ticket punching

I recently sent off another report through FixMyStreet, pointing at the horrible state of the roads round here. (I am more than a little disappointed with the Android client app, by the way.) Within a week, some of the worse potholes had been tar'n'gravelled. Meanwhile, even more seem to have appeared or worsened. What it needs is someone to have a look down the street and think about resurfacing, or at least for some sort of statistical alert to fire showing an unusually high level of potholes based on the incoming reports.

I'm not aware that any of the councils are doing anything clever with the stats, which is itself disappointing. All the cool kids, meanwhile, are fascinated by people like Adam Greenfield and his "walkshops on networked urbanism". He likes the idea of using a ticketing paradigm for things like FMS; I'm not so sure. (More here. First, as friend of the blog Duane Griffin pointed out, geeks love trouble-ticketing and nobody else does.

In fact, Duane's exact words were that every young programmer eventually decides to design their own ticketing system. (What he didn't say is that once they have wasted their time and failed, they are no longer young.) I suspect that this is simply a case of the face growing to match the mask - a hell of a lot of IT people spend significant chunks of their time in symbiosis with either a ticketing application, a distributed version control system, or both, and as a result they come to imagine that all the world's problems are soluble in a typical Sourceforge project page.

Secondly, there is a more fundamental problem with this - it requires problems to be discrete, atomic, and transactional. In fact, as our keen and agile minds will no doubt have noticed, these characteristics are also intrinsic to the MySQL or SQLite databases that underpin these applications. You open a ticket, it gets assigned, it gets updated, it gets closed. But how do you model a persistent or repeating task, or one that involves a relationship rather than a truck-roll? I don't, in fact, want potholes patching; I would like the road surface to be maintained, which implies changes in Islington Council's budgeting and management procedures.

And I suspect that an unintended consequence of ticket-based support in general is that it trains everyone involved to prioritise cancelling the noise. Do the minimum necessary to outprocess the ticket. It requires a further, meta-level of analysis to recognise any root causes - there's a kind of old fashioned Taylorist view of organisation embedded here. If change is needed, it has to come from some sort of management layer analysing the stats. Further, and more subtly, it models the user, customer, or citizen as an entity that is either silent, or whining. You are expected to shut up, until your environment becomes intolerable, at which point you squawk.

Now, Daniel Davies would probably say that negativity is useful. It is harder to contribute positively than it is to oppose stupidity, so you're more likely to do some good to society by flinging poo than by drafting a manifesto on the future of the Left. He has a point. And Stafford Beer's Cybersyn actually worked on this principle - enterprises were silent while they could deal with their own problems, and only escalated issues in the system when they encountered something they couldn't fix themselves. But I can't help being sceptical that this is any way of organising a city. By the time you get significant numbers of tickets for cracks in a viaduct, your problems are well advanced.

democracy

This is depressing; they couldn't find enough volunteers to count the votes in the Norwich North by-election on the night. What's especially worrying is that it's one of those assumptions that you never think about - a sort of minimum of commitment to the special importance of voting. And it's being eroded, just as the police are gradually making their uniforms more militaristic, having been originally designed to be specifically civilian.

Meanwhile, people like James Purnell get Ernst & Young in to make people change GP more often.

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.

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.

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:

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.

Review: Alistair Crooke, "Resistance: the essence of the Islamist revolution"

Resistance - The Essence of the Islamist Revolution is Alistair Crooke's survey of modern Islamist thought. It would be clearer to say it is a couple of books occupying the same space; one would be a history of Islamist thought since the origins of the Iranian Revolution, with a polemic for greater understanding of such thought, and another would be a slightly eccentric, neo-Platonist rant with overtones of Ian Buruma's notion of Occidentalism.

Well, that sounds fun, doesn't it? Then you have to add in Crooke's career; the book glosses him as an advisor to the European Commission on the Middle East, but makes absolutely no mention of his term as SIS station chief in Tel Aviv, in which role he negotiated a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which lasted until an unfortunate air raid resulted in the deaths of a round dozen civilians and not the Hamas man the Israelis were after. (The story is here.)

The war resumed, and Crooke was recalled; officially this was for "security reasons", but if anything imperilled his security it was probably that after the event, the Israeli tabloids discovered his job title, identity, and photograph with un-mysterious suddenness. He eventually fetched up in Beirut, running a thinktank called the Conflicts Forum, devoted to contact between Western powers and Islamists. (Time was, it would have been a nightclub, but we live in fallen times.)

