Thursday, July 09, 2009
Andy Coulson and the Law
Much fuss about the yellow press listening to voicemail through knowing the default passwords. I'm rather more worried about their network of private detectives who had access, according to the print version, to police databases and to BT's billing system. And I'm depressed about a group of journos who, given the keys to the 650 terabyte BSS/OSS database at BT Martlesham Heath, couldn't think of anyone more interesting to spy on than Gordon Taylor. He's not even the most interesting person in football I'd want to pull a STELLAR WIND call detail record/social network plot on.
But I'm really keen to know why nobody wants to mention that Andy Coulson, News of the Screws editor, and Rupert Murdoch's ambassador to David Cameron, isn't just mixed up in this. He is. But he's also involved - according to the courts - in a dispute at the paper which ended with him and other execs trying to bully one of their employees' doctor into changing his mind over whether they had bullied the employee into quitting. They further tried to force the guy to see a company doc - a Dickensian mine-owner's trick - and two of Coulson's direct reports (his deputy and the sports ed) were named by the court as having lied about the affair.
You want names? The liars are Paul Nicholas and Mike Dunn. But Coulson was in charge, just as he was during the spy operation. Now, if I was a pol looking to sink the Tory spin-control ship, I'd want to pull this story in as much as possible. A fit and proper person? Well...
But who, being fit and proper, would take on the job of a Tory Ali-C clone?
But I'm really keen to know why nobody wants to mention that Andy Coulson, News of the Screws editor, and Rupert Murdoch's ambassador to David Cameron, isn't just mixed up in this. He is. But he's also involved - according to the courts - in a dispute at the paper which ended with him and other execs trying to bully one of their employees' doctor into changing his mind over whether they had bullied the employee into quitting. They further tried to force the guy to see a company doc - a Dickensian mine-owner's trick - and two of Coulson's direct reports (his deputy and the sports ed) were named by the court as having lied about the affair.
You want names? The liars are Paul Nicholas and Mike Dunn. But Coulson was in charge, just as he was during the spy operation. Now, if I was a pol looking to sink the Tory spin-control ship, I'd want to pull this story in as much as possible. A fit and proper person? Well...
But who, being fit and proper, would take on the job of a Tory Ali-C clone?
Labels: GSM, intelligence and stupidity, press, special relationships, surveillance
Monday, July 06, 2009
someone's got it in for us, they're planting stories in the press
Bob Dylan lyric too appropriate not to use yet again. Who is trying to frighten MySociety.org users?
It begins with a Daily Telegraph story that a clerk, Lisa Greenwood, in the Department for Children, Schools and Families was sacked for posting a comment about Hazel Blears on theyworkforyou. Unfortunately, no comment including the text quoted exists in any MySociety.org system, and the Torygraph doesn't seem to know which Web site they actually mean.
Further inquiries show that the story originates from a local news agency (South West News) and the DCSF press office. The Telegraph claims that the comment was sent by e-mail, but there are no MySociety sites that accept comments by e-mail, so this cannot be true. TheyWorkForYou doesn't send confirmations by e-mail, so it can't be one of those, although WriteToThem and FixMyStreet do.
Clearly, someone is telling porkies, and using the same as grounds to terminate some poor sod's employment. Now, civil servants are formally bound by oath to renounce partisanship; however, the text doesn't make any reference - if it wasn't invented out of thin air by the DCSF press office - to any political party, only to Hazel Blears' personal financial probity.
It is probably worth remembering at this point that several government ministers have been in the habit of quoting what they claim is other people's private correspondence during parliamentary debates, no doubt because they cannot be sued for what they say in the House. Specifically, Lord Warner, Andrew Miller MP, and Caroline Flint MP used what purported to be private e-mail sent by Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University and Simon Davies of Privacy International and LSE to score points in debates on ID cards and on the NHS National Programme for IT.
Nobody has ever explained how they came by these documents, or whether the quotes were genuine, and the (sigh) mainstream media has displayed zero interest. E-mail messages have the legal status of letters, and even under RIPA it would be hard to consider the campaign to opt out of the NPfIT Spine a question of national security. The government has form for using dubiously acquired, or possibly fictional, private correspondence for partisan ends.
Update: Well, well. She contacted Blears from her own Web site, by clicking a MAILTO link, which of course launched her local (i.e. service) mail client rather than a Hotmail account.
But the issue here is that a minister (with exceptions - Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland, of course. Yes, yes) is responsible as an MP to their constituents, and as a minister to Parliament as a whole, i.e. the nation at one remove. Further, it's just fucking indecent and violent, an act of boss brutality. She was on £16,000 at age 38; what else is it?
Far from wanking about trivialities, we ought to demand her reinstatement. If she wants to deal with an organisation that spies on private correspondence for partisan ends, that is.
It begins with a Daily Telegraph story that a clerk, Lisa Greenwood, in the Department for Children, Schools and Families was sacked for posting a comment about Hazel Blears on theyworkforyou. Unfortunately, no comment including the text quoted exists in any MySociety.org system, and the Torygraph doesn't seem to know which Web site they actually mean.
Further inquiries show that the story originates from a local news agency (South West News) and the DCSF press office. The Telegraph claims that the comment was sent by e-mail, but there are no MySociety sites that accept comments by e-mail, so this cannot be true. TheyWorkForYou doesn't send confirmations by e-mail, so it can't be one of those, although WriteToThem and FixMyStreet do.
Clearly, someone is telling porkies, and using the same as grounds to terminate some poor sod's employment. Now, civil servants are formally bound by oath to renounce partisanship; however, the text doesn't make any reference - if it wasn't invented out of thin air by the DCSF press office - to any political party, only to Hazel Blears' personal financial probity.
It is probably worth remembering at this point that several government ministers have been in the habit of quoting what they claim is other people's private correspondence during parliamentary debates, no doubt because they cannot be sued for what they say in the House. Specifically, Lord Warner, Andrew Miller MP, and Caroline Flint MP used what purported to be private e-mail sent by Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University and Simon Davies of Privacy International and LSE to score points in debates on ID cards and on the NHS National Programme for IT.
Nobody has ever explained how they came by these documents, or whether the quotes were genuine, and the (sigh) mainstream media has displayed zero interest. E-mail messages have the legal status of letters, and even under RIPA it would be hard to consider the campaign to opt out of the NPfIT Spine a question of national security. The government has form for using dubiously acquired, or possibly fictional, private correspondence for partisan ends.
Update: Well, well. She contacted Blears from her own Web site, by clicking a MAILTO link, which of course launched her local (i.e. service) mail client rather than a Hotmail account.
But the issue here is that a minister (with exceptions - Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland, of course. Yes, yes) is responsible as an MP to their constituents, and as a minister to Parliament as a whole, i.e. the nation at one remove. Further, it's just fucking indecent and violent, an act of boss brutality. She was on £16,000 at age 38; what else is it?
Far from wanking about trivialities, we ought to demand her reinstatement. If she wants to deal with an organisation that spies on private correspondence for partisan ends, that is.
