Recently in Politics Category

Dawn Butler (Lab - Brent South) and Sarah Teather (LD - Brent East) will be fighting it out for the re-drawn seat of Brent Central at the next election, but online the battle has already started. The conflict is taking place on their Wikipedia entries (Butler, Teather), and researchers and party supporters almost definitely involved.

If you look at the history pages for both entries, and you’ll see a user called Brent Central has been duelling with an anonymous user working in the House of Commons (the most common Parliamentary IP address is 194.60.38.10). The fight has been going since mid-June and involved more than 60 edits in under a month.

A nice piece of reporting from Recess Monkey, there. And it's very interesting that both sides seem to consider Wikipedia an important enough site that their representation there matters.

Looks like yesterday's failed attack on London wasn't an isolated incident: there's been a possible suicide car bomb attack on Glasgow Airport.

Too early to make too many assumptions about the reasons behind it, but the witness interviews going on on BBC News24 right now make it sound like a calculated attack, not an accident.

Up to four people arrested, one of whom was on fire.

I think most people who attended LeWeb3 in Paris last year would agree that Hans Rosling was the stand out presenter. His graphical presentations of significant society development statistics is awe-inspiring. His recent TED talk is available as a video, and I couldn't resist sharing it. Do watch it:

"Did Harriet Harman blog her way to victory?" asks Ellee, as part of a nice round-up of the Labour Deputy Leadership blogs.

Maybe.

But it's a shame she hasn't blogged since her victory.

So, what would be the sensible government approach to repeated revelations that IT projects have gone wrong? An internal investigation? Some changes of management? How about bringing in outside experts to manage the mess?

No.

They order civil servants to shred documents.

Some fine reporting from Tony Collins on Computer Weekly, there.

It appears that David Miliband has some strange toilet habits:

I was lurking outside the press room at the CLA's centenary conference when the minister appeared and asked whether I could check if there was anyone in the toilet opposite. The reason he wanted me to check it out was because it was the ladies and he didn't want to surprise anyone.

Not surprising people seems to be his thing right now. No standing against Brown, for example.

There's a nice piece over on The Telegraph's (journalist) blogs where Robert Colvile discusses how the Left in the US and the Right in the UK have used the internet and blogs in particular to reshape the political debate.

I do like the use of the term "netroots" to describe what we'd call grassroots activists in the physical world.

In the aftermath advance of its much-as-expected drubbing in the local elections Slightly Ageing Labour is reaching reached out to its loyal bloggers:

During the week I was one of a number of bloggers who went to the first of what the Labour Party say they hope will be a regular series of briefings for Labour bloggers. I think its fair to say that the Party doesn't quite know what to make of us, or this medium.

They know we're out here and they've all heard of the right wing bloggers that trade on gossip and a relationship with the mainstream media but by and large we're below the radar.

So this move is experimental, seeing how we react to each other and what sort of relationship can be developed.

I'm very glad to hear it. And I'll be watching to see if something interesting comes of it over the next few months.

Update: Antony Mayfield has done some research on links to the various political parties' blogging homes which gives some interesting context on this.

I know it's traditional to complain and tut and nit-pick about the NHS in blogs at the moment. After all, a very large amount of extra money has gone into the service in recent years to very little apparent benefit. That's something we should all be annoyed at. Hell, I've even helped the guy who's broken most of the stories about the complete screw-ups in the NHS IT systems start blogging.

But, really, I believe that without the efforts of the NHS, my Mum wouldn't be alive to spend Christmas with us this year. She's been battling cancer since early this year, and the medical treatment she's received, both from her GP and local nursing team and the specialists at the Norfolk & Norwich has been excellent.

There's still much to quibble about. The admin of the hospital is clearly chaotic and the nursing staff can be terrible indifferent in their care sometimes, but all told, it's done well by us. And that's worth noting.

According to Guido Fawkes, us poor taxpayers are paying people to read blogs.

Guys, click on some Adsense links while you're doing it. Spread some love.

Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death by hanging.

Things are about to get even more "interesting" in Iraq.

Sometimes a break can let you see things with new eyes. I haven't commuted into or out of London by train for over three months now, and a blessed change it's been. However, today an appointment in London in the morning and one in Sutton in the afternoon necessitated me abandoning the car and commuting by train once more.

My goodness, what an eye-opener it was. After nine years of train commuting, I'd got used to it. After a short break, I saw it with new eyes. I saw the utter filth of London Bridge station. I saw the people crushed into cattle trucks. I smelt the fast food and the perfume and the body odor all mingling in an unpleasant aroma cocktail. I saw people struggling to get though a tiny platform exit on Lewisham station.

London has been described as the heart of the country's economy, pumping its fiscal blood around the nation. If that's the case, then the country has heart disease. Its arteries are clogged, unable to cope with the demands placed on them.

