the Fourth Plinth project of changing artworks. As I have said before, I rather like the Fourth Plinth and I am glad that the project, for the time being at least, will continue. I expressed my support for Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle for the next installation.

However, the fact that the Fourth Plinth is not available does not mean that that there cannot be a statue of Sir Keith Park in the centre of London. While I understand the logic of putting a senior RAF person on a square that has army and navy figures already, there is a risk that Sir Keith would become as famous as some of the other statues on Trafalgar Square. Can you tell me what Henry Havelock, Charles James Napier or Andrew Cunningham did? Equally, despite the campaign’s statement to the contrary, the plinth is not empty. From an artistic point of view, the Fourth Plinth is shaped and sized for an equestrian statue – in the north-east corner, George IV is on horseback.

It would be unfortunate if the campaign to commemorate Park were to end. It would be equally unfortunate if it were to focus on overturning a given decision, potentially annoying people who support the Fourth Plinth project, when there are other places that could be considered. Leicester Square is undergoing redevelopment; there are spaces on both sides of the Ministry of Defence Main Building. Situated between the Embankment and Whitehall, lots of people walk past on the way between Parliament Square and Trafalgar Square.

A final thought; I do hope that this campaign, worthy though it is, is not the first of a series to replace the Fourth Plinth with something permanent.

xD.

The BNP, Hizb ut-Tahrir and no-platform

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Sunny Hundal asks a couple of interesting questions over at Pickled Politics; should a no-platform policy with regards to the BNP be continued and should that it be extended to groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir?

By way of a background, I understand a no-platform policy (in the instance of the BNP) to mean that no-one from an organisation with that policy would share a speaking platform of any description with a representative of the BNP and that the BNP should not be invited to speak at said organisation. I don’t consider this to impinge on freedom of speech. Firstly, there is no obligation, for the most part, on anyone holding an event to invite people of all political persuasions. Secondly, there are no restrictions placed as a result of the policy on the BNP’s ability to inform others and on others to inform themselves about the BNP as there is plenty of information out there, not least on their website; nor does it prevent their arguments being dealt with as it is not necessary for someone to be present to be able to take on board their argument.

The point of the no-platform policy is to prevent a serially mendacious party from being able to claim any form of recognition or acceptance from civil society because they will twist ‘appearing on platform x’ into an endorsement of their existence and precisely because they crave that acceptance. The evidence for that is the dropping of the boot-boy image for suits and the attempt to cover up their racist and violent tendencies for the image of a legitimate political party.

Sunny asserts that the ‘BNP has been successfully de-legitimised’. I’m afraid that this is not universally true; in parts of East London, they are very much legitimate to some parts of the community. It is true that there was not much of an increase in the vote for the BNP but it put them above the five per cent threshold to give them an Assembly seat; we cannot deny and must not ignore the benefits that the BNP will seeks to extract from this position. There are many things that can be done and, in fairness, are being done. However, abandoning a policy of delegitimisation just as the BNP achieve an electoral success would simply allow them to say that their ‘growth’ means that the mainstream parties now see them as a legitimate part of the political sphere.

A good reminder of the illegitimacy of the BNP comes from the Tory Troll, who reports that an internal challenge to the leadership of Nick Griffin has been met by that organisation’s elections officer, one Eddy Butler, telling members not to sign any nomination papers and for ‘zero publicity’ to be given to the challenger.

Hizb ut-Tahrir are a different kettle of fish altogether. Yes, they are unpleasant and, yes, they have traits in common with the BNP but it would be wrong to see Hizb ut-Tahrir as simply an Islamic version of the BNP. For one thing, they are in different situations and they have different political ends; that alone is grounds to consider different tactics for opposing these groups differently.

The BNP, as I see it, wish to appeal to all whites. Their tactics are dependent upon a broad appeal and, because of the level of their support, they cannot nurture individuals. Their aim is to represent what they would consider the ‘true’ inhabitants of the UK; a broad take-up of the no-platform policy makes it harder for them to claim that representation as the mainstream not only disagree with them but see them as beyond the pale. That might sound a little counter-intuitive, but they are not just going after the alienated but after people who feel they are abandoned by the major parties; the difference there is important.

Hizb ut-Tahrir are not targeting all Muslims; rather, they are going after Muslims they might consider susceptible to their influence. They seek to capitalise on alienation and would be able to capitalise on the exalted position of difference if no-platform were broadly implemented towards them; for those who might feel removed from the British polis (to the extent that it exists), this would highlight Hizb ut-Tahrir as a standard around which to rally.

I would echo a point made by Sunny:

“The other problem is that most of the people who choose to take on HuT don’t know much about them, which provides them an opportunity to play the victim card and pretend they’re just lovely people.”

“[T]he truth will set you free” (John 8:321) or knowledge is power2; whichever way you prefer it, providing honest information and background to both these groups is a decent part of defeating them. The question of no-platform is essentially a question of the best way of delivering the message and countering the threats they pose in a manner which at least does nothing to strengthen their position and at best weakens it. Given that, as I have said, I have no philosophical objection to no-platform, it becomes a tactical issue. Going back to the original questions, I would say that we should continue the no-platform policy against the BNP but that we should not extend it to Hizb ut-Tahrir at this juncture.

xD.

1 – Disclaimer – the truth will set you free, but you might not like it.

2 – And, given that I’m quoting a lot and that both the BNP and Hizb ut-Tahrir have their own variations on truth, ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’.

The persistence of American power – in response to Matt Sinclair

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Matt Sinclair has an interesting post up, in response to Will Hutton’s article, on the role of universities in promoting America’s hegemonic position. In short, Matt says that non-Western countries lack (in short) the cultural situation that allows Socratic method to flourish and that good academia attracts good academics.

To an extent, Matt is right, but he is mistaking symptoms for cause. If we look at the second point, which he refers to as network effects, we see the role of complex sequencing. Setting up a new university today is not the same as the creation of the Ancient universities – Oxford, Cambridge, Saint Andrew’s – the redbricks or even the plate glass universities. In the case of the American universities, a couple of hundred years of building up endowments means that promising academics in countries that do not have the traditions of freedom of speech and academic dialogue of the US are likely to end up overseas, hampering the development of an autoctonous academia. This explains Matt’s first point on cultural differences. Although I disagree with what seems a slightly Whiggish interpretation of history when Matt talks about cultural differences, the brain drain may result in reinforcing hostility to free speech. Geographic congregation for some skilled trades was noted by Adam Smith; this is a modern form of it.

There are other reasons that are essentially a result of complex sequencing. The de facto international language is English, which gives the US, along with a few other countries, a big head start.

xD.