The powerless of the individual in the face of the internet giants

Blogger was down for a whole day. I can, as you will no doubt be aware, post here again, but some posts are still missing. Blogger Buzz says these "should" be restored soon. I would find it more reassuring if it said that "will" be restored.

And when I finally got home from work Twitter was down too.

All of which brings home to me how little power the individual citizen on the net. I have no idea where my posts are held or what to do if they suddenly stop appearing.

I am reminded of an article John Harris wrote in the Guardian recently:

The computer industry came of age in the 1990s, that giddy phase of American and European history when authoritarianism was assumed to be on the wane. For sure, it's still nice to live in a liberal democracy, but given that the world has since moved in no end of sinister directions, isn't our unthinking embrace of the cloud (and just to recap: our medical records could soon be up there) an ill-advised throwback? 

And what of the long view: looking ahead 50 years, how certain are we that the surveillance state will not have extended its tentacles; that nasty, illiberal politics will not be all the rage; or that Google, Microsoft et al. will not have learned dangerous new tricks?

I fear there may be something in this - and not just because of today's frustrations.

If you went on a social media training course even a couple of years ago you would be told that ideas like "privacy" were hopelessly old-fashioned. Young people today put their whole lives online. We dinosaurs were going to have to catch up.

This was nonsense, of course. As those young people probably discovered when they started applying for jobs.

I do put a calculated version of my life online here on this blog. If anything, writing it has made me more active because I want to have something interesting to write about.

But we all need our privacy - whether from government or from Google. One of the notable things about commerce of the web is that is has not given rise to near perfect competition but to thumping great monopolies that it is hard to love.

Later. My missing posts are back. Thank you, Blogger.

Broxtowe ballot blunder sees wrong member of Lib Dem couple elected

From the Nottingham Evening Post:

Red-faced election officials declared the wrong member of a husband and wife team the winner at the ballot box.

Bob Charlesworth should have been announced as a successful candidate in the Broxtowe Borough Council elections last week.

But instead his wife Hazel Charlesworth – who was also running for office but polled 21 fewer votes – was elected to the seat in the Eastwood North and Greasley (Beauvale) ward.

The couple say they can see the funny side of the situation – but the council will now have to go to court to rectify the mistake.

Both husband and wife were standing as Lib Dem candidates on May 5.

Thanks to Martin Brookes.

Muscular Liberalism: "Five years ago I was a four-stone apology - today I am two separate gorillas"

Eeyore is only 90 years old

A couple of days ago I questioned the claim of a Guardian writer that Eeyore had just celebrated his 140th birthday.

Looking through the comments on the Guardian article, though the writer makes an attempt to defend his position, the discussion confirms that the original Eeyore toy was given to Christopher Robin Milne as a Christmas present in 1921. So he is certainly not 140 years old.

And another comments alerts us to this Soviet version of Winnie-the-Pooh. I don't know if this was intended as a Marxist allegory - Christopher Robin as the forces of capital, Piglet as the proletariat - but it is rather sweet.

The Educational Maintenance Allowance and trusting teenagers

Yesterday I wrote about the way the left does not parents. I am not sure they trust teenagers that much either.

Take this Polly Toynbee article from last November, defending the Educational Maintenance Allowance:

EMA ought to sit comfortably with Conservative thinking. Pupils who miss a class, are late or don't do homework lose EMA for the whole week.

This might sit comfortably with Conservative thinking, but it ought to worry anyone who is not a Conservative. It seems extraordinary to boast that the policy you are defending imposes severe sanctions on teenagers from less affluent homes and those teenagers alone.

You could say it is better to receive an allowance with those conditions than not to receive one at all. But that is not the choice that less affluent teenagers should be faced with.

I hope that a more reasonable approach will be taken when the more tightly focused replacement for the EMA is unveiled.

GUEST POST Creative Perambulations: Marking the boundaries of Sherwood Forest

Nottinghamshire poet Dave Wood describes his plans to walk and celebrate Sherwood Forest's ancient boundaries.

The Creative Perambulations have become a whirlwind of hopes for the best, fears for the worst and a long awaited dream that I should be paid appropriately for a large and exciting project leading to an intense body of imaginative and professional work. It brings together my being-ness of writing, my career in community arts and my love of dandering through the woods and the cityscape.