So, what upshot? Crooke makes a strong case for modern Islamism as a classical reaction to colonialism and modernisation, or rather an interwar vision of modernity. He relies on an impressive battery of reading ranging into cultural Marxism at one end and into hardcore conservatism at the other. More controversially, he tries to place Islamism since the 1950s in a context of rebellion against free-market economics drawn from Naomi Klein; but the Ba'athist and similar regimes hardly qualify as Friedmanites, with their nationalised oil companies, state military industries, and extensive Soviet influence in administration, secret policing, and military doctrine and structure.

He draws on a battery of confidential interviews, which are some of the most interesting things in the book, to illuminate current ideas and practice, specifically among Hezbollah thinkers. Notably, they argue, the Caliphate should now be seen as a world-wide network of loosely interconnected "communities of resistance", rather than a state or any other kind of hierarchical organisation. The aim of these is to uphold the practice of an ideal, self-organising community of believers against a total onslaught by the forces of liberalism, which wishes us all to be atomised individuals.

In practice, this demands a sort of liberation theology/community-organising/vaguely anarchist drive to create base groups everywhere, drawn together by the practice of mutual aid and the study of critical texts, and if necessary to form the underground shadow-administration common to all good guerrilla armies.

Crooke is interesting on the military implications of this, but I think what he describes is less original than he suggests. Flat, highly networked command structures, with a high degree of autonomy down to the squad and the individual, are not characteristic of Islamic or Islamist warfare; what he is describing here sounds a lot like Auftragstaktik. Also, he describes the requirements of a Hezbollah leader as integrity, authenticity, reliability, personal charisma, and ability to mobilise others; would anyone at all disagree?

There is an interesting side-trip into Islamist economic ideas. He criticises Westeners who assume that the main aim of these is to find technical workarounds to make the normal course of business sharia-compliant; apparently the real thing is considerably better. However, a lot of it (as described here) consists of accepting a market economy but not letting money be the be-all and end-all of everything, etc, etc; in practice, this seems to mean a welfare state. No surprise, then, that one of the thinkers he quotes had to write an entire book to rebut the charge that his ideas were indistinguishable from European social democracy.

According to Crooke, the main distinction is in the field of monetary economics; but, in so far as his writing is a true misrepresentation of it, it seems to be distinct in a way which isn't particularly original. Apparently, Islamist economists are very exercised about M3 broad money growth, on the grounds that this represents the growth of credit in a fractional-reserve banking system and that this is the root of the evils of capitalism. Instead, they are keen on...the gold standard, that most free-trade imperialist of economic institutions!

At this point you might want to halt briefly; Islamist Auftragstaktik applied to community organising? The Caliphate in terms suited to Clay Shirky? Dear God, Islamist monetarist gold bugs? Phew! And you could, perhaps, take comfort from the thought that however strange Iranian political thought may be, their economic thought is no stranger than Fraser Nelson's or Jude Wanniski's. Placing an upper bound on the strangeness, after all, is probably an important step towards international understanding.

Then we get into the second book. Crooke is always quoting Plato, specifically the apposition between the port and the city; he attacks Karl Popper, and uses a great deal of Horkheimer and John Gray. It is fair to say he accepts entirely the complex of critiques that argue that life is meaningless without a higher purpose usually decided by higher people, that the freedom offered by liberalism is no such thing, that trade (or commerce, or industry) is "mere"; it is harder to say whether he accepts this for the sake of argument, as much of the Islamist thinking he is discussing bases itself on these ideas.

And there is a valid argument that a lot of it claims to represent the up-side of such critiques - the need for a self-empowered, cohesive community, the problems of the free market - but might just as well be the downside. The economy should be directed, at a national level, towards certain "great concepts"; this could be post-war French indicative planning, and might well be, having been written in the 1950s - or it could be a Straussian exercise in National Greatness Conservatism. We should work and care for society; or is it, as one of Crooke's interviewees says, that "life is not worth living without something worth dying for"?

None of this stuff about "false reconciliation" and "self-pacifying", materialism, etc, etc, answers E. P. Thompson's classic attack on "theories that assume that ordinary people are bloody silly", either. Strangely enough, towards the end of the book, we have a sudden swerve back towards liberalism; freedom is not so bad after all, it turns out, compared with a neoconservatism informed by Leo Strauss.