No care is being taken of the heart's health, and that lack of care is reflected in simple cleanliness. We Londoners are well known for our stiff upper lips, for putting up with things. But I do feel that that tolerant nature is being abused, and will continue to be abused unless we stand up and demand the sort of transport system we deserve.

So, Tory leader David Cameron is blogging.

Seems that he underestimated the demand a touch:

Ooops.

UPDATE: OK, it's working now. And, well, it's a bit lame. There's something about the desperate chumminess of the “look, I'm an ordinary bloke with a family” about the videos that doesn't ring true. If something like this had cropped up along the way, it would have been charming. Up front, it looks too calculated.

Still, nice to see a party leader doing it.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, conservative party, david cameron, politics, tories

I'm not normally one for posting those “meme”s that do the rounds, but I found the results of this one rather interesting:

You Are 48% Capitalist, 52% Socialist

While you are definitely sympathetic to a free economy, you also worry about the less fortunate. Wealth and business is fine, as long as those who are in need get helped out too. You tend to see both the government and corporations as potentially corrupt.

The little text at the bottom described how I feel pretty exactly

So, the Labour Party has announced the results of the competition to find its official blogger for this year's conference.

The winner is Jonathan Roberts who blogs at the snappily-named Thirsk and Malton Constituency Labour Party Blog. And who doesn't allow comments on his blog. That fact alone should have disqualified him.

Remember the days when Labour wanted a Big Conversation? Those days are clearly gone. They wouldn't want the plebeian masses commenting on their official blogger's words, would they?

(Incidentally, I was going to link to the Big Conversation website, but it appear that Labour's we team let the domain lapse and fall into the hands of the spam linkers. Oh, dear.)

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, labour, labour party, politics

This won't come as much of a shock to regular readers, but I was an over-serious child who thought about things far too much. The downside of that was getting the s**t kicked out of me by other kids at school. The upside is that I have good memories of all sorts of peculiar things from my childhood like, for example, my parents' attitudes to politics.

I remember very clearly my parents moving from delight when Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party was elected, which continued for four or five years, through growing worries, to final disillusionment. Or, as my Dad put it: “She was great when she started and now she's gone completely bonkers”.

Even as I celebrated Tony Blair's victory back in '97, a little voice in my head said “history will repeat itself”. And guess what? It was right. A party riven by in-fighting? Check. A leader attempting to hold on to power, even if doing so will damage the party? Check. An opposition in the ascendant once more? Check.

It's no wonder that even true followers of New Labour are finding the current situation hard to stomach.

I truly hope that Labour manages to resolve these problems quickly and move on, because I'd hate to see history repeat itself yet again, with the Conservatives with a massive majority and a weak, fragmented Labour unable to oppose them. I truly believe our democracy works better with a strong opposition not too far behind the ruling party in the polls.

Technorati Tags: labour, labourparty, politics, tony blair, uk

It's been an interesting few days for the UK political system and the web. On the positive side David “Dave” Cameron is blogging his trip to India.

The video on the blog reinforces the idea that he's going for an approachable, ordinary bloke image:

Still, a few policies might be nice, too, Dave. how about it?

Meanwhile David Millibland's latest venture onto the web - a wiki - has had to be taken down because it was defaced. It's a shame really. It was an interesting idea, but launching it at a time when the current government is rapidly reaching the nadir of its popularity was probably naive.

Technorati Tags: conservative party, david milliband, david cameron, egovernment, labour, labourparty, politics

I should be in France right now. I really should. I should have taken off from London Stanstead yesterday afternoon and landed in Poitiers an hour or so later. Thanks to terrorism, a somewhat extreme reaction from the security forces and bottled drinks, I'm writing this in London.

And I'm not happy.

Yes, a serious reaction to a serious threat is warranted. But at what point does the reaction actually do the terrorists' work for them. As I tried to cram my camera equipment into my hold baggage and decide what not take, these questions were pretty high in my mind. Not books to distract me from the tedium of the flight. No iPod to ease me through takeoff with great music (I'm a nervous flyer). No basic set of clothes with me in case the bags have lost.

I understand the risk. But if, as we seem to be doing, we make travel so miserable for everyone that all we get to carry on board is a handful of belonging is a clear plastic bag, then we're doing the terrorists' work every time someone gets on a plane. We're allowing them to adversely affect every flight people take. We're letting them win.

Still, I've been spared the flight experience. My passport is out of its plastic bag. Our flights were cancelled. We're not going anywhere. The holiday is delayed, possibly cancelled.

Somehow, we've got this one wrong.

Technorati Tags: aircraft, airports, flying, terrorism, terrorists, travel

A couple of things caught my eye in the papers over lunch (I know, I know. Dead tree papers. How very 20th century of me.)