As with all billowing ideas, it started with a passing reference or utterance; let me explain. I'd been to a talk at a county library. The representative of Nottinghamshire Archives had come to speak about Mediaeval Nottinghamshire and had mentioned the Perambulations; a way of the current King making sure that the land wasn't being used or taken without permission. Another theory was that it was a marking of the seasons. Although never too late for further research, it’s too late to say I’m going back. This is the hero’s point of no return and I still have that childlike judder in the heart.

The last Perambulation was undertaken in 1662 and only written about (retrospectively) in the 1800s.

So now, after the initial talk late(ish) last year, I’ve put the project together, sent out the press release, made contacts (and this list, I promise, is never ending) and applied to the Arts Council for the funding. The form went in at 1 a.m. I went to bed at 1.30 and fell down the stairs sometime later that night.

So here’s the project

I follow the last Sherwood Forest Perambulations route as closely as possible; there may be (actually there are) busy roads, fences to traverse and farmers’ lands to be negotiated (that’s to be expected). On the way, I run public workshops, record thoughts, take notes and (if appropriate) give performances based around the area I’m currently in. Any information which can be used from the public or myself will be; ideas will be smithy’d in to poetry, story and/or imaginative reminiscence.

Members of the public, bearing in mind some areas will no longer live in a forested area, will be interviewed and invited to contribute as widely and as wildly as possible about their locality, culture and environment.

A large majority off the creative output will be blogged. There will also be postings on Facebook and Twitter. Again, all encouraging noises will be made for the public to engage with these new ways of communication as well as the old ones of course..

There will also be a one off broadsheet; A3 in size, it will be copyright free to enable quick and further dissemination of the resulting creativity.

I’m gathering support, left and centre. Sherwood Forest Trust are on board with their Special Trees Project; looking at the old trees of Sherwood and supplying new ones to plant on the Perambulatory way, the Woodland Trust, Experience Nottinghamshire, Broxtowe Green Party, Save Sherwood Forest, the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers, the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust, the Friends of Bestwood Country Park and lots of locals have sent letters of positivity and gung-ho.

I’m exhausted thinking about it; I’ll sleep better once I’d out there and doing it. Anyone wishing to be kept in touch can follow my blog. If you’d like to contribute or join in, then please email me: davewrite2002[{@}]yahoo.com.

Be excited. Be very excited.

Opera at Bonkers Hall

Most literary scholars now accept that Nevill Holt is the model for Lord Bonkers' ancestral home. Look closely at this video and you may see Meadowcroft in the background or a Well-Behaved Orphan making a run for it.

How do you tell whether the kids are alright?

Last week the Guardian printed a short piece by Max Benato about a new report from Save the Children:

The UK came a woeful 23rd out of 43 countries for child wellbeing according to three main factors: pre-primary enrolment (81% in the UK compared to 100% in France, Germany, Netherlands and some others); secondary school enrolment (99%); and under-five mortality rate (six per 1,000 live births, the joint 23rd lowest score out of the 43 countries – the lowest rates were three per 1,000).

"Read the report and weep," says Benato.

Well, you can download the report from this Guardian page and judge for yourself. But if anything makes me want to weep here it is Benato's reasoning.

Clearly, the under-five mortality rate is a vital figure and I wish ours were lower. And I am all in favour of enrolment in secondary school, though there is a debate to be had about what the leaving age should be.

But pre-primary enrolment? Is it really the case that children in a country with a 100 per cent enrolment rate will have the best time of all? Doesn't it depend upon the nature and quality of the institutions they are in? I am sure the Soviet Union and its satellites had a very high rate in this category, but I am far from convinced that they were the best place in Europe to be a child.

I went to a Save the Children event earlier this year, and they are good people. But when I heard that the charity's founder Eglantyne Jebb had been a leading light of the Charity Organisation Society, I had Doubts. The COS was breeding ground of many Fabian socialists, who are the ancestral enemies of good Liberals.

And I do sense a touch of the Beatrice Webbs here. Isn't putting such an emphasis on pre-primary enrolment effectively saying that you do not trust the lower orders to raise their children properly so the state must take a hand?

There are all sorts of ways of having a good childhood. To reduce them to ticking three boxes seems a very blinkered approach.