Curiously, I left the book with a feeling that it had set out to make right-wing Americans feel closer to political Shi'ism.

a small object lesson on the past decade

Jason Scott tells a sad tale of how AOL eliminated a whole mass of little Web sites and then erased all traces of their content. (Readers with long memories will recall the shutdown of Dave Winer's blog farm.) What follows showed the best and worst of Internet culture - Scott called for volunteers to start a rapid reaction group aiming to respond to similar incidents and archive the lot (AOL doesn't let Archive.org spider their stuff), and he got so many offers of help he was able to make Archive Team operational within a week.

Unfortunately he was also inundated with wankers demanding to know what was wrong with deleting a ton of other people's stuff - didn't they make backups? - and similar tiresome Bush-era bollocks. IT libertarians, I've spit'em. I don't know where this thinking came from - but whether it was a cause of the low, dishonest decade or a symptom, it was certainly of the times. I think of it as the Human Shield Party - whatever happens, blame the victims.

Strangely enough, the law has always been quite clear that it doesn't matter if someone else doesn't have insurance, you're still not allowed to set fire to their house. I commend this. Similarly, international humanitarian law doesn't give you an out because the enemy put the civilians there; especially because this is very easy to say. Further, if you are concerned that your enemy is hoping you'll fire artillery into a school-ful of refugees and thus make everyone else despise you, the best solution is not actually to give them what they want.

Strangely, again, in every other branch of strategy, avoiding doing what the enemy wants is not controversial. After all, the best way of convincing people of the merits of a libertarian society is not to behave in exactly the way they fear you would behave in such a state.

anger is an energy

And then I was fool enough to look at another newspaper. So, with Labour you can at least hope they'll look after us in the recession, right? No, they want to give bailiffs the right to restrain people, and to charge interest on social fund loans. And they're blowing hot and cold on the Jaguar-Land Rover loan. (Did you know their sales are actually ahead of last year's? You think all that stuff about the City not wanting to lend industry any money was true?) Merry Christmas to you, too... It's not just the why - it's the why now? Interest on loans for mattresses for the poorest of the poor, in the depths of The Crash of '08?

On the other side, Michael Portillo devotes his column in the Times to explaining why Britain has lost its stomach for a fight and the US willl not think we're "reliable" because of withdrawing from Iraq. (Although it's their declared policy to, ah, withdraw from Iraq.) Jesus. Portillo talks like he's some sort of ironclad veteran, rather than the defence secretary who allowed someone-or-other to exaggerate the troop requirement for Bosnia by a factor of 10 while his mate Douglas Hurd was collecting fees at NatWest Markets for privatising the other side's telecomms network.

And as Dean Godson scurries back under his stone, Anthony "VDARE" Browne clears the decks for his inevitable safe Tory seat.

stuck, stuck, stuck

Pakistan Policy Blog speaks sense:

Zardari’s attempt to present himself as a savior belies the reality and the way most in Pakistan and even the United States see him. Billionaire Zardari is part of Pakistan’s feuding oligarchy, not a revolutionary against it.

The sad fact is that most Pakistanis have been hostage to this sadistic version of Bill Murray’s Groundhog’s Day for 60 years. There will be no messiahs in Pakistan. Pakistanis need the rule of law — neither Baitullah Mehsud’s law, nor Farooq Naik’s law — and a system with real checks, balances, and accountability to free them from their malaise.

Read the whole thing; I mean the whole blog, if you've got time. I suppose it couldn't last; the position since the formation of the PPP-PML(N) government was just too good. The government had genuine public support, civil society had given The Tyrant a beating, both the Punjabis and Sindhis were represented, and no bugger voted for the Taliban tribute bands.

Now it's back to normal service; a weak, unpopular, corrupt civilian president without support from half the country. I confidently predict there'll be a coup in three or so years. What is genuinely depressing is the role of Zalmay Khalilzad - whether officially or pseudo-unofficially - in egging Mr 10 Per Cent on. The Americans seem to think that Pakistan is a 1970s rightwing military dictatorship, by nature. Says Mr. Douglas State:

Sweating with indignation, as of course they have every right to be, the great majority of the public would go communist tomorrow - and then, what? So, you see, we have to support General Caudillo. I agree he's unattractive, but, you can't do everything...

But they won't - even the NWFP recorded about 15% of votes for the various Taliban tribute bands. They don't trust the Americans. So what? I don't. After all, they got new F-16s from the US, to replace the ones they didn't get the parts for the time before that; they got a couple of spanking new GSM networks from dealing with Norwegian and UAE interests, respectively.

