Voting TaKtiX

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.

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.

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?

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. (more…)

One of the blogs on the blogroll is a contradiction in terms. A Tory atheist with a sense of humour. She’s done some nifty wallpapers that amused, I especially liked the Cameron one, and the Brown one will probably be good for many years to come. Go download, before the puppy gets it.

Tired of the Govt? (Anyone not already tired of them needs to smell the coffee). We are. Rachel is as well. THE RULES OF THE GAME HAVE CHANGED:

We won’t talk of causes, we’ll talk of effects.
We’ll whip up a horror of radical sects.
(We don’t want to talk about why they are vexed)
The Rules of the Game Have Changed.

Go read the rest

OK, took less time than I wanted, many thanks to Pete and Dave for the assists, and Duncan for pointing out the obvious (I had Flashblock installed, it’s absolutely essential for browsing with dial up, but it was stopping the weird stuff displaying). So I now have my nice grey-sludge post background, curved boxes in Safari and Mozilla and blue links and purple visited links like what they’re meant to be. Cool beans. Now, Lib Dem conference stuff or The Cameron Project?

Tim’s got the weekly best of up, which is good. Especially liked Gavin’s post on UK partisanship.

Hmm, a challenge for me. Can I break the blogger’s block and write something good enough for inclusion in nest weeks? Meh, we’ll see.

Well, it took me long enough. I’ve had the domain set up for months, it was just a question of timing and inclination. Got there now. (more…)

Jack Straw - Cretin?

Right, it’s fairly well established around these here parts that we don’t think much of the current Government. However, we now have conclusive proof that Jack Straw is an idiot:

we have a problem in the House, which is called researchers trying to prove a point and the result of these websites called TheyWorkForYou which simply seem to measure MPs’ work by quantitative rather than qualitative measures.

(more…)

Well, Alex has finally got it working. Labour Home is launched, to compete with Conservative Home and Liberal Review. It looks ok, and it’s something I thought was lacking awhileback (even mentioned it’s lack in a thread at B4L). He’s also got a team of writers lined up. Shame that one of them seems to have both a poor grasp of economics and a very weird definition of liberalism. (more…)

The times, they are a changin’. Awhileback, I reviewed the campaign sites for the LibDem leadership contenders. Like in the election itself, Ming Campbell won. Well, he’s taking that impetus further. Two specific areas. Firstly, he’s been interviewed by some prominent Lib Dem bloggers, each of whom has written up their meeting with him in a different style. Secondly? (more…)

I wholeheartedly support the idea that politicians should blog more, communicate more, discuss things directly, etc. Ergo, when a Govt Minister sets up a blog, I think that’s, on balance, a good idea. For the record, I’m working on my employers to give me space for a newsblog at work, it’ll be a good way to communicate with the people I work with. Whether they’ll buy it or not I don’t know, but I don’t think work blogs are a waste of time, nor of taxpayers money.

Note the corrolary though. When it’s done right. (more…)

Jonny Nexus:

The problem with saying that all politicians are crooks … is that it is a self-fullfilling prophecy.

I spent ten years involved in local politics … I didn’t expect thanks for this, or even respect. But I didn’t expect to be treated like a piece of shit.

I’d be spending, say, my Saturday morning delivering leaflets (that I’d donated the money to print) and people would be looking at me like I was some piece of crap that crawled out of the gutter. They were convinced that they were morally superior to me (and made it pretty clear) on account of the fact that they weren’t spending their Saturday morning delivering leaflets. (They were going shopping, or to the football or something else I guess).

So eventually, it ground me down, and I thought “fuck this!” and give it up. I earn a good living, and I should pay more taxes as a result. I’ll ask people nicely to vote that I should pay more taxes, but I’m not going to fucking beg. So I basically decided, screw you all, I’m okay, so I’m just going to start living my life. I still give money to the party and a variety of charities, but I get to spend my weekends looking after me.

