There’s a race on, and no it’s not the Cheltenham festival. Should the election be held on the 6th of May as is expected then parliament will be duly dissolved around the 6th of April, which leaves only 10 days of parliamentary time to debate all the remaining laws trying to be passed. It is this reason that when the Lords finally passed the Digital Economy Bill on the 15th of March they spent a significant portion of time discussing the issue of the “wash-up”, or a (relatively) clandestine period of legislative discussion that occurs in the twilight between an announcement of an election being made, and parliament being closed down for the impending election.

The Government here has one hope and one set of plans, get the Digital Economy Bill through to the “wash-up” in such a way that they can add bits and pieces to an already illiberal piece of legislation without the proper scrutiny of parliament. Instead of our elected representatives ensuring that we are protected from bad law, it would come down to the front benches and the party political whims of the main parties. In short, representation takes the back foot in place of backroom dealing to pass the bills, even if they are slightly watered down in the process. It’s for this reason that we have to stand our ground and ask our MPs to ensure this controversial bill receives proper scrutiny. If they do not provide that scrutiny, if the law goes through on the nod, then the government will have every power to do what they wish, opposed only by the minority Lib Dem party and the Tory party who are surely not the best example of a party beholden to public democracy over business interests.

For those that are writing to your MPs, specifically point them to the areas of the bill that are problematic (and do so in your own words, it has more impact!):
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I can absolutely understand why many people around my age don’t want to vote in the upcoming elections, as long as they can understand why they deserve a smack and a dose of Susan B Anthony: suffrage is the pivotal right. If you opt out of the one effort that makes you a relevant civic entity, you have forfeited your right to complain about anything the government does, and you have betrayed all the other young people who do want the right to be heard. Generations of suffragettes, civil rights protesters and trades unionists did not fight and die so that you could sit on the sofa thinking about how the government never listens to you.

But if you’re stil parrotting the line that voting doesn’t make a difference and politicians are all the same – implying that you’ve never actually looked too hard at John Redwood- there is now an alternative. You can give your vote to someone who does care, someone in another country affected by Britain’s policies on trade sanctions, climate change and military interventionism, someone who doesn’t have a voice in these elections, but who just might deserve one.

The Give Your Vote campaign is one of the maddest, most mind-boggling, most potentially revolutionary ideas to come out of the internet age in Britain so far. continue reading… »

Ed Miliband, or at least his tweetmeister, has been asking for suggestions on what should be in Labour’s health manifesto for the coming election.

Now in principle, I’m against this sort of thing. Policy should be developed in branches, in CLPs, in unions and debated on the conference floor.

Even so, I have to admit there’s something quite attractive about being able to bung an idea into 140 characters and send it direct to someone given ministerial authority to pretend to be a minister online.

I think it’s a good way of picking up the odd good, practical idea for change that fits within the broad manifesto statement and brings it a bit more to life than it might otherwise.

So an experienced but now ex-nurse, as an ex-Director of a Primary Care Trust, as an experience developer of social enterprises, and as a Labour leader on a small council, I tweeted six quick ideas, all of which I think would make a decent positive difference to the NHS’s work, and all of which have the virtue of not costing that much.

Here they are, in unadulterated tweet form:

@EdMilibandMP #health Set up local social enterprises to conduct local needs and opportunities research with funds top-sliced from GP commissioning budget

@EdMilibandMP #health Re-democratize PCTs, especially if Adult Social Care functions are moved to the NHS, by creating real veto power in Overview & Scrutiny

#health @EdMilibandMP Reinforce valuable role of walk-in centres by secondment of A&E staff and provision of further emergency capacity.

@EdMilibandMP #health Provide seed corn funding for replication in medical wards of brilliant acute psychiatry www.starwards.org.uk/ idea

@EdMilibandMP #health Reintegrate fully the career development path for care workers/nurses so that nursing degree becomes possible for all

@EdMilibandMP #health Provide ‘guidance’ on minimum nursing staff levels in acute medical/elderly wards & ensure this is priority over all else

*

Don Paskini adds: Those are Paul’s ideas – now over to you. In 140 characters or fewer, which ideas do you think would improve the NHS (or any other area of policy) ?