Labels: censorship, civil service
Sunday, July 05, 2009
hate to say I told you so
Duncan: why don't we turn GNER as was into a co-operative?
Ah. Like this?
Ah. Like this?
Labels: trains
action: D-day, 8th July
OK, it's coming down to the wire. Next week, on Wednesday, 8th July, the Government is going to put three regulations before the House of Commons. These are the crucial executive orders that put the guts of the Identity Cards Act in place; specifically, they are the ones that make it possible to force anyone who wants a passport (or any other official document not yet specified) to be fingerprinted, recorded, and loaded into the National Identity Register, to force the same people to pay for the dubious privilege unless they work at Manchester or London City Airports and have an airside security pass, and to pass any and all information from the Register to a variety of authorities including private credit-reference agencies and anyone who those authorities want to give it to.
At the current time of asking, this would appear to include the Uzbek secret police, so long as a police officer above the rank of inspector (!) acting on orders from a more senior officer, or the authorised agent of either secret service, GCHQ, SOCA, or the Inland Revenue says so. There is a clear hierarchy of priorities here; the fee is no problem so long as the compulsion doesn't get in, and although obviously evil, the data-trafficking is considerably less problematic if the compulsion doesn't get in.
So, time to write to them; remember that the scheme will be compulsory for anyone who ever wants to leave the country, which is another way of saying there is no choice; remember that the system is wildly insecure, that the biometrics have been hacked repeatedly, and that the Government wants to use the Chip-and-PIN infrastructure as a major part of it, and some Chip-and-PIN terminals mysteriously contain GSM radios that call numbers in Pakistan; remember that it will cost a fortune; and remember that many of the supposed "allied" intelligence services who will be able to ask for data from it have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted not to torture British citizens.
If you're scared of the whips, vote for the fees regulation and maybe the data sharing one if you're desperate and they've shown you the photos; but whatever you do, vote down the Information and Code of Practice on Penalties Order. It's secondary legislation, so it just takes one loss in the Commons to kill it.
The texts are here, here, and here.
At the current time of asking, this would appear to include the Uzbek secret police, so long as a police officer above the rank of inspector (!) acting on orders from a more senior officer, or the authorised agent of either secret service, GCHQ, SOCA, or the Inland Revenue says so. There is a clear hierarchy of priorities here; the fee is no problem so long as the compulsion doesn't get in, and although obviously evil, the data-trafficking is considerably less problematic if the compulsion doesn't get in.
So, time to write to them; remember that the scheme will be compulsory for anyone who ever wants to leave the country, which is another way of saying there is no choice; remember that the system is wildly insecure, that the biometrics have been hacked repeatedly, and that the Government wants to use the Chip-and-PIN infrastructure as a major part of it, and some Chip-and-PIN terminals mysteriously contain GSM radios that call numbers in Pakistan; remember that it will cost a fortune; and remember that many of the supposed "allied" intelligence services who will be able to ask for data from it have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted not to torture British citizens.
If you're scared of the whips, vote for the fees regulation and maybe the data sharing one if you're desperate and they've shown you the photos; but whatever you do, vote down the Information and Code of Practice on Penalties Order. It's secondary legislation, so it just takes one loss in the Commons to kill it.
The texts are here, here, and here.
why is there no enduring FOIA request?
Something else that came up at OpenTech; is there any way of getting continuing information out of the government? This is especially interesting in the light of things like Who's Lobbying? and Richard Pope and Rob McKinnon's work in the same direction; it seems to me that the key element in this is getting information on meetings, specifically meetings with paid advocates i.e. lobbyists. Obviously, this has some pretty crucial synergies with the parliamentary bills tracker.
However, it's interesting at best to know who had meetings with who at some point in the past, just as it is at best interesting to know who claimed what on expenses at some point in the past; it's not operationally useful. Historians are great, but for practical purposes you need the information before the next legislative stage or the next committee meeting.
I asked Tom Watson MP and John "not the Sheffield Wednesday guy" Sheridan of the Cabinet Office if the government does any monitoring of lobbyists itself; you'd think they might want to know who their officials are meeting with for their own purposes. Apparently there are some resources, notably the Hospitality Register for the senior civil service. (BTW, it was a bit of a cross section of the blogosphere - as well as Watson and a myriad of geeks, Zoe Margolis was moderating some of the panels. All we needed was Iain Dale to show up and have Donal Blaney threaten to sue everyone, and we'd have had the full set.)
One option is to issue a bucketful of FOIA requests covering everyone in sight, then take cover; carpet-bomb disclosure. But, as with the MPs' expenses, this gives you a snapshot at best, which is of historical interest. As Stafford Beer said, it's the Data-Feed you need.
So I asked Francis Davey, MySociety's barrister, if it's legally possible to create an enduring or repeating FOIA obligation on a government agency, so they have to keep publishing the documents; apparently not, and there are various tricks they can use to make life difficult, like assuming that the cost of doing it again is the same as doing it the first time, totalling all the requests, and billing you for the lot.
However, it's interesting at best to know who had meetings with who at some point in the past, just as it is at best interesting to know who claimed what on expenses at some point in the past; it's not operationally useful. Historians are great, but for practical purposes you need the information before the next legislative stage or the next committee meeting.
I asked Tom Watson MP and John "not the Sheffield Wednesday guy" Sheridan of the Cabinet Office if the government does any monitoring of lobbyists itself; you'd think they might want to know who their officials are meeting with for their own purposes. Apparently there are some resources, notably the Hospitality Register for the senior civil service. (BTW, it was a bit of a cross section of the blogosphere - as well as Watson and a myriad of geeks, Zoe Margolis was moderating some of the panels. All we needed was Iain Dale to show up and have Donal Blaney threaten to sue everyone, and we'd have had the full set.)
One option is to issue a bucketful of FOIA requests covering everyone in sight, then take cover; carpet-bomb disclosure. But, as with the MPs' expenses, this gives you a snapshot at best, which is of historical interest. As Stafford Beer said, it's the Data-Feed you need.
So I asked Francis Davey, MySociety's barrister, if it's legally possible to create an enduring or repeating FOIA obligation on a government agency, so they have to keep publishing the documents; apparently not, and there are various tricks they can use to make life difficult, like assuming that the cost of doing it again is the same as doing it the first time, totalling all the requests, and billing you for the lot.
Labels: civil service, computer, corruption, democracy, hacker
free our bills: hardcore wonk/geek out
So what do we need to know about a parliamentary bill?
First of all, as soon as a piece of legislation is published, it has certain meta-data. Date originated; originating department; originating MP; originating house; type - primary legislation, order in council, statutory instrument; current status (pre-legislative/Green/White Paper, first reading, committee, report, second, third, Royal Assent, repealed/superseded). And, of course, a unique identifier. But they aren't isolated; they amend, supersede, or repeal other legislation, so every Bill object needs to keep this information as well.
And if it's secondary legislation, it has dependencies on at least one past Act of Parliament, so anything with the types order-in-council or statutory instrument has to track which Acts it inherits from. Similarly, a primary Bill may create possible secondary legislation.