Leicester City Council finds alternative site for Aylestone Meadows football pitches

Today's Leicester Mercury carries the less than startling news that an alternative to siting football pitches and their accompanying development on the city's most important nature reserve has been identified:

Leicester City Council is planning to split the development between two areas either side of the meadows – Riverside College, in Braunstone Lane East, and Aylestone Playing Fields, off Narborough Road South, where there are already a number of disused pitches.

The paper also quotes Herbert Eppel (Hello, Herbert) from the Aylestone Meadows Appreciation Society:

"As a group we had suggested this site probably about a year ago."

In last week's elections Labour won all but two of the seats on the council - more on that another day. Interestingly, one of the two seats they failed to win was in the Aylestone ward, where the Liberal Democrats gained one of the seats.

I hope that this was because of Labour's earlier enthusiasm for building on Aylestone Meadows.

Six of the Best 158

David Willetts' scheme to allow universities to create extra places unsupported by state finance, for which could charge the full international student fee, was an interesting idea but almost certainly a very bad one. So Free Radical argued earlier today, before the plan was disowned by David Cameron.

Stephen Glenn, on Liberal Democrats in Northern Ireland, pays tribute to David Cairns, the Labour MP for Inverclyde, who died earlier today.

Political Valley is pleased that all Birmingham's travel-tracking spy cameras are to be taken down.

"The SNP today faces the same problem as the PQ did – running a government while making uncompromised choices that risk party splits. Nine years after his initial triumph, René Lévesque was forced to resign as PQ leader and Quebec Premier because of party divisions over sovereignty and the economy. Like Salmond now, Lévesque then was grappling with a recession." Writing on British Politics and Policy at LSE, Françoise Boucek argues that Alex Salmond must learn from the failure of the Parti Québécois in Canada.

On Liberal Conspiracy, Lucy James asks why Anjem Choudary has been invited to speak at the Hay philosophy festival.

"For people of a certain age Jack Warner was ... a figure of probity in British national life.  His cheery, 'Evening all' as we turned on to Dixon of Dock Green spoke of a Britain of close knit communities, and low level scampiness with little in the way of murders ... or corruption," writes Love and Garbage. So he is dismayed at today's revelations about corruption in international football. Lord Bonkers writes: Are you sure he has got this right?

UKIP recriminations over Leicester South result

A thread on Bloggers4UKIP makes interesting reading.

The full Leicester South result is here.

When boys are not youths

In recent days I have discussed the Newspaper English word "youth", showing that a youth can be 11 or 20 but is always up to no good.

In the first of those posts I made the observation:

There have always been double standards here - a 14-year-old offender is a "youth"; a 14-year-old victim is a "schoolboy".

The truth of this was pretty much borne out today by another Leicester Mercury story:

Two teenage boys were assaulted by a gang of youths in Abbey Park, Leicester.

The victims, both aged 14, were assaulted by the gang after the pair had refused to hand over their property. The victims received minor injuries.

The attackers made off empty-handed towards the fun fair and then possibly Abbey Park Road and Belgrave Road. They are described as black and Asian youths who were aged between 15 to 19.

Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

My review from Friday's Liberal Democrat News.


WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy
David Leigh and Luke Harding
Guardian Books, 2011, £9.99

Leigh and Harding tell the story of Wikileaks and its release of 250,000 secret diplomatic cables and classified files from the Afghan and Iraq wars. Their own paper, the Guardian, was one of the newspapers that was given this material, and they dissect its often fraught relationship with Wikileaks’ moving spirit Julian Assange.

This is very much the Guardian’s side of the story, but it is clear that Assange, by turns charming and impossible, is difficult to deal with. The book has obviously been written in a hurry and each chapter carries a subheading like “Emergency Operating Station Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, Iraq, November 2009,” as though the authors half imagine they are writing a screenplay. Perhaps they have never got over seeing Paddy Considine play a Guardian journalist in The Bourne Ultimatum?

Julian Assange’s childhood was spent in hippy communes and as a teenager he entered the world of hacking – gaining unauthorised access to government and commercial computer systems just for the fun of it. Like many pioneers in the world of computing, he dropped out of formal education before completing his first degree.