There has been a lot of fuss about the Digital Economy Bill online for months, rightfully so. However the current topic that is particularly concerning to opponents of the bill is the latest amendment, 120a, tabled by Lib Dem and Tory peers to replace the vastly more dangerous Clause 17. Clause 17 was the one which it’s argued could give dark Lord Peter Mandelson – or any future Secretary of State – unwarrantable powers to change British copyright law.

If you can’t remember the problems with Clause 17 then you should take another look and be thankful that due to yesterday’s controversial amendment getting through such measures are being weeded out.

I am certainly not saying the bill is good, or even adequate, in either it’s original or it’s amended state; indeed once the bill is passed to the commons I intend to go through it on Liberal Conspiracy in detail. There is a lot more that is bad about the bill than just the file sharing aspects, areas that will unlikely be debated properly in the commons as they have barely been touched in the Lords, and unfortunately barely touched in public opposition. But there are some things that need to be understood about where we are now.

1) Things like this amendment (120a) are not fundamentally bad, certainly not so much that we should spend all of our efforts on them compared to the much greater risks to personal freedom present in the bill.
2) We need to be careful not to over-react because we are ourselves making assumptions about the language used.
3) There has to be a distinction between the law and the practicing of law, and a realisation that no legislation on an issue like this can cover every eventuality.

So, why isn’t this amendment quite as bad as people are saying? continue reading… »

The government are refusing to back down. They are pressing ahead with plans which even they admit could punish innocent people: by disconnecting whole families and companies where one individual may have infringed copyright.

The music and film lobbies have portrayed copyright infringers as thieves endangering their entire industries.

They have pressed for harsh and indiscriminate punishments and persuaded Peter Mandelson that any appeals should be narrow, and focus purely on legal technicalities.

‘I didn’t do it’ will be no defence: if somebody else seems to have shared copyright content on your account, that will be your problem. You will be punished.
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“Let me make sure you know exactly who I am and what I am going to do at the PCC” – so said Baroness Buscombe, the new chair of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), at the annual conference of the Society of Editors.

Having read her speech in full, I fear I do know what she is going to do at the PCC – and that I’m not going to like it.

It’s a curious speech in several ways. She started off by recounting in some detail her Conservative Party roots. Leading off with the fact that she’s a Conservative, added to the jibes at Labour and the silence about other parties (even though her reference to civil liberties gave an obvious opportunity to mention the Liberal Democrats, for example), leaves an obvious question about what her motives were.

I’m sure she’s a smart person and can’t have been unaware that the message many people will take from her speech is, “I’m a Conservative”. Is that really the right message for the chair of the PCC – which has to deal with complaints about political stories all in an equitable manner – to send? Is it the best way to reassure the public about how self-regulation will work on her watch?

There were also some rather astringent comments about Google and news aggregators:
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Today’s Sunday Times published a thoughtful contribution to the filesharing debate from Peter Mandelson. In it, he not only displays his understanding that the Internet, when used well, is about dialogue but also shows his stoicism at the route one style of conversation that takes place in the blogosphere

To those who have raised their voices about the proposed changes this week, let me say that I hear their concerns. I have read their blogs and can live with the abuse (I’ve had worse)

I see the article as a positive step and should be seen by digital rights campaigners and concerned ISPs that the door is still open. Now is the time to firmly make their case in the consultation on P2P.

I hope that the officials and special advisers to Lord Mandelson who may be reading blogs and briefing him might remember that the music industry have got past form at trying to pretend that technological advance isn’t happening.
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Anyone who’s passionate about science, as I am, cannot help but be seriously concerned by the growing extent to which anti-scientific ideas, and the groups and organisations that promote them, are increasingly creeping into public life and attracting mainstream political support.