Now we need to look at the revisions. Once the bill is published, it starts to attract changes; but it remains the same bill. So we need to have further rows which are permanently associated with the original bill, but uniquely identifiable in themselves. It's probably simplest to keep only the changes at each step, because much of the point of the whole project is to monitor the changes. It feels right to me, if nothing else, to consider all the texts of a bill to be revisions, contained within the bill wrapper.
So a revision contains the title, the text in its sections, the status of the text, the originating organisation, if possible the originating MPs, the timestamp, and the amend/supersede/repeal/inherit information, and a revision ID. At each revision stage, a new item is added, until the final version gets Royal Assent; it would make sense to sort them in reverse chronological order and make the most recent version the default that is retrieved when that bill is requested.
This gives us a reasonable database of legislation, but it's not going to be much use; for that we need some more comprehensible semantics. So each bill needs both a summary and some category tags, and both the bills and revisions will need to have users specify their own tags and notes. Add those fields as well... And we'll need links to the debates at each stage, as well. Chuck in a URI field for Hansard in each Revision.
Summing up in object oriented terms, we've got a class called Bill, which has instance methods for the various metadata we've described, and a subclass called Revision, whose instance methods provide all the fields for each revision, but which always inherits the metadata and unique identifier of the Bill that created it, and possibly a further subclass of Revision called Comment to contain user notes. Further, the Bill needs a method Amend that creates a new Revision with the amending text, which remains provisional (inheriting the amending Bill's current status) until the amending Bill is finalised. Of course, if we implemented it in something like Django the code could be precisely that.
In database terms, each Bill is a row with a primary key that uniquely identifies the bill and all its revisions and comments; each Revision and Comment is a row which has the same key as its parent Bill and a key which identifies it in the context of that Bill.
Update: Comments point out that a Comment shouldn't be a subclass of Bill, for because it's not legislation itself and it should be an is-a relationship not a has-a relationship. Good point; actually, commentary should probably be logically parallel to the actual text of legislation, but related to it - Commentary, with subclass UserComment, linked by the bill and revision IDs to the actual text.
And Dsquared tells us that the German Bundestag already has a public version control system for legislation! Here it is; it's very complete and logical, I'll say that for it, but there is no facility to annotate anything. But if you want to know precisely what the Baden-Württemburg delegation wanted to change in the law on modernisation of accounting requirements in the Federal Council's Committee stage, it gets you there in two clicks from the search page. User experience design does not mean making things pretty.
First of all, as soon as a piece of legislation is published, it has certain meta-data. Date originated; originating department; originating MP; originating house; type - primary legislation, order in council, statutory instrument; current status (pre-legislative/Green/White Paper, first reading, committee, report, second, third, Royal Assent, repealed/superseded). And, of course, a unique identifier. But they aren't isolated; they amend, supersede, or repeal other legislation, so every Bill object needs to keep this information as well.
And if it's secondary legislation, it has dependencies on at least one past Act of Parliament, so anything with the types order-in-council or statutory instrument has to track which Acts it inherits from. Similarly, a primary Bill may create possible secondary legislation.
Now we need to look at the revisions. Once the bill is published, it starts to attract changes; but it remains the same bill. So we need to have further rows which are permanently associated with the original bill, but uniquely identifiable in themselves. It's probably simplest to keep only the changes at each step, because much of the point of the whole project is to monitor the changes. It feels right to me, if nothing else, to consider all the texts of a bill to be revisions, contained within the bill wrapper.
So a revision contains the title, the text in its sections, the status of the text, the originating organisation, if possible the originating MPs, the timestamp, and the amend/supersede/repeal/inherit information, and a revision ID. At each revision stage, a new item is added, until the final version gets Royal Assent; it would make sense to sort them in reverse chronological order and make the most recent version the default that is retrieved when that bill is requested.
This gives us a reasonable database of legislation, but it's not going to be much use; for that we need some more comprehensible semantics. So each bill needs both a summary and some category tags, and both the bills and revisions will need to have users specify their own tags and notes. Add those fields as well... And we'll need links to the debates at each stage, as well. Chuck in a URI field for Hansard in each Revision.
Summing up in object oriented terms, we've got a class called Bill, which has instance methods for the various metadata we've described, and a subclass called Revision, whose instance methods provide all the fields for each revision, but which always inherits the metadata and unique identifier of the Bill that created it, and possibly a further subclass of Revision called Comment to contain user notes. Further, the Bill needs a method Amend that creates a new Revision with the amending text, which remains provisional (inheriting the amending Bill's current status) until the amending Bill is finalised. Of course, if we implemented it in something like Django the code could be precisely that.
In database terms, each Bill is a row with a primary key that uniquely identifies the bill and all its revisions and comments; each Revision and Comment is a row which has the same key as its parent Bill and a key which identifies it in the context of that Bill.
Update: Comments point out that a Comment shouldn't be a subclass of Bill, for because it's not legislation itself and it should be an is-a relationship not a has-a relationship. Good point; actually, commentary should probably be logically parallel to the actual text of legislation, but related to it - Commentary, with subclass UserComment, linked by the bill and revision IDs to the actual text.
And Dsquared tells us that the German Bundestag already has a public version control system for legislation! Here it is; it's very complete and logical, I'll say that for it, but there is no facility to annotate anything. But if you want to know precisely what the Baden-Württemburg delegation wanted to change in the law on modernisation of accounting requirements in the Federal Council's Committee stage, it gets you there in two clicks from the search page. User experience design does not mean making things pretty.
Labels: democracy, hacker, open source, politics
Saturday, July 04, 2009
a package manager for Westminster 1.4
OpenTech blogging...after this morning's MySociety brainstorm on the specifications for MPs' expenses and tracking bills through Parliament, I'm concerned that we're going to end up with the best imaginable system for monitoring public employees' expenses, and miss some absolute horror of a thing while our attention is elsewhere. (Is that the latent content of Heather Brooke?)
Certainly, the parliamentary bills tracker is a far more important and interesting project, unashamedly wonkful as it is. It's a CCTV camera in the sausage factory of legislation; it's hugely important to be able to monitor the drafting process itself, and correlate it with other sources of data - for example, information on meetings and lobbying extracted through the Freedom of Information Act.
As usual, the meeting ran off after a few minutes as various people came up with their pet idea for sexy graphics; if you can't insist on MVC architecture at a hacker conference, when can you?
User-generated tagging will be incredibly important; the nature of legislation is that the geographical areas affected aren't usually explicit, because it acts to change legal status rather than specific spots on the ground. So you need a way to flag which actual places and people will be affected...
Strangely, the longer it was discussed the more it sounded like a Linux package manager, what with the importance of dependencies, supersession, amendment, etc.
Certainly, the parliamentary bills tracker is a far more important and interesting project, unashamedly wonkful as it is. It's a CCTV camera in the sausage factory of legislation; it's hugely important to be able to monitor the drafting process itself, and correlate it with other sources of data - for example, information on meetings and lobbying extracted through the Freedom of Information Act.
As usual, the meeting ran off after a few minutes as various people came up with their pet idea for sexy graphics; if you can't insist on MVC architecture at a hacker conference, when can you?
