Site overhaul got delayed for personal reasons and issues with the internet connection at my new place, but I’ve been keeping my journal going, and have written a tribute to Chris Lightfoot over there. The bloggers blogger, he’ll be missed by all of us.
I recently discovered that my (soon to be former) MP has a blog, on MySpace. It’s actually not awful, for a MySpace blog, but today, he’s speculating Blair Resigns? :
something is definitely in the air. I don’t know what it is, but if Blair announces his resignation by the end of this week, you read it here first.
So the Westminster bubble says something is up. It would, of course, be a good thing for him to go. Here’s just hoping the constitutionally illiterate morons don’t make much running with getting Brown to got for an early election, we need to give the man time to mess things up utterly.
Ian Parker, a writer new to me, has an excellent story on the dangers of the database state that ends with:
In a free society, the rights and laws protect the individual from the government. In a dictatorship, the rights and laws protect the government from the people.
So very true. We’ve written at length here in the past about the dangers of the National Identity Register, but as Ian says:
I can hear Mr Blair protesting now that this is not what all these laws are for, but Mr Blair, please understand, THIS IS HOW THEY WILL BE APPLIED, if not in a dictatorial regime, certainly one in which it is very easy to hit all your targets when the laws are all on your side.
(via)
I am reminded that this year will mark the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union that created Great Britain. There are those that would like it to also be the last, a subject I’ve written about extensively in the past. Indeed this desire seems to be spreading both North and South of the border:
devolution was supposed to defeat nationalism. That was what George Robertson, the former chief of Nato, famously said would happen: devolution would kill nationalism ’stone dead’. Not so. For England increasingly feels the intrinsic unfairness of devolution. Now John Reid, a Scottish Home Secretary, presides over a department that has limited powers in his own constituency of Airdrie and Shotts. Soon Gordon Brown will move into 10 Downing Street, to make laws on health and education that have no play in North Queensferry, where he lives. Meanwhile, a nation ashamed of the Iraq war tries to shake off culpability by turning to the SNP.
Me? Well, I still stand by the words I wrote in my very first post at teh old site, now to be found here:
Great Britain was founded in 1707, nearly three hundred years ago. The anniversary approaches. Are we doing anything about it? Let’s be proud to be British, and remember that we are also English, Welsh, Scottish or whatever. Let us look to the future and be proud of our heritage, not look to the past and try to bolt the doors.
I’d like to celebrate the foundation of this great nation. Look to the future, a liberal, tolerant, open minded society that truly does live and let live.
Given that this useless Government appears to be doing and planning absolutely nothing, anyone got any ideas?
Via D-Notice I see that this afternoon is another registration day for one of Mark Thomas‘ Mass Lone Protests, forms to be handed in at the Police Station on Agar Street, just up from Charing Cross station. As I’m in London (flat, then job, hunting), might as well register my presence.
If anyone else cares to join us, I’ll probably be in a pub for a bit afterwards as well (no idea which pub, naturally, I’m not, yet, a Londoner)…
Professon Fred Halliday has written an analysis of what he believes to be the twelve worst ideas in international discourse. On some of his points, I agee completely, on others, he is completely off base. I seem to recall thinking that when I studied his theories properly, but that was a few years ago now.
Written a lot about Europe in the past, I think I’ve found and tagged most of the old posts but have probably missed hundreds. One of the subjectst that comes up time and again is that, while I don’t like the EU as it currently stands, I like it more than the current alternatives, and truly believe it can be reformed and improved. I share this view with James Clive Matthews, who has written an excellent post on the need to take the long view and broken down his philosophy on Europe and Britain’s involvement:
10) Most individual nations are simply too damned small to have much chance of surviving on their own in the long term. Throughout history, the general trend has been for states to grow larger and larger, until some kind of limit (either geographical or geopolitical) is reached, because the larger the area you cover, the more versatile your production and the more self-sufficient you can be. - This is my primary reason for being pro-EU: I simply cannot see how a country as small as the UK (or, indeed, any European country) can survive on its own in the longer-term. Just as I see national identity being formed largely from negatives, so too is my pro-EU stance.
This is, largely, my primary reason for support as well, Britain gave up the Empire before my father was born, and joined Europe before I was born.
Well, I guess it’s about time to try to end the hiatus here. I’ve personally been busy wrapping up at my old job and enjoying a break, but while I’m still ‘between jobs’ as they say, and moving to London soon, that’s no reason to not do stuff here.
Anyway, I’m hoping to invite a few more writers on board over the next few weeks and months, and get back to a few that expressed an interest before. The first new writer is already on board; John Franglen is another friend from University I’ve kept in touch with, studied economics, and is now studying design; he wrote a peace for his journal that tied in with a few of my thoughts on a popular issue, so I asked if he’s like to re-publish it here, a nice little explanation about why hypothecated taxes are, generally, a bad idea.
I plan to update the look of this place (I’ve been learning Wordpress theming) as well, but that’s a medium term goal, and also install a few plugins to support OpenID login and thus authors from other sites writing here without registering, which will be nice. In the meantime, if anyone would like to write the occasional peace, comment here or email; contact address is currently on the About page…
My first post on here is something that I’d been planning to write about on my livejournal for a while, but it took me a while (11 months actually) to get around to. The thing that spurred me to actually getting around to write it was someone saying something along the lines of the following:
And what he’s after is what economists call hypothecation. The problem is, while it might sound good, it’s really quite a bad idea
No idea who he is, but Steven Skelton has an excellent article at Make My Vote Count about electoral reform and the rise of the BNP. It’s nothing I haven’t said before, but it’s very well put together and all in one place.