While it’s easy to ridicule the purveyors of anti-scientific ideas when they’re to be found at the lunatic fringes of mainstream politics, and one thinks immediately of Nadine Dorries’s ridiculous claim that ‘Tridents aren’t weapons of mass destruction’ and David Tredinnick’s expenses claim for astrology software, the kidding around has to stop when one finds sizeable sums of public money are being routed to organisations that promote pseudoscience as a matter of public policy.
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Evenin’ all. I wanted to make a quick point about certain global news stories, and the relative amount of news coverage given to each.

Its fashionable, yet incredibly easy to complain that the Michael Jackson death has crowded out news of other more pressing matters. Shawn Micallef sounded an early word of warning about this attitude:

There is no need to compare MJ & Iran – completely dif, just intersect on same medium, not a social/moral lesson to be learned.

Then (again via Twitter, though the link is now lost in the maelstrom) I came across this MJ/Election mash-up, and it occurred to me that coverage (be it on Twitter, blogs or the international MSM) is not a zero-sum game, and that coverage of one piece of news could promote awareness of another.
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Recently, Nadine Dorries is emerging as a prominent figure in Tory politics, and since Conservatives are almost certain to be in power by this time next year that’s bad for people who support evidence-based policy, because her relationship with science and rational thinking has been rather fraught.

Dorries’ influence in the party was demonstrated in Prime Minister’s Questions on April 22nd, when dozens of other Conservative MPs sacrificed their opportunity to ask a question in order to allow Dorries to demand a personal apology from Gordon Brown over smeargate. This backfired so badly that Dorries achieved what no amount of Labour spin has been able to in recent months – she made Gordon Brown look good as he brushed her aside.
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There are many things that are very wrong with English libel law but, arguably, the one issue that should most concern bloggers is the chilling effect of the High Court’s despicable ruling in Godfrey vs Demon Internet Services, under which ISPs and other providers of online services are treated as a publisher, for the purposes of litigation, irrespective of whether or not they had any kind of involvement in publishing the allegedly libellous material.

The problem this creates for bloggers is simply that this makes UK-based ISPs and online services, in particular, a stupidly easy target for any crook, quack or and shyster with an interest in suppressing information about their dubious and, in some cases, unlawful activities. A mere threat of litigation is too often all it takes to propel a service provider into removing content from a blog or forum, regardless of whether the complaint has any kind of merit at all and, as Craig Murray, Tim Ireland, bob Piper and Boris Johnson found, it can even lead to the termination of an entire hosting account, resulting in sites being taken down which had nothing whatsoever to do with the complaint that the ISP received.

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with Google’s Webmaster Tools and came across a rather curious stream of messages from Google, which appear to have started last November:
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I think there’s more to Adrian Short’s Mash the State project (which he wrote of yesterday) that deserves exploring. I played a part in the project when I first laid eyes on this post by Adrian on how he’d managed to build a local news ‘mashup’ using Twitter, del.icio.us, RSS and other feeds. I thought to myself: hang on, if people wanted to build their own websites which featured a whole range of local news sources, including local council news, then this was the template they needed. I contacted Adrian about it, we talked about its potential and he ran with the project entirely by himself.

I think this is the future of local and citizen journalism: people building their own hyper-local portals with whatever news they want (from councils, local police forces, national organisations etc). Then it becomes a lot easier to learn what government authorities are doing and hold them to account. But for that we need easily accessible information. Adrian’s had some coverage in Guardian Technology already, and even been mentioned on the official Tory blog.

You can help by either contributing to the project, or contacting your council to ask why they don’t have an RSS feed for their news if they don’t already.

Last week I launched Mash the State, a national campaign to get government data to the people. It’s not a new idea but our method is. We’ll be setting up a series of challenges to the public sector, asking one group of public bodies at a time to release one specific set of data.

Our first challenge asks all local councils to serve up an RSS news feed by Christmas. I wouldn’t have bet good money in 2003 that by 2009 370 councils would still be without RSS, but here we are. I’ve thrown the gauntlet down and I’m pleased to see that a couple of hundred people have signed up to our website or followed us on Twitter to help make this happen.
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You may have read that email and internet phone information now has to be stored by your internet provider. The new law – promoted and pushed in the EU by the UK government – is a first step before they try to change how they can ‘intercept’ your communications.