Several times since then, I’ve been involved in conversations about politics where people first slag off everyone involved, and then say something like: “You should be a councillor! You make a good councillor!”

At which point my reply is generally something along the lines of, “Why should I give up a shitload of my own time to do a load of really stressful work, which doesn’t pay anything like enough to make it monetarily worthwhile, just so that people like you can tell everyone I’m scum?”

The point is that if you believe that everyone involved in politics is corrupt and power-serving, pretty soon the only people involved will be corrupt and power-serving. I believe this is already happening. Certainly, it happened with me.

That’s a comment in a post on reforming voting. One of the things I like about blogging? It forces you to really think through your ideas. I’ve changed my mind about compulsory voting, it is, as I should have always known, a stupid idea. Chris has more at qwghlm:

To first punish poor people by betraying the ideals that were meant to defend them, then to bully them into voting with the threat of a fine, in order to make election results ostensibly “legitmate”, is totally reprehensible.

What’s the solution? Ideally, provide poor people with a Labour party worth voting for; one that is in their interest, not that of supermarket owners, billionaire media magnates and piss-poor IT contractors. Since that won’t happen, then the very least they could do is reform the electoral system, abolish first-past-the-post and replace it with a more proportional system that allows a political spectrum that contains more than the two-and-a-half parties we have at the moment. Either that will allow a genuinely left-wing party into the political arena, or it will give Labour a bloody good incentive to reclaim the ground and people it has abandoned.

I, ultimately, believe that electoral reform will lead to a complete realignment of the existing party structures. I’ve never done partizan, just issues.

I might end up in a party with like-minded people. Although I suspect this bunch of hippie reformers would find it hard to agree on a single policy.

Hmm, I’d never heard of the site before, but Silicon.Com has an excellent series of articles on ID cards, the NIR, the potential commercial uses for the scheme, what will happen in the event of serious disturbance, etc.

In addition to this, John Pilger (a journalist I only sometimes agree with) has an excellent, if hyperbolic, article on the implications of ID, the NIR and the Leg/Reg Bill in this weeks New Statesman.

The dying of freedom in Britain is not news. The pirouettes of the Prime Minister and his political twin, the Chancellor, are news, though of minimal public interest. Looking back to the 1930s, when social democracies were distracted and powerful cliques imposed their totalitarian ways by stealth and silence, the warning is clear. The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill has already passed its second parliamentary reading without interest to most Labour MPs and court journalists; yet it is utterly totalitarian in scope.
—
Those who fail to hear these steps on the road to dictatorship should look at the government’s plans for ID cards, described in its manifesto as “voluntary”. They will be compulsory and worse. An ID card will be different from a driving licence or passport. It will be connected to a database called the NIR (National Identity Register), where your personal details will be stored. These will include your fingerprints, a scan of your iris, your residence status and unlimited other details about your life. If you fail to keep an appointment to be photographed and fingerprinted, you can be fined up to £2,500.

Every place that sells alcohol or cigarettes, every post office, every pharmacy and every bank will have an NIR terminal where you can be asked to “prove who you are”. Each time you swipe the card, a record will be made at the NIR - so, for instance, the government will know every time you withdraw more than £99 from your bank account. Restaurants and off-licences will demand that the card be swiped so that they are indemnified from prosecution. Private business will have full access to the NIR. If you apply for a job, your card will have to be swiped. If you want a London Underground Oyster card, or a supermarket loyalty card, or a telephone line or a mobile phone or an internet account, your ID card will have to be swiped.

In other words, there will be a record of your movements, your phone calls and shopping habits, even the kind of medication you take.

—
Like the constitution-hijacking bill now reaching its final stages, and the criminalising of peaceful protest, ID cards are designed to control the lives of ordinary citizens (as well as enrich the new Labour-favoured companies that will build the computer systems). A small, determined and profoundly undemocratic group is killing freedom in Britain.

The facts are correct. The conclusions? I’m not sure I even disagree with them either.