User-generated tagging will be incredibly important; the nature of legislation is that the geographical areas affected aren't usually explicit, because it acts to change legal status rather than specific spots on the ground. So you need a way to flag which actual places and people will be affected...
Strangely, the longer it was discussed the more it sounded like a Linux package manager, what with the importance of dependencies, supersession, amendment, etc.
Labels: hacker
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
stars of CCTV
OK, so the Iranian police - well, the Basij, the IRGC, the spooks, the cops, the repressive state apparatus anyway - are publishing photos of demonstrators on the Web and trying to crowdsource the job of identifying the faces on their CCTV tapes. It says here. And, indeed, here they are.
Now, this is obviously a case where throwing a multi-gigabit DDOS attack at them would do nothing but gooood. If you want to load that page several thousand times, or post completely spurious information to it, of course there's nothing I can do to stop you, even though it is no doubt against the Computer Misuse Act.
But what depresses me about this project is that the idea was originated by the West Yorkshire Police after the Bradford race riot of 2001; they got the Telegraph & Argus to publish, day after day, front pages of CCTV or other surveillance images of rioters, in the hope that the public would turn them in. Which they did.
Now, this is obviously a case where throwing a multi-gigabit DDOS attack at them would do nothing but gooood. If you want to load that page several thousand times, or post completely spurious information to it, of course there's nothing I can do to stop you, even though it is no doubt against the Computer Misuse Act.
But what depresses me about this project is that the idea was originated by the West Yorkshire Police after the Bradford race riot of 2001; they got the Telegraph & Argus to publish, day after day, front pages of CCTV or other surveillance images of rioters, in the hope that the public would turn them in. Which they did.
irrigating Senegal with free software
It's the kind of day on the Holloway Road that rappers get mawkish about. So, obviously, time for some blogging about open-source software for the public sector. I'm hugely impressed by the contestants in the SourceForge Community Contest, specifically the ones in the Government category. There's Trisano, a free epidemic surveillance system for public health officials. Think you're going to cook up squid flu in your shed and the sclerotic processes of Government 3-G can't do a thing? Think again.
In case that doesn't work, there's Sahana, the open-source disaster management application that works either as a network or as a standalone application. It's apparently been used from Galveston to China via New Orleans and is "pre-deployed" in New York - not only have they got the disaster software, they've even got disasters that haven't happened yet.
And there's the simply named Medical, an open-source healthcare information system, which is certain to be much less bad than whatever code-glob the Department of Health, Cerner, and BT eventually excrete onto the NHS. But my favourite, and the one I voted for, was Agepabase, a French-speaking GIS devised by the Senegalese government to plan the construction of water supplies.
I'm awed by the innovation and commitment., and ashamed by all the shite I've produced over the years. There is nothing at all like it in the other categories; if you don't count the RepRap, that is, which you ought to vote for in its own slot.
In case that doesn't work, there's Sahana, the open-source disaster management application that works either as a network or as a standalone application. It's apparently been used from Galveston to China via New Orleans and is "pre-deployed" in New York - not only have they got the disaster software, they've even got disasters that haven't happened yet.
And there's the simply named Medical, an open-source healthcare information system, which is certain to be much less bad than whatever code-glob the Department of Health, Cerner, and BT eventually excrete onto the NHS. But my favourite, and the one I voted for, was Agepabase, a French-speaking GIS devised by the Senegalese government to plan the construction of water supplies.
I'm awed by the innovation and commitment., and ashamed by all the shite I've produced over the years. There is nothing at all like it in the other categories; if you don't count the RepRap, that is, which you ought to vote for in its own slot.
Labels: hacker
Sunday, June 28, 2009
obsolete
Am I daft, or was the Apple iBook G4, 12" screen, the least annoying computer of my experience?
Labels: computer
yet more roads
Another On Roads thing is the special role of the North; indeed, as he points out, it's the construction of the M62 that made the North of England a sensible geographical construct rather than an awkward stereotype that uneasily combined Lancashire and Yorkshire.
And so much early motorway building started up north; you have the role of tireless boosters and chief engineers James Drake in Lancashire and Stuart Lovell in West Yorkshire, the A580 East Lancs Road (the very first), the Preston bypass, the Manchester and Leeds urban motorways, and the epic engineering drama of the M62 itself. As its chief engineer put it, "for seven years we ate mud, walked in mud, sat in mud and were aware of mud, and there was mud in the sandwiches".
This would have far-reaching consequences; not so long ago, I recall some journalist or other saying that they were very surprised, on going to Yorkshire to report the miners' strike, to find all these huge roads leading everywhere. They would, of course, be a major theatre of that conflict, and a few years later, the rave/drugs wars as well. Later still, both the protestors and the Sheffield-based professional climbers hired to get them out of trees would go that way.
Can it be true that my mother and I ran the length of our local bypass, twice, wearing donkey jackets, boots, hi-viz vests, and carrying shovels? I rather think it is. It was a fearsomely hot day, and I don't think we were even formally protesting, although, in a sense, what else were we doing?
Which reminds me; one of the very first road protests in the UK, against the Westway in the late 60s, or rather in favour of playgrounds under it, was started by someone who'd been reading about Guy Debord and was looking for something to start a row about.
And so much early motorway building started up north; you have the role of tireless boosters and chief engineers James Drake in Lancashire and Stuart Lovell in West Yorkshire, the A580 East Lancs Road (the very first), the Preston bypass, the Manchester and Leeds urban motorways, and the epic engineering drama of the M62 itself. As its chief engineer put it, "for seven years we ate mud, walked in mud, sat in mud and were aware of mud, and there was mud in the sandwiches".
This would have far-reaching consequences; not so long ago, I recall some journalist or other saying that they were very surprised, on going to Yorkshire to report the miners' strike, to find all these huge roads leading everywhere. They would, of course, be a major theatre of that conflict, and a few years later, the rave/drugs wars as well. Later still, both the protestors and the Sheffield-based professional climbers hired to get them out of trees would go that way.
Can it be true that my mother and I ran the length of our local bypass, twice, wearing donkey jackets, boots, hi-viz vests, and carrying shovels? I rather think it is. It was a fearsomely hot day, and I don't think we were even formally protesting, although, in a sense, what else were we doing?
Which reminds me; one of the very first road protests in the UK, against the Westway in the late 60s, or rather in favour of playgrounds under it, was started by someone who'd been reading about Guy Debord and was looking for something to start a row about.
Labels: logistics, personal history, protest, Yorkshire
slip inside this (giant distribution ware)house
After the Mancunian love-in at Jamie Kenny's, my own thoughts on Joe Moran's On Roads are inevitably coming.
I didn't know that we have Tony Benn to thank for the big-box supply chain logistics industry. But yes; at the end of the 1960s, the then Minister of Technology tore off a £150,000 innovation grant for the Co-op to investigate the idea of developing a small number of giant, automated distribution centres. Specifically, they started work at Birtley in County Durham, where they built a huge regional warehouse that used new articulated trucks and robotic cranes, and an ICL mainframe computer to keep track of it all, achieving a then-unheard of 5,000 boxes an hour.