They need exactly the opposite of this kind of government, and this kind of ethic. It's especially painful that, despite all the "freedom agenda" bollocks, the people who defied the tyrant precisely to defend the rule of law are being sold out. We're on the wrong side of history, again.

This, meanwhile, is purely irresponsible, unless the game is to bring about a new military government. The upshot is that the Pakistanis turn off the MSR via Karachi; now, their interests and the other side are aligned.

OpenTech 2008: It's like the ESF, with code...

Back in 2004, this blog went to the European Social Forum - we weren't that impressed, but we did call it "the Caesar's Palace of Ranting". I'm not sure what the equivalent for the UKUUG's OpenTech 2008 would be; there was plenty of ranting, but a sight less committee wank, more practicality, even if no-one can answer the question of what any of this stuff stands for. I ran into, among others, Liz Henry, most of MySociety, the author of Spyblog (who has some damn good war stories), various readers including Duane Griffin, and a small galaxy of assorted hackers, militants, gawpers, freaks and mutants. Good People, as the Doctor would say.

And they are, too; even if the live demonstration of the ViktorFeed didn't happen due to the lack of a routable IP address (or even working connectivity for that matter), there was the loan of another laptop when OpenSUSE didn't want to speak to the projector. When I'd finished the show and dealt with all the questions, I was faced with at least two offers of colocated server capacity, and the services of at least three professional software developers, as well as an interview for the BBC World Service, a spare USB key, and a pint of lager. All of which would have come in handy the night before, when I foolishly attempted to change something in the code after midnight and borked the whole thing, forcing me to get up at six the next morning to fix it.

As it turns out, having met Francis Irving, I'm probably going to be assimilated by MySociety, or at least my project is. I was also very interested in some of the green/geek crossover projects - I missed the session on solar power and IT, but I did get to the AMEE presentation on their automated carbon dioxide profiler and Hotmapping's show of their IR surveying work, intended to classify buildings by the rate at which they lose heat. Apparently they'd already found one urban cannabis farm.

And BT Osmosoft's TiddlyWiki - a wiki in a single file - may not sound all that much; but I really liked the idea of a zoomable, pseudo 3D interface for wikis. I'm quite keen on the idea of using this to organise contacts - who puts their friends in alphabetical order after all?

Solidarity with the oppressed police informers

Not looking great for Comrade Bob, which is fine news to anyone other than a blind-thick arsewit. David Osler thrashes Stephen Glover over a gaggle of strawmen about how "the Left" secretly support Zanu-PF; he's right, you know. I've said before that Tories still have a very odd relationship to Southern Africa, and here is exhibit A - check out the raging projection as he struggles to avoid the thought of Margaret Thatcher and Lord Carrington arranging for Mugabe to take power in the first place, whilst also trying to dog whistle the old Rhodesia lobby without breaking cover. Gah.

But this made me think; surely, somebody's going to mourn Robert Mugabe. Probably...How long before Neil Clark or John Laughland comes out of the woodwork to accuse the MDC of being as bad as Hitler, or something? Checking up, I find Clark is fully occupied accusing Nicolas Sarkozy of being as bad as Petain, but no doubt he'll get to it in due course.

Anti-Link

One of the many wonderful things about the Web is that its hypertext structure not only permits us to navigate it, and to invoke external resources (scripts, graphics, etc), but also to measure relevance and authority. Google's killer insight was of course just this; to use links as votes for the relevance of a given document, and to do this recursively so that the more authoritative the document, the more powerful its outbound links.

But there is a fundamental problem here; the introduction of the REL="NOFOLLOW" tag was meant to stop spammers manipulating this structure by autogenerating great numbers of links, but this is only a partial solution. After all, the fact that somebody considers a document unreliable, irrelevant, spammy, or just...repellent is useful information; but there is no way of capturing it. Ideas like the "Semantic Web" have examined things like the idea of creating links that go backwards as well as forwards; I for one have never been able to understand this, and it sounds far too much like INTERCAL's COME FROM... statement. (You thought GOTO was considered harmful; COME FROM ... is the exact opposite.)

What I propose is that we introduce a negative hyperlink. A kind of informational veto. I've blogged about the Stupid Filter before, which attempts to gather enough stupidity from the Web that it can characterise stupid and use Bayesian filtering to get rid of it, as we do with spam. But I suspect that is a fundamentally limited, and also illiberal, approach; StupidFilter is indexing things like YouTube comments threads, which seems to guarantee that what it actually filters will be inarticulacy, or to put it another way, non-anglophones, the poor, the young, and the members of subcultures of all kinds. The really dangerous stupidity walks at noon and wears a suit, and its nonsense is floated in newspaper headlines and nicely formatted PowerPoint decks. StupidFilter would never filter Dick Cheney.