His hacking soon came to have a political edge, and he dreamed up the idea of Wikileaks – a way of allowing people to leak documents while being sure they would remain anonymous. Such a system, incidentally, would have been useful to Sarah Tisdall, who was gaoled in the 1980s for leaking details of cruise missile deployment to the Guardian after the newspaper revealed her identity to the authorities.

Assange was an idealist, believing that he need only lay bare the workings of international diplomacy and power politics for the world to rise up in anger. But things turned out to be more complex than that: material needs to be analysed and put into context before the public can understand it. So when an extraordinary collection of American cables and files came into his possession he put together a consortium of newspapers to publish them.

Even when this trove was published, Assange was probably disappointed at the reaction. The idea that US foreign policy is wicked is taken for granted by most Guardian readers. When they read of civilian casualties, corruption and arm twisting it confirmed their prejudices rather than roused them to action.

It was in the Third World that the revelations had more effect, with local journalists begging for the material on their own countries. The recent uprising in Tunisia has been called “the first Wikileaks revolution”. The Wikileaks website continues to make the most astonishing revelations, most recently revealing the files on numerous prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Meanwhile in Britain, the drama of Assange’s remand and then bailing of allegations of sexual assault in Sweden has taken centre stage. While this does look very convenient for the Americans, no evidence of their interference in the process has emerged. Leigh and Harding suggest Assange has displayed rather Antipodean attitudes to women in the past, and the argument “I disapprove of American foreign policy therefore he must be innocent” is a pretty thumping non sequitur.

The real victim in this book is not Assange but Bradley Manning, the former pupil of Tasker Milward School in Haverfordwest, who leaked the material on Iraq and Afghanistan that made Wikileaks famous. It is easy to sympathise with a thoughtful young man, stationed in the heat and boredom of Iraq, who saw these secrets and horrors every day on his screen every day and wanted the world to know what was really going on. If nothing else, the Americans’ cavalier attitude towards cyber security is astounding.

Today Manning is being held under oppressive conditions in America – some believe the authorities want to force him to implicate Assange more deeply and give them a pretext to seek the extradition. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this, there is a support site for him.

In which the Guardian makes a Very Silly Mistake about Eeyore's age

You may not know it, but today is Eeyore's birthday. And if there's one thing that upsets Eeyore more than anything, it's people forgetting his birthday. Traditionally Eeyore might receive a popped balloon from Piglet, or an empty honey jar from Pooh. But since AA Milne's gloomy donkey turns 140 today – which is Very Old Indeed – I think we should surprise him by celebrating his status as a truly great literary character.

announces Chris Cox on the Guardian's Books Blog today.

Eeyore born in 1871? That cannot possibly be right.

The anhedonic donkey first appeared in Winnie-the-Pooh, which was published in 1926. Even his creator A.A. Milne was not born until 1872.

I am afraid we have to conclude that Cox has made a Very Silly Mistake.

Week of the Week

23-29 May 2011 is Rabbit Awareness Week.

Market Harborough had a tin tabernacle

This is St Hugh's in Northampton Road, Market Harborough, which was opened in 1940. The new parish was carved out of Little Bowden in 1920 to serve the housing that had appeared south of the River Welland since the late Victorian period. (The two parishes were reunited some years ago.)

On Saturday I bought a pamphlet about this church's history:

Following a meeting in November 1892 it was agreed to acquire the necessary land and build a Mission Room. The building was opened on 16th August 1893. The building is still in use as the Church Hall ...

The Mission Room rapidly proved too small and in 1895 a temporary church was built using corrugated iron and referred to either as the Iron Church or as the Tin Tabernacle.

Soon after the Iron Church was opened the parishoners started to think about a "permanent church". Their dreams were realised when the present building was consecrated on 10th February 1940.

So there was a Tin Tabernacle in Market Harborough for 45 years. The odd thing is that I have always knows that St Hugh's was the "Iron Church", but had wrongly assumed that was because iron was somehow used in the construction of the 1940 church. Instead it seems that the old nickname attached itself to the new building.