As a condition of the grant, the Co-op had to share the details of their trial with the rest of British industry. For once, they soaked it up but good, and the rest is history. I find this fascinatingly ironic, especially in the light of Benn's status both as pope of the 80s green-left and, later, as professional national treasure. Most of his fans in the 80s would have been delighted to burn Birtley down, and the cardigans who go to his speaking engagements are exactly the people who drive everywhere and oppose all planning applications on principle.
Benn was famously keen on nuclear power and Concorde (even if Roland Beamont really saw him coming, when he let the old pilot execute a barrel roll in the prototype); he also bought BT's first billing systems computer as postmaster-general. I very much doubt if many people who considered themselves Bennites would have accepted any of these things, still less the UKAEA police force he created with its special nuclear role, routine and heavy armament, and nationwide area of operations. Similarly, he was forever despised by some people for the infamous bonfire of TSR-2 blueprints.
Some would say that this is a sign that he was always oversold, and in fact was just trimming to the winds of popularity for most of his career. Isn't he the only third-generation cabinet minister to have a cabinet minister for a son, after all?
But I suspect it's deeper and wider than that. One thing about Moran's book is the way nothing lasts less than the perception of modernity. By the time that ICL 'pooter was being set up in Birtley, the great road burst was already losing momentum; it had run into serious trouble at the 1970 local elections and along the Westway, and a property boom was straining the economics, to say nothing of altering the politics and demographics of many of the road projects. By M6 completion in 1972, the Department of Transport had already accepted that "the day of the supremacy of the motor car and the roadbuilder has come to an end". Leeds was about to make a fool of itself by declaring that it was the Motorway City of the 70s; the 60s would have met with great approval.
By the 90s, who on earth imagined roads as being the future? This was one of the reasons, I think, the Major government was never able to come to terms with the road protestors on the political level. The only language they had to argue against them was all about Luddites, stick-in-the-muds, progress, and such - the language of 50s corporation socialists and youve-never-had-it-so-good Tories. But the future now looked like one of solar panels, synthesisers and Web servers - everyone agreed there - and maybe genetics and TGVs - much more controversial, of course. And what on earth were conservatives - members of a party that believed in the scepticism of Burke and the libertarianism of Hayek...it says here - doing talking about progress and plans that were bigger than those of Julius Caesar?
Now, of course, with the grandeur stripped out and the brakes applied, no-one really cares. And it is no surprise, really, that a book like On Roads should appear at this moment; it's about time for motorways to become part of the palaeo-future. The notion of ironic hipster A40(M) widening, however, makes me feel like I've got used to too many things.
I didn't know that we have Tony Benn to thank for the big-box supply chain logistics industry. But yes; at the end of the 1960s, the then Minister of Technology tore off a £150,000 innovation grant for the Co-op to investigate the idea of developing a small number of giant, automated distribution centres. Specifically, they started work at Birtley in County Durham, where they built a huge regional warehouse that used new articulated trucks and robotic cranes, and an ICL mainframe computer to keep track of it all, achieving a then-unheard of 5,000 boxes an hour.
As a condition of the grant, the Co-op had to share the details of their trial with the rest of British industry. For once, they soaked it up but good, and the rest is history. I find this fascinatingly ironic, especially in the light of Benn's status both as pope of the 80s green-left and, later, as professional national treasure. Most of his fans in the 80s would have been delighted to burn Birtley down, and the cardigans who go to his speaking engagements are exactly the people who drive everywhere and oppose all planning applications on principle.
Benn was famously keen on nuclear power and Concorde (even if Roland Beamont really saw him coming, when he let the old pilot execute a barrel roll in the prototype); he also bought BT's first billing systems computer as postmaster-general. I very much doubt if many people who considered themselves Bennites would have accepted any of these things, still less the UKAEA police force he created with its special nuclear role, routine and heavy armament, and nationwide area of operations. Similarly, he was forever despised by some people for the infamous bonfire of TSR-2 blueprints.
Some would say that this is a sign that he was always oversold, and in fact was just trimming to the winds of popularity for most of his career. Isn't he the only third-generation cabinet minister to have a cabinet minister for a son, after all?
But I suspect it's deeper and wider than that. One thing about Moran's book is the way nothing lasts less than the perception of modernity. By the time that ICL 'pooter was being set up in Birtley, the great road burst was already losing momentum; it had run into serious trouble at the 1970 local elections and along the Westway, and a property boom was straining the economics, to say nothing of altering the politics and demographics of many of the road projects. By M6 completion in 1972, the Department of Transport had already accepted that "the day of the supremacy of the motor car and the roadbuilder has come to an end". Leeds was about to make a fool of itself by declaring that it was the Motorway City of the 70s; the 60s would have met with great approval.
By the 90s, who on earth imagined roads as being the future? This was one of the reasons, I think, the Major government was never able to come to terms with the road protestors on the political level. The only language they had to argue against them was all about Luddites, stick-in-the-muds, progress, and such - the language of 50s corporation socialists and youve-never-had-it-so-good Tories. But the future now looked like one of solar panels, synthesisers and Web servers - everyone agreed there - and maybe genetics and TGVs - much more controversial, of course. And what on earth were conservatives - members of a party that believed in the scepticism of Burke and the libertarianism of Hayek...it says here - doing talking about progress and plans that were bigger than those of Julius Caesar?
Now, of course, with the grandeur stripped out and the brakes applied, no-one really cares. And it is no surprise, really, that a book like On Roads should appear at this moment; it's about time for motorways to become part of the palaeo-future. The notion of ironic hipster A40(M) widening, however, makes me feel like I've got used to too many things.
Labels: history, ideology, logistics, networks, politics, protest
on my radio
OK, so there's the magic army vehicle project that spent more on powerpoint presentations than Drayson managed to spend buying several hundred actual vehicles. FRES, as it is known, started off as the British half of a US project that ended up being the Future Combat System, a pharaonic lashup of vehicles, radios, computers, and individual equipment that was meant to "network enable" everything.
The US end has now been cancelled, which will have nontrivial consequences for the various BAE-owned companies involved, who were probably hoping to use the work there for our job. This would be a great moment to rethink; after all, why would you try to design a large motor vehicle from the radio outwards? The whole point about "network enablement" everywhere else it has been tried is that it doesn't matter what you attach the mobile phones/PCs/RFID chips/whatever to, so you have great technical flexibility.
The US end has now been cancelled, which will have nontrivial consequences for the various BAE-owned companies involved, who were probably hoping to use the work there for our job. This would be a great moment to rethink; after all, why would you try to design a large motor vehicle from the radio outwards? The whole point about "network enablement" everywhere else it has been tried is that it doesn't matter what you attach the mobile phones/PCs/RFID chips/whatever to, so you have great technical flexibility.
Labels: stupid procurement
admin: opentech
It's that time again: OpenTech is next Saturday. I'm not presenting anything, which will leave me more time to argue about random things in the ULU bar. But I'm especially keen to do this with readers, and anyone who's interested in the political uses of Asterisk, starting out with Ardour, which I've just installed, and all kinds of weird things.
tatty
Brilliant post from Dan Lockton on the design problems of making smart meters usable and useful.