But a folksonomic approach to nonsense detection would not be bound to any one kind of stupidity or dishonesty, just as PageRank isn't restricted to any one subject. Anyone could antilink any document for any reason, across subjects, languages and cultures. Antilinks would be simple to capture programmatically - just as simple as other HTML tags are. In Python, it would be as simple as replacing the search string in a BeautifulSoup instance - one line of code. Even without changes to today's Web browsers, a simple user script could flash a warning when one was encountered, or provide a read-out of the balance between positive and negative links to a page.

Consider this post at qwghlm.co.uk; Chris is quite right to mock the Metropolitan Police's efforts to encourage the public to report "unusual" things. After all, there is no countervailing force; if you collect enough noise, statistically speaking, you will eventually find a pattern. What you need is the refiner's fire. Why is there no Debunk a Terror Alert hotline?

I am quite serious about this. Implementation could be as simple as a REL="BULLSHIT" attribute. Now how do you go making a submission to the W3C?

15-7

So now we know; looks like the Glock 17 caucus got a clean sweep of the "independent" MPA members.

BBC:

The MPA chairman, Len Duvall, said the watchdog body risked bringing itself into disrepute by the public and vitriolic attacks on Sir Ian.

I think I'm going to vomit. Excuse me, will you?

Anyway, the result was 15 votes against, 7 for, one abstention; I think the abstention was probably Whittaker, as her e-mail account autoreplies that she is away until tomorrow. Does anyone have a rollcall?

Here are some of the replies I received from members of the MPA:

Am sorry alexander. I do not know who you are and contray to your message I have received many messages of support for ian. Perhaps you could give me examples of what performance issues of concern you have of the Metropolitan Police's command and control systems.

With crime at its lowest level in 5 years in london and reassurance levels up I would be interested to read your views

Thanks you for taking the time to e mail me.

John Roberts

I replied in-line:

On Nov 20, 2007 3:01 PM, John Roberts wrote:
> Am sorry alexander. I do not know who you are

Merely a citizen, a Tube user, a target.

> and contray to your message I have received many messages of support for ian.

Well, this is not one.

>Perhaps >you could give me examples of what performance issues of
concern you have of the >Metropolitan Police's command and control
systems.
>

According to the IPCC Report, no-one ever positively identified de
Menezes as a suspect, but after this had filtered through the system,
the senior commanders were given the impression he *had* been
identified as such. Further, the CO19 group were receiving filtered
information from headquarters after these errors had got into it, but
not direct information from the surveillance team; the commander on
the scene didn't control all the units involved and wasn't deployed
forward with the surveillance team, so didn't actually know what was
happening.

Have you read the IPCC Report?

And he replied:

Thank you for a quick reply your comments have been noted.

Take care

John roberts

Here is a reply from Green MLA Jenny Jones:

Alexander Harrowell wrote:
>This is an edited version of the response I prepared to the IPCC Report:

....(ed: snip a version of this post without the swearing)...

>Who are you?

>---------------------------------------------------------------
>Cllr Jenny Jones AM
>Green Member of the London Assembly
>City Hall
>The Queen's Walk
>London SE1 2AA
>Tel: 0207 983 4391
>Fax: 0207 983 4398

And this is an oversight body. I could laugh; I suppose I'd better. A colleague remarked that the whole thing had been an example of "democracy theatre" by analogy to "security theatre".

Being for the benefit of Mr. Kite

The Ministry reports on some Tories' bright idea, a website where people who don't want to be contacted by canvassers can "sign up" to be taken off their lists. The man behin it, Tory councillor Jeremy Kite, turns up in comments to defend himself.

A clue: it seems not to have declared that Tory canvassers were the ones who would avoid your door, and there is (as Kite admits) no procedure to share this information with the other parties. It's hard to see how this isn't intended to produce the following effect: "What's this, canvassers? I signed up to say I didn't want to see you. Bugger off!" and either abstention or a spite vote for "somebody else" - who is by definition the Tory candidate.

It's also not so fantastic for Kite to be encouraging the public to opt out of politics.

You must have scared yourself

Dear God, John Redwood says something entirely sane. This frightens me - there is something we agree on. Naturally, I followed a link from Chris Dillow - I don't read his stuff, you know.