The first up was this piece about the declining standard of UK graduates, found in the business section of the Telegraph:

The dismal standard of literacy and education in the UK is one of the key reasons that the economy's efficiency has plunged in recent years, according to the chief economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

That's absolutely no surprise to me. The media tends to get all worked up over education standards when the A-level results come out, and the teachers protest that improved results are all down to improved teaching. Then everything goes quiet again. Talk to most people working on the frontline of higher education, though, and they'll tell you of their despair at the quality of school-leavers coming into Universities. Eventually, the need to teach literacy and numeracy to undergraduates is going to impact on the quality at the end of the process and employers are going to see it.

Following that was a piece in The Guardian about inadequate nursery nurses harming the development of children:

Nursery nurses with few qualifications and poor social skills risk creating a generation of Vicky Pollards, teachers' leaders warned yesterday.

Too many illiterate students were starting childcare courses as an easy way to get government grants paid to encourage students to stay in education, the Professional Association of Teachers warned.

So, poor quality graduates are starting to return to the education system, and are undermining the next generation of kids to come through.

It's beginning to look a little like a death spiral isn't it? And when both the right wing and left wing newspapers are reporting on it, we should be getting really worried. Yet, it just doesn't seem to be on the political agenda. And that scares me.

Technorati Tags: business, education, graudates, nursery care, politics, uk, recruitment, schools

Another fine piece of work from our noble tax-supported civil servants:

Never mind what Benjamin Franklin said about there being only one thing in life that was certain--death and taxation. You can't even rely on that any more. It seems that the chances of catching a road tax dodger is just one-in-forty according to a recent Whitehall watchdog report. Apparently there are 1.55 million untaxed vehicles in britain and the number of people not paying their Vehicle Excise Duty is still increasing.

So that's nice. We're funding a big old department in Swansea, who not only managed to miss 1.55m people, while catching a tiny fraction of that number? Sounds like money well spent, doesn't it?

BigLorryBlog has plenty more to say about road tax, too.

Technorati Tags: cars, civil service, driving, motoring, politics, road tax, road transport, taxation, vehicle excise duty

Jeff Jarvis suggests that the video below shows that journalists have no sense of humour.

Certainly, they've completely failed to get the point here. I was channel-hopping last night, trying to build up the energy to shift myself from the too hot sofa to the too hot bedroom, when I found a show on BBC4 about the history of the Tory party. It had a clip of Winston Churchill, in his swimming trunks, no less, sliding down a water slide into a swimming pool. It was a strangely touching moment, a little glimpse into the man behind the image, from an age when the press was far more deferential than it is now. I don't think returning to a deferential attitude would do anyone any good, but an interest in who our politicians are beyond the obvious prurient interest in sexual misdemeanours, would engage people in politics a little more.

There seems to be a mindset amongst journalists and politicians at the moment that politics is Serious, and should be treated in a Serious way at all times. The truth, of course, is that politics, like all human endeavour, has its fun side and its serious side, and the media should really be reflecting both.

We seem to have developed an idea that the route to serious, professional journalism is to conceal the human within the journalist at all times. Blogging, thankfully, is starting to erode that edifice.

Technorati Tags: blogging, humor, humour, journalism, politics, professionalism

The Farmers Weekly podcast interview with David Cameron feels like it should have got more publicity than it did, if only for the revelation that Cameron grows cucumbers outside his kitchen window. It's a nicely-done, fairly relaxed piece, recorded in the back of Cameron's car on the way to the Royal Show.

FWi interview with David Cameron

Hang on, shouldn't it have been done on the back of his bike?

[Disclosure: this is another bit of “employer pimping”, but only because I genuinely liked it]

Technorati Tags: conservative party, david cameron, farming, interview, rural life, tories

July has been an interesting month for people interested in serious blogging in the UK. Why? Well, blogging's really started to hit the national media consciousness. It all started a couple of weeks ago with pieces in The Observer and The Guardian's media supplements about the John Prescott sleaze storm, much of which stemmed from the Guidio Fawkes blog.

However, it took a fortnight for the interest in that story to leak from the Media pages into the mainstream news, with a blonde blogger's sacking helping it along the way. Let's track the progress:

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, guido fawkes, journalism, news, newspapers, politics

Well, well, well. Everyone's favourite outgoing Prime Minister has started podcasting via his constituency's local paper, the Northern Echo.

Sadly, it's a one-off effort, marking the launch of the paper's podcasting efforts, which aren't live just yet.