In a sense, it relates to this post at the RSA's Social Brain about "the dark side of "nudge""; of course, the downside of all these neat ideas about adjusting people's decision processes into ones that are more rational, or at least less harmful, isn't a sinisterly hyperefficient world where all troublesome individuality has been, blah, blah, but instead a world of undermaintained, malfunctioning good intentions.
In science-fiction terms, rather than a space-opera dystopia, it's a New Wave one we've got to watch; all greasy handrails, important safety devices rigged to stop them making a noise, and infinite reserves of bitterness and resentment. From Dan's scenario-planning:
In a sense, it relates to this post at the RSA's Social Brain about "the dark side of "nudge""; of course, the downside of all these neat ideas about adjusting people's decision processes into ones that are more rational, or at least less harmful, isn't a sinisterly hyperefficient world where all troublesome individuality has been, blah, blah, but instead a world of undermaintained, malfunctioning good intentions.
In science-fiction terms, rather than a space-opera dystopia, it's a New Wave one we've got to watch; all greasy handrails, important safety devices rigged to stop them making a noise, and infinite reserves of bitterness and resentment. From Dan's scenario-planning:
The display is still there on the fridge door, but when the batteries powering the display run out, and it goes blank, no-one notices.Quite; like the indefinitely deferred maintenance that tends to kill modern buildings. In fact, what that snippet reminded me of was democracy.
Labels: architecture, democracy, energy, engineering
spam
Arbor Networks has a great post with data on Iranian Internet censorship. As well as the deliberate transit shortage, they seem to be targeting specific protocols, notably SSH, the secure shell protocol one uses to administer servers and also quite often to provide a VPN tunnel. This isn't surprising, really, but it is depressing; practically any shell account and any machine, including my mobile phone, will let you set up an SSH tunnel, and it is strongly encrypted, so it's one of the most reliable and easiest ways to beat the censor.
Arbor's analysis suggests that the point is to limit traffic to levels that their existing censorship infrastructure can handle; interestingly, e-mail, and bogstandard Web traffic on port 80, seem unaffected, which suggests they already had the big squid proxy etc. in place. There is, of course, nothing to stop you configuring your server to do SSH on port 80, but it might be a little obvious. An alternative would be to use something like OpenVPN, which uses the same HTTPS protocol and port that all the e-commerce and corporate e-mail things do.
Fascinatingly, levels of gaming application traffic are unaffected, and Arbor wonder if it would be possible to use this for clandestine communications. (Perhaps the government wants people playing computer games?) This is, of course, a major plot point from Charlie Stross's Halting State, although the exploit is rather more sophisticated there - rather than just meeting up for a chat in-game, they are mapping their data to the game's commands and reversing the process at the other end.
Depressingly, according to Renesys, many of the open proxy servers that have been set up for the use of Iranian dissidents are being heavily abused by Chinese spammers. This is a hard problem; any tunnelling system intended to defeat the censor must be open to anyone, it's insanely risky to keep any logs of who accesses it, so it seems inevitable that the vermin will get in.
Arbor's analysis suggests that the point is to limit traffic to levels that their existing censorship infrastructure can handle; interestingly, e-mail, and bogstandard Web traffic on port 80, seem unaffected, which suggests they already had the big squid proxy etc. in place. There is, of course, nothing to stop you configuring your server to do SSH on port 80, but it might be a little obvious. An alternative would be to use something like OpenVPN, which uses the same HTTPS protocol and port that all the e-commerce and corporate e-mail things do.
Fascinatingly, levels of gaming application traffic are unaffected, and Arbor wonder if it would be possible to use this for clandestine communications. (Perhaps the government wants people playing computer games?) This is, of course, a major plot point from Charlie Stross's Halting State, although the exploit is rather more sophisticated there - rather than just meeting up for a chat in-game, they are mapping their data to the game's commands and reversing the process at the other end.
Depressingly, according to Renesys, many of the open proxy servers that have been set up for the use of Iranian dissidents are being heavily abused by Chinese spammers. This is a hard problem; any tunnelling system intended to defeat the censor must be open to anyone, it's insanely risky to keep any logs of who accesses it, so it seems inevitable that the vermin will get in.
Labels: action, censorship, hacker, Internet, Iran
some MPs considered beneficial
Lynne Featherstone MP: for workers' representation, against managerialism, for Iraqi employees. WIN.
More seriously, I'm increasingly convinced by the argument that the fundamental driver of the economic crisis is the falling labour share of national income. This was J.K. Galbraith's take on the Great Depression; despite the roaring 20s, wages had been flat for years.
Living standards for the great majority could only rise in so far as technological change and competition could hold down inflation; beyond that, there was quite simply a limit to how much the rich could actually spend, and as they got richer, more and more of national income was being taken out of circulation and eventually used in the stock market, either directly or as part of the "great river of gold that converged on Wall Street, all of it to help Americans hold common stock on margin", where it was eventually destroyed by the crash.
I'm still strongly in favour of the agenda in this post.
More seriously, I'm increasingly convinced by the argument that the fundamental driver of the economic crisis is the falling labour share of national income. This was J.K. Galbraith's take on the Great Depression; despite the roaring 20s, wages had been flat for years.
Living standards for the great majority could only rise in so far as technological change and competition could hold down inflation; beyond that, there was quite simply a limit to how much the rich could actually spend, and as they got richer, more and more of national income was being taken out of circulation and eventually used in the stock market, either directly or as part of the "great river of gold that converged on Wall Street, all of it to help Americans hold common stock on margin", where it was eventually destroyed by the crash.
I'm still strongly in favour of the agenda in this post.
too many right-wing meetings
OK, so I got no takers for this prediction.
"The Waffen divisions of the Wehrmacht"? What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? For a start, "Waffen" means "weapon or "armed". Did the German army of the Second World War have any unarmed ones? Of course, it's completely nonsensical as a unit designation. Kirkhope was presumably trying to skate around the phrase "Waffen-SS", which refers to the SS's field units as opposed to its "general purpose" administrative staff.
But even if we straighten out his mangled words, his argument is still ignorant and morally awful, as it rests on the long-discredited idea that all the atrocities of the Eastern Front were the work of the SS, and the regular German army obeyed the laws of war. Further, even if that wasn't wrong, he would still be hopelessly ahistorical, because the various locally recruited units the Germans set up starting in 1942 were administratively attached to the Waffen SS, not the Army. The Army did recruit a lot of foreigners as individual replacements, but it didn't create a foreign legion; the SS did.
And worst of all, the earliest Latvian SS were recruited from a vicious militia which emerged as the Russians pulled out in the early summer of 1941 and immediately started murdering the local Jewish population without even waiting for the Germans to show up. The degree of horror they achieved regularly sickened hardened soldiers and deeply impressed the SS Einsatzkommandos that followed the army; they lost no time in signing them up and using them all over Central and Eastern Europe to do the dirty work, including acting as the guard force at the extermination camps.