You can help build the campaign to stop this, firstly by inviting all your friends to our Facebook campaigning group. Secondly, sign the No 10 petition if you haven’t done so already. We need to stop this!

There is a real difficulty in translating the Obama campaign to the UK. Inevitably, we end up focusing on the easy bits – the technology for example. The tougher bits such as how you pluck a energised movement out of the ether tend to be ignored. We focus on the more recent influences on Obama ‘08 – moveon.org and the Howard Dean campaign – and forget that it is actually rooted in very old-fashioned politics.

The Fabian Society’s Change We Need launched with self-conscious irony in Millbank Tower last night. Though excellent in many respects, it falls into this trap to a degree.
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A year ago, I wrote a piece here about the great art of the Gothic and Renaissance periods, and how we owe its existence to the Dead Hand of the (Tuscan) State. But where should we look for actions of slightly more modern government working to enrich our lives? Certainly not in the unending flow of nutty, illiberal laws; nor in the insidious creep of compliance culture (subject of a memorable Stephen Fry podcast). So, here’s an idea: look to the British Library.

More specifically, their Turning the Pages project, 10 years in the developing, that put our national library in the very first rank of learning innovation worldwide. (See the video.) The project’s achievement has been to digitize 15 (so far) of the Library’s most valuable manuscripts, and deliver them inside an interactive online environment that re-creates the experience of handling them in the raw.
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Writer of the popular Guardian ‘Bad Science’ column, Ben Goldacre, has been threatened with legal action by LBC radio. As Ben explains, the controversy arose when he took part in a debate on LBC radio around the MMR vaccine scare – a hoax that the media keep running with. He says the whole discussion was so bad, and the presenter Jeni Barnett’s behaviour on air so atrocious, that he posted the radio segment on his blog.

That invited legal threats by LBC radio, which in itself is outrageous. How is a radio segment (now on WikiLeaks) broadcast on air property of LBC? Furthermore, doesn’t it fall under the ‘fair usage’ criteria (or is that only applicable in the US?).
Ben says: “If you felt that this was an irresponsible piece of broadcasting, and an inappropriate use of the public bandwidth – which is licensed to companies such as Global Audio as a privilege by the nation – you may wish to complain about Jeni Barnett’s MMR show of 7th January 2009 to OFCOM.”

A complaint against Jeni Barnett is definitely in order, but what about LBC’s appalling behaviour in not allowing their output to be reproduced elsewhere?

Update: A Sunday Times investigation has now found Wakefield altered the MMR data. What will Melanie Phillips say now?

The government’s report into “Digital Britain” – an 81 page pdf – was launched last week.

As an interim report, it would be unreasonable to expect it to have come to conclusions across the board – but time after time, rather than offering up suggestions or ranges of options for further consideration before decision, the report basically says, “we’ve thought about it, and decide someone needs to think about it some more”.
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Digital Britain is one of those government initiatives that might provoke a degree of cynicism, since it comes at a point when many people are not expecting the authors to hold power for much longer.

Both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have criticised it as being unambitious in its headline conclusions about broadband roll out.

But that’s not the only thing about this report that should be worrying you.
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Last November I wrote a piece outlining the worrying implications of the BBC’s acquisition of Lonely Planet for the Corporation’s non-commercial UK neutrality. I’m not the only travel journalist with these sorts of doubts. The BBC Royal Charter and Agreement, remember, is very clear on how the Beeb can and cannot interact with the UK media market:

The Agreement requires all commercial activities undertaken by the BBC to comply with four criteria. …

4. comply with BBC fair trading guidelines and in particular avoid distorting the market.

Of course, that begs a whole series of questions, but this much is plain: BBC Worldwide activities that distort a domestic market in which the corporation is a player are forbidden. This, essentially, was the basis for the decision to disallow BBC investment in ultra-local video last year. It’s the reason that the BBC’s acquisition (through BBC Worldwide) of Lonely Planet should be reversed at the first opportunity. continue reading… »