[via Podcasting News]

Technorati Tags: new labour, podcasting, podcasts, politics, tony blair

I've been watching the US reaction to the movie by Al Gore (the man who sorta lost an election to George W. Bush) about climate change - An Inconvenient Truth - with interest. I'm especially enjoying this animated response to it from the guys who did Futurama:

[via The Medium is Not Enough]

Technorati Tags: climate change, politics, an inconvenient truth, video

Before I get onto the subject of blogging and journalism, I'd like to look and politics and blogging. Specifically, I'd like to comment a little on no-longer-councillor Andrew Brown.

Andrew has being something of a poster child for blogging politicians. He's been widely quoted in the media, and in political circles, on the topic of blogs and their interaction with the electorate. He used his blog to communicate with the electorate directly, and engaged in conversations with local bloggers (like me).

He then lost his seat at the local elections. So, is political blogging a failed experiment ?

On Auntie Beeb's Web Site:

Thames Water has been urged to apply for a drought order to try to curb London's water use.

The Environment Agency's call for "immediate" action comes a day after an order was granted in England and Wales for the first time in 11 years.

I don't know about you, but I'm starting to feel a tad thirsty.

England's water crisis deepens (or should that be "gets shallower"):

A drought order has been granted in England and Wales for the first time since 1995, banning the non-essential use of water.

Under the six-month order, Sutton and East Surrey Water can ban car washing, the filling of swimming pools and watering of parks and sports grounds.

I find it absolutely amazing that in a wet, temperate country we struggle so badly to supple water to our homes. But then, perhaps that's the problem? We're far too complacent about the issue, so when extreme conditions hit, our inadequate, lazy, leaking pipes dry up and leave us to suffer.

If London ends up with standpipes during the summer, I'm decamping to Suffolk for the duration.

(Bonus Fact: the heatwave and drought of 1976 saw me appear in the press for the first time, in a local Manchester paper. I was in a paddling pool, along with my little brother and my mother. Mum was in a bikini, of course, which one might suspect was the main point of the shot.)

Technorati Tags: drought, hosepipe ban, water

In what looks like a very clever piece of misdirection, the cabinet reshuffle seems to have distracted most of the media's attention from the fact that the number of Labour councilor losses appears to have crept over 300 as the final councils declare.

That's the level most pundits were positing as "total shambles" rather than "bad night".

Clever.

Technorati Tags: labour, politics, UK

The BBC's political editor Nick Robinson has been doing some fine work on his Newsblog over the past 24 hours. I particularly like this little insight into his work:

I’ve often interviewed resigning ministers, but this was amongst the bizarrest. When I was called to be told the news, I was naked in bed in a Westminster hotel hoping to get at least an hour’s sleep, having stayed up all night covering the local elections. The interesting discovery I’ve made is that you can go from being in bed to attending a resignation statement in exactly seven minutes.

Mind you, not sure I needed the nudity image.

Technorati Tags: journalism, politics, BBC, UK

Well, Tony's trying to put some spit and polish on his party by sacking everyone who has had a bad few months and replacing them in the cabinet. Clarke's out. Prescott is politically emasculated, with much of his workload heading to Ruth Kelly's desk.

In the offices, we're all watching to see what becomes of the Office of the Dirty Porking Monster Deputy Prime Minister, as that carries the property-related brief. How much of it will Kelly get? What about Millibland? Personally, I'm just enjoying seeing some dynamism creeping back into our politics. Labour has lost its assured position, the Cameron-lead Tories are looking resurgent at long last, and the horror of the LibDem leadership election doesn't seem to have seriously damaged the party.

We could be in for a much more interesting few years.

Technorati Tags: conservatives, labour, liberal democrats, politics, cabinet, UK

Who expected that? After more than three decades at the top of the Lewisham political tree, Labour is left scrubbing around for support with the rest of the parties, as the borough enters a period of no overall control. Big gains for the LibDems across the borough, I note, with Andrew Milton back in for Lewisham Central and, in an upsetting, Labour's Andrew Brown losing his contest with them in Blackheath. The Greens now control Ladywell, and even the Tories gained a seat.

You can find all the results here.

It is a new era in Lewisham politics and it'll be interesting to watch the parties negotiating with each other to actually get anything done. Most interesting of all will be watching Steve Bullock, who returned comfortably as mayor. I bet he'll be looking forward to his next council meeting a lot less than he has previous ones.

Oh, and will the new set-up be enough to save Ladywell Pool?

Technorati Tags: conservatives, labour, lewisham, local elections, politics, liberal democrats

Polling Station - Clarendon Rise, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

On my way to work this morning, I called into the polling station and did my democratic duty.

The final tally of contact by would-be councillers and mayors? One LibDem leaftlet and a few comments on my blog from a Tory.

Good for them. Shame on everybody else.

Political Balloon, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

One of the local independent candidates for the Lewisham mayor took the cheap and cheerful approach to advertising his candidacy. Spotted this morning, on my way to Lewisham Station.