As if you needed any confirmation of this, the Times report has a useful photo of a Latvian remembrance day parade, complete with red-and-white flag, swastika, and Adolf Hitler's likeness. A note for the guidance of readers, and Timothy Kirkhope MEP: if you need to know if your allies might be fascists, check if they like to wave flags with Hitler's face on them. This is not an exclusive test, but the false-positive rate is essentially zero.
(Oh, and if anyone's still interested in the bet, I'm taking the Belgian guy or at least his party to place.)
My money’s on the Latvian or the Hungarian to out himself as a buffoon or neo-nazi.Not surprising, really. But what I didn't expect was that even though the Latvian turned out to be the neo-nazi, the buffoon would turn out to be Timothy Kirkhope MEP, the Tory leader in the European Parliament, who I had always assumed to be an uninspiring but roughly acceptable placeman. But it looks like the Borat Party's Borat is actually its leader. However:
He and the Latvian LNNK denied that it was in any way sympathetic to Nazism. “There was a commemoration of those who had served in the Waffen divisions of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. The Labour Party has been churning this thing out over and over again,” Mr Kirkhope said.
“The truth of the matter is that attendance of the commemoration service for those who have died in wars is not just by members of LNNK — it is by others attached to the EPP because the Baltic states were taken over and oppressed by the Russians and the situation was that the Germans conscripted a number of people to join the Waffen.”
"The Waffen divisions of the Wehrmacht"? What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? For a start, "Waffen" means "weapon or "armed". Did the German army of the Second World War have any unarmed ones? Of course, it's completely nonsensical as a unit designation. Kirkhope was presumably trying to skate around the phrase "Waffen-SS", which refers to the SS's field units as opposed to its "general purpose" administrative staff.
But even if we straighten out his mangled words, his argument is still ignorant and morally awful, as it rests on the long-discredited idea that all the atrocities of the Eastern Front were the work of the SS, and the regular German army obeyed the laws of war. Further, even if that wasn't wrong, he would still be hopelessly ahistorical, because the various locally recruited units the Germans set up starting in 1942 were administratively attached to the Waffen SS, not the Army. The Army did recruit a lot of foreigners as individual replacements, but it didn't create a foreign legion; the SS did.
And worst of all, the earliest Latvian SS were recruited from a vicious militia which emerged as the Russians pulled out in the early summer of 1941 and immediately started murdering the local Jewish population without even waiting for the Germans to show up. The degree of horror they achieved regularly sickened hardened soldiers and deeply impressed the SS Einsatzkommandos that followed the army; they lost no time in signing them up and using them all over Central and Eastern Europe to do the dirty work, including acting as the guard force at the extermination camps.
As if you needed any confirmation of this, the Times report has a useful photo of a Latvian remembrance day parade, complete with red-and-white flag, swastika, and Adolf Hitler's likeness. A note for the guidance of readers, and Timothy Kirkhope MEP: if you need to know if your allies might be fascists, check if they like to wave flags with Hitler's face on them. This is not an exclusive test, but the false-positive rate is essentially zero.
(Oh, and if anyone's still interested in the bet, I'm taking the Belgian guy or at least his party to place.)
Labels: Cameron, conservatives, Europe, fascists
Loonies 2.0
What is the legacy of the so-called "loony left"? The conventional wisdom is clear; it was all their fault, for panicking the swing voters and preventing a sensible, Newish Labour solution emerging earlier. Well, how did that work out?
And it has always seemed disingenuous for the Labour Party establishment to blame local councillors for a period when the party's central institutions were regularly totally out of contact with the public mood and spectacularly incompetent; it certainly serves the interests of the top officials and MPs to push responsibility onto an amorphous and vague stereotype essentially based on hostile newspapers' take on the 1980s. Arguably, believing hostile newspapers' take on itself has been the fundamental mistake of the Left since about 1987; the entire Decent Left phenomenon, after all, was all about demonising anyone who was right about Iraq in identical terms. Does anyone imagine that the Sun in the Kelvin McFuck era wouldn't have savaged and libelled any non-Tory power holders?
In a comment at Dunc's, Paul "Bickerstaffe Record" says:
He has a point. Consider the position; it's still conceivable that Labour might luck into a hung parliament next year, cue Liberal and Nationalist (of various types) rejoicing, but any realistic planning has to include a high probability of a fairly rabid Tory government in the near future. Further, the financial position is not great - it's nowhere near as bad as Gideon Osborne makes out, as a look at the gilt rates shows, but it's very far from ideal.
So whoever is in charge will be looking for cuts, and it is a reliable principle of Whitehall politics that one of the best ways to get a policy implemented that you want for your own ideological aims is to attach it to a supposed saving. Only the special relationship and the police-media complex can beat this principle as all-purpose justifiers.
The possibility space includes a Labour government in coalition or under a toleration agreement with the Liberals, which is likely to still be strongly influenced by the Blairite stay-behind agents, a Conservative government heavily influenced by products of 80s Tory culture (the mirror image of the London Labour party in the same period), and some sort of grand-coalition slugthing. It is clear that the balance of risks is towards an effort to legitimise a lot of ugly hard-right baggage through an appeal to cuts.
The Tories are planning to make all spending departments justify their budgets at line item level to none other than William "Annington Homes" Hague; it's certainly a first in British history that the Foreign Secretary will control the public spending settlement, if of course he finds the time to show up.
Therefore, even though there is a need to steer the public finances back towards balance once the recession is clearly looking over, there is a strategic imperative to push back and push back hard against the agendas the cross-party Right will try to smuggle through. After all, the nonsense industry is already cranking up.
Which brings me back to the importance of being loonies, and a bit of politics by walking around. One thing that strikes me about North London is how much stuff in the way of public services here was visibly built in the late 70s and the 1980s; there is a reason why Ken Livingstone hopped right back into the Mayor's office. Despite all their best efforts, the Thatcherites were never quite able to shake the core welfare state; was it, in part, because down on the front line people were still pushing out its frontiers and changing its quality?
A lot of ideas (service-user activism, notably, environmentalism, a renewed concern for architecture and urbanism, and the whole identity-politics package) that were considered highly loony back then are now entirely orthodox and are likely to stay that way, especially given the main parties' obsession with putting taxpayer funds into the "third sector".
I fully expect that anyone who talks a good game about making black schoolboys click their heels in front of teacher - you know the stuff they like - will be able to secure reliable venture capital funding in the million class from a Cameron government, just as they have been able to from Boris Johnson's City Hall, with remarkably little monitoring. William Hague will be snarky. Let him. Nobody cares what the Foreign Secretary has to say.
This creates both opportunities for action - perhaps someone should prepare a Creative Commons or GPL toolkit for citizen-initiated delivery quangos and thinktanks - and also targets for ruthless mockery, when the Tories' preferred third sector entities fuck up. We've already had some very fine examples of this courtesy of Boris Johnson. Clearly, the only rational response to the times is to go mad.