The pamphlet - "St Hugh's Church Market Harborough, 1940-1990" by C.G. Medley - is not enthusiastic about Tin Tabernacles, quoting a report about the one at St Hugh's from 1913:

"There are many reasons why we must make an effort to find the money required as soon as possible. Among them: the heat in summer and the cold in winter are both intensified in a building of iron. Again, we are very crowded together, it is a difficulty to kneel in comfort. Ventilation without draught is an impossibility, in one part of the building people are calling out for windows to be open and somewhere else they are suffering from draught. There is no spaciousness which is so necessary not only for health but also for dignity."

Pete Townshend & Paul Weller: So Sad About Us

This isn't just dad rock it is granddad rock. But I do like Paul Weller's sweater.

So Sad About Us is a Townshend song, written for The Who. There is a great version by them recorded live at The Marquee in the 1960s. And The Jam used to play it too. So here they are together.

BBC: Kirsty Williams has not ruled out working with Labour in Wales

BBC News reports that talks are taking place to explore the possibility of a coalition government in Wales after Labour fell just short of winning a majority last week:

Welsh Liberal Democrat leader Kirsty Williams told BBC Wales she has not ruled out working with Labour.

"Welsh Liberal Democrats want there to be a stable government over the next five years and we want to concentrate on the issues we've been campaigning on, how can we strengthen the Welsh economy, how can we improve education results for our children and how can we cut waiting times.

"Whether that's part of government or opposition these will continue to be the main thrust of the work of the Welsh Liberal Democrats," she said.

Interesting, but a minority Labour administration or a deal between Labour and Plaid Cymru both look more likely.

Stevenage in 1971

One of the discs I have from LoveFilm at the moment is Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. Released in 1968 and featuring a distinctly superior soundtrack, the film was shot around the new town of Stevenage.

This documentary on the town is one of the extras on the DVD. It is rather nostalgic for me as at the time I was growing up in another Hertfordshire new town, Hemel Hempstead.

Indeed, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush is also nostalgic for me because it features exactly the same model of bus that we had in Hemel, right down to the slot where the conductor kept his clipboard.

Does anyone here remember bus conductors?

The Liberal Democrats need fewer policies and more ideology

In my final House Points column for the party newspaper, I urged my fellow Liberal Democrats to enjoy being in government. But my impression is that most are still not that happy about it.

Why is this?

According to an email from Nick Clegg sent to party members yesterday:

The BBC estimates that we are implementing 75% of the policies of in our manifesto, compared to just 60% of the Conservative manifesto.

(Matthew Harris has reproduced the whole message - and I hope that whoever sent it out will note that "thank you" is two words.)

So why aren't we more happy?

A look at the party document from March of this year, Liberal Democrats: Our manifesto in practice, may give us an idea. This goes through our manifesto from the last general election and lists all the points on which progress has been made.

Some examples of those points:

• Lib Dem Manifesto p.17 – “Better IT procurement, investigating the potential of different approaches such as cloud computing and open-source software.”
• Lib Dem Manifesto p.18 - “We will give people control over their pension by scrapping the rule that compels you to buy an annuity when you reach age 75.”
• Lib Dem Manifesto p.40 – “We will end Train to Gain funding for large companies,restricting the funds to the small and medium-sized firms that need the support.”
• Lib Dem Manifesto p.72 – “Reform the police, with a full review of the very restrictive terms and conditions for police officer employment.”

Of course, there are some more substantial achievements in the document, such as the scrapping of identity cards. But these examples give a fair idea of the sort of Liberal Democrat policies that are being implemented.

I suspect that we are not happy at this success because of the way Liberal Democrat policy is developed. As I and others have argued in the past, the problem is that it is essentially written for us be experts with little political input. So we end up proposing a raft of sensible reforms that would make Britain a better place, but do not make an emotional commitment to them. This also means that we struggle to establish a clear identity with the voters and to differentiate ourselves from moderate opinion in other parties.

Being a philosopher at heart, I want to call for a firmer Liberal Democrat ideology at this point, but the reality is that we are an exceedingly broad church, including as it does both libertarians and unreconstituted social democrats.

I am reminded of my experience of the prickly relations between the Liberals and the SDP during the 1983 election campaign. We could all support the slightly dull package of reforms that constituted our joint manifesto, but if we had dinner together and the discussion turned to political philosophy then it could soon become surprisingly heated.

So what we need are fewer policies and more ideology, but getting everyone to sign up to that ideology will not be easy.