Breaking my hiatus here for this startling statement from Chris Dillow:
I’m breaking the first rule of blogging here, but I reckon Polly’s said something true
Message ends.
Am in the middle of finishing off my current job and moving to London early New Year; long-planned revamp with new contributors should hopefully start then.
Busy. Unable to comment on this delusional, totalitarian, and borderline racist crap about ID cards
properly. Fortunately, Gareth and Tez Burke have done so already. Go read.
STATEMENT: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
QUESTION: Do you have curtains?
STATEMENT: They’re to stop anyone perving over intimate moments with my wife.
QUESTION: You do know that as soon as they upload your STD records on that health database, the whole of Whitehall can see everyone you’ve fucked since freshers’ week?Write To Them. Or chase down a Swiss grandad.
Damn stupid idiotic centralising authoritarian fools. Technology will solve all our problems. Especially if it’s a technology that we don’t really understand and will subcontract to a bunch of incompetents like Capita et al…
I get confused following US elections, especially for the House. Mostly because of the weird borders they’ve gerrymandered in order to ensure as many safe seats as possible. Lovely. Also, they don’t seem to do a ’swingometer’ style analysis, at all. It’s all about current polling data, very little public psephology. Fortunately, blogging allows all of us to exhibit our random obsessions, and Iain Weaver has prepared a fairly good swingometer analysis for the US 2006 elections. Definately a handy resource to refer to on results night.
And yes, I keep forgetting to post stuff. Sorry about that, I seem to have lost my anger recently, which is weird given the amount of stupidity around out there at the moment. I have however been in contact with a few potential contributors, so when I get things sorted out we might actually see the site moving again. Also? I hate rich text editors, no idea how I managed to turnt eh damned thing on. Ah well.
The Boundary Commission has almost completed their review of constituency boundaries. Anthony Wells of UK Polling Report has run an analysis of the new seats and completed a very excellent guide to the next election, with target seat list for the three main parties and a breakdown of the notional 2005 results and swings needed for each seat in the country. Scary amount of work there, but very impressive. There’s a comment box for every seat, and he welcomes contribution from anyone with local knowledge or facts he may have missed. An excelent resource that I suspect will get a lot of use over the next few years. As for Tooting?
From the 214 seats the Conservatives notionally hold on the new boundaries they would need to win an extra 112 to get the 326 seats necessary for a majority. In order of marginality, the 112th most winnable seat for the Tories is Tooting.
Information, as they say, is power.
There are a large number of oft-repeated tropes about electoral systems and the impact of any change away from the Simple Majority system we use for Westminster. Most of them are either lies, fallacies or half-truths. I’ve written about electoral systems a lot over the last year, but I can’t cover anything. Fortunately, Paul Davies is paid to write about electoral systems, and he’s pretty good at it as well. He’s written a series of articles over the last week debunking the main myths, and they’re definately well worth a read.
A lot of these myths are based on examples from systems that no sane people are advocating for the various UK governments, and thus should be still-born. Unfortunately, they’re not, and it seems that there will always be people that think that shouting ‘look at Israel’, ‘look at Italy’ or ‘PR gave us Hitler’ are valid arguments against electoral reform.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a sensible, adult debate about crime, punishment and rehabilitation without it devolving to the mudslinging about being “soft on criminals” that we sometimes see stuck as labeled on anyone who thinks the current system is palpably failing?
Well, that’s was a surprise; wasn’t folling too closely the cabinet formation, then this turned up in my feedreader. Carl Bildt talking about his appointent to the Govt oh his blogspot blog. He’s been quite a good read for sometime; although there are no comments, the posts can be quite incisive. Hmm, wonder if Milibland can learn from actually being interesting?
Unity mails me pointing to his latest article here:
The Police raid two houses. In one they discover “a record haul of chemicals used in making home-made bombs”, in the other the find “rocket launchers, chemicals, and a nuclear or biological suit”.It’s a terrorist plot, right? It’ll be all over the national news in a shot?
Wrong on both counts, apparently… because the two men caught with this nifty little haul of equipment aren’t Muslims, they’re BNP supporters, one of whom stood for election in Colne only last May.
Um, rocket launchers and chemical suits? Leon, Jamie, Fridgemagnet and bat020 have more.
A politician says something not at all offensive about running his consituency surgeries, and a policeman gets reassigned, both are screamsheet headlines. BNP members get arrested in an apparent bomb plot conspiracy? Where’s the headlines?
Tom Watson asks:
Seriously, I’d be interested to know what people think about this stuff. Is it a new way of communicating or just clever marketing and spin?
Both, I think. As Paul Walter observes:
Does he think we were born yesterday? If you were going to do a videcast would you do it while you were doing the washing up?
It’s obviously staged and intended to make him look like a ‘normal’ person, right down to the flat not being 100% clean and tidy. But, essentially, while it is a little cynical, it’s a sign that politicians are learning and adapting to the new media environment.
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