And it has always seemed disingenuous for the Labour Party establishment to blame local councillors for a period when the party's central institutions were regularly totally out of contact with the public mood and spectacularly incompetent; it certainly serves the interests of the top officials and MPs to push responsibility onto an amorphous and vague stereotype essentially based on hostile newspapers' take on the 1980s. Arguably, believing hostile newspapers' take on itself has been the fundamental mistake of the Left since about 1987; the entire Decent Left phenomenon, after all, was all about demonising anyone who was right about Iraq in identical terms. Does anyone imagine that the Sun in the Kelvin McFuck era wouldn't have savaged and libelled any non-Tory power holders?
In a comment at Dunc's, Paul "Bickerstaffe Record" says:
I want to kick off a bottom up meets top down economic analysis of how Labour /Left leaning local authorities should now be challenging the Thatcherite orthodoxies of cost control/rate capping in a sort of ‘1980s no cuts militant’ meets 2000s grassroots-dictated economic policy. The institutional/legal framework has of course changed out of recognition since 1984, but heh, that’s a challenge rather than an insurmountable problem
He has a point. Consider the position; it's still conceivable that Labour might luck into a hung parliament next year, cue Liberal and Nationalist (of various types) rejoicing, but any realistic planning has to include a high probability of a fairly rabid Tory government in the near future. Further, the financial position is not great - it's nowhere near as bad as Gideon Osborne makes out, as a look at the gilt rates shows, but it's very far from ideal.
So whoever is in charge will be looking for cuts, and it is a reliable principle of Whitehall politics that one of the best ways to get a policy implemented that you want for your own ideological aims is to attach it to a supposed saving. Only the special relationship and the police-media complex can beat this principle as all-purpose justifiers.
The possibility space includes a Labour government in coalition or under a toleration agreement with the Liberals, which is likely to still be strongly influenced by the Blairite stay-behind agents, a Conservative government heavily influenced by products of 80s Tory culture (the mirror image of the London Labour party in the same period), and some sort of grand-coalition slugthing. It is clear that the balance of risks is towards an effort to legitimise a lot of ugly hard-right baggage through an appeal to cuts.
The Tories are planning to make all spending departments justify their budgets at line item level to none other than William "Annington Homes" Hague; it's certainly a first in British history that the Foreign Secretary will control the public spending settlement, if of course he finds the time to show up.
Therefore, even though there is a need to steer the public finances back towards balance once the recession is clearly looking over, there is a strategic imperative to push back and push back hard against the agendas the cross-party Right will try to smuggle through. After all, the nonsense industry is already cranking up.
Which brings me back to the importance of being loonies, and a bit of politics by walking around. One thing that strikes me about North London is how much stuff in the way of public services here was visibly built in the late 70s and the 1980s; there is a reason why Ken Livingstone hopped right back into the Mayor's office. Despite all their best efforts, the Thatcherites were never quite able to shake the core welfare state; was it, in part, because down on the front line people were still pushing out its frontiers and changing its quality?
A lot of ideas (service-user activism, notably, environmentalism, a renewed concern for architecture and urbanism, and the whole identity-politics package) that were considered highly loony back then are now entirely orthodox and are likely to stay that way, especially given the main parties' obsession with putting taxpayer funds into the "third sector".
I fully expect that anyone who talks a good game about making black schoolboys click their heels in front of teacher - you know the stuff they like - will be able to secure reliable venture capital funding in the million class from a Cameron government, just as they have been able to from Boris Johnson's City Hall, with remarkably little monitoring. William Hague will be snarky. Let him. Nobody cares what the Foreign Secretary has to say.
This creates both opportunities for action - perhaps someone should prepare a Creative Commons or GPL toolkit for citizen-initiated delivery quangos and thinktanks - and also targets for ruthless mockery, when the Tories' preferred third sector entities fuck up. We've already had some very fine examples of this courtesy of Boris Johnson. Clearly, the only rational response to the times is to go mad.
Labels: academies, action, Blair, Cameron, Gordon Brown, LibDems, libertarian, London # open source # politics # prediction # privatisation, socialism, special relationships
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
I think Flipper is trying to tell us something!
Back in May:
Well, you still don't. After all, look what crawled out of his expenses; he bought a house, which he later sold at a huge profit, by hugely increasing the mortgage on his home in London and, naturally, expensing the increased repayments. This is the man who lectures everyone about the Evils of Improvidence, the need for austerity, and such.
Naturally, there was total radio silence from him while the property boom was going up. He eventually trousered £748,000 in clear profit when he sold in 2006, nailing the top of the market with uncanny precision. I cannot think of a better definition of a conservative economist than a man who complains about the state not letting business lend enough money in the boom, and then tells you off for borrowing in the bust.
But he's not just another flipper; like Hazel Blears, he told the Inland Revenue porkies about the whole affair. While the parliamentary fees office heard that the London house was his second home for expenses purposes, the Revenue heard that it was his first home for tax purposes. Later, he borrowed even more money against the country house, and switched his parliamentary residence there to whack it on the exies; of course, the taxman heard nothing of it.
Strange, really; it's obviously no longer polite to say this. Duck house boy, yes; but Gideon is special.
Somebody is clearly rationing the leaks according to partisan considerations; I for one can’t wait for Gideon’s exes to hit the tabs, but do you see any of that?
Well, you still don't. After all, look what crawled out of his expenses; he bought a house, which he later sold at a huge profit, by hugely increasing the mortgage on his home in London and, naturally, expensing the increased repayments. This is the man who lectures everyone about the Evils of Improvidence, the need for austerity, and such.
Naturally, there was total radio silence from him while the property boom was going up. He eventually trousered £748,000 in clear profit when he sold in 2006, nailing the top of the market with uncanny precision. I cannot think of a better definition of a conservative economist than a man who complains about the state not letting business lend enough money in the boom, and then tells you off for borrowing in the bust.
But he's not just another flipper; like Hazel Blears, he told the Inland Revenue porkies about the whole affair. While the parliamentary fees office heard that the London house was his second home for expenses purposes, the Revenue heard that it was his first home for tax purposes. Later, he borrowed even more money against the country house, and switched his parliamentary residence there to whack it on the exies; of course, the taxman heard nothing of it.
Strange, really; it's obviously no longer polite to say this. Duck house boy, yes; but Gideon is special.
Labels: Tories
Kano seizure update
A quick UR-CAK update. The owners are vigorously protesting, but it still isn't clear who they are. The crew apparently claimed that the arms belonged to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, and the handling agent and the Equatorial Guinea government say they are for Equatorial Guinea. But it seems that the plane came from Zagreb, typically via Malta or Benghazi in Libya, and the arms were probably loaded there. The Ukrainian arms export agency - not strange to a dodgy deal in Africa - denies the weapons came from them. Exports from the Balkans are common; see the 99 tonnes of guns and Sloman Traveller posts.
Meanwhile, Viktor Bout has got a Web site. It bears more than a family resemblance to Richard Chichakli's, and in fact the domain name was registered by the same person.
Meanwhile, Viktor Bout has got a Web site. It bears more than a family resemblance to Richard Chichakli's, and in fact the domain name was registered by the same person.