But I think he's right that a big part of the solution to party spending is that the buggers ought not to spend so much. As energy geeks will tell you, only half the problem is supply. After all, if they couldn't rely on spin, broadcast ads, and billboards they would rely so much more on their activists, which would imply greater accountability of the politicians to the base. Broadcast, by the way, should here be read to include all forms of one-way, centre to mass communication.

In a sense, large donations and their pal, broadcast campaigning are to British politics what oil revenues are to (enter 'orrible rentier state here). That is, they provide a way of escaping not only from accountability, but also from the realities of society.

You've been bought and paid, you're a whore and a slave

Well, where to start with my utter rage at the kiboshed Al-Yamamah investigation? It's a total map of state direness, New Labour subtype: we have hypocrisy, we have a good day to bury bad news, we have cash, we have Lord Goldsmith, the professional get out of jail card himself. Obviously, this being a blog, we'll start by abusing a leader-writer.

In today's Guardian, we have Martin Kettle, who wants to say that we aren't serious enough and we don't understand how tough it is for politicians. In fact, our understanding is so minimal we will slide into fascism, and be raped by the dogs of a British Pinochet. No, this is not snark. Mr. Kettle actually threatens the nation at large with a British Pinochet, which put like that sounds pleasingly like some kind of baroquely obsolete firearm. Look at him! Look at Martin Kettle!, as Withnail would say.

I've said before that I'm not comfortable with the fisking tradition, but then, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Here goes.

It had been Tony Blair's day of infamy, the veteran pundit Anthony Howard told Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight. By yesterday morning, having drunk deep from Thursday's heady cocktail of police interviews, discontinued fraud inquiries, and furtively announced airport expansions and post office closures, the amalgamated union of right thinking people all seemed to agree with him.

Well, count me out of this facile consensus. A difficult and politically damaging day, yes. A shaming day too, in some respects, particularly on the killing off of the BAE Systems probe. Further evidence of the Blair government's terminally battered condition? Certainly. But a day of infamy? Get real. Kenneth Williams rather than Franklin Roosevelt spoke with more relevance about Blair's real predicament. Infamy, infamy, they've all got it infamy.

Ipswich Killer: "By yesterday morning, having murdered five women, I found the amalgamated union of right-thinking people all seemed to agree that killing them was wrong. Count me out of this facile consensus!" Yes, I know it's tasteless. I know it's not serious. But if seriousness and good taste are what Kettle defines them to be - and we'll get to that - you can, ah, count me out of this facile consensus. "Seriousness", "responsibility", "consensus" - these are all words that are very useful translations of "in the interests of power". Kettle:

The government has accumulated many failings over the years. Yet it is not alone. Especially since the 2005 general election, much of the wider political culture, of which the media also forms part, has failed too. As a society, we seem to be living through a collective suspension of seriousness about how politics and government should be carried out in modern Britain. This is doing sustained damage to our ability to think clearly about what we expect from politicians and ministers. Of course, some of this deepening disengagement and cynicism is the government's doing. But it is time there was more honesty and self-criticism about the role of the wider political culture too.

The issues of the week exemplify what's wrong. Yes, it is embarrassing that a serving prime minister should be questioned in Downing Street as part of a criminal investigation into political donations. And yes, part of the issue lies in the way Blair leads his party and his government. But the fundamental failing is not his. As a country and culture we have not worked out an open and fair system of financing necessary political life in a rapidly changing world. We wish for the end, but persistently ignore the means. Yet with a general election to fight in 2005, the parties had to act. The rest of us can afford to hold our noses. The parties needed big money in the bank. In that sense, Blair is a victim of our collective failure, not the perpetrator of his own individual one.

Note the tropes of establishment journalism, the false balancing (yes, the government has failed, but so has the media, and apparently the nation, every man jack of us, too, so no-one is responsible), the false generalisation that lumps the government in with the opposition, the politician and the bureaucrat with the journalist and the activist, the worker and the boss. Everyone is to blame, so nobody is responsible - it's not new, but it's effective, something bound to go over well at the Glasgow Empire.

So, what would have happened if all of us - tweed-makers on Harris, tarts in Ipswich, programmers in Reading, immigrant cleaners in the West End, unemployed ex-miners in Featherstone, BAE bagmen in Mayfair (they have rights too!) - had bent our minds to designing a state funding scheme for political parties? Precisely nothing, if the government had not wanted to find parliamentary time for a bill to make it so. Let's be clear: Tony Blair did not find the parliamentary time for such, and he's the man who decides. Of course, the opposition could have, but they didn't - and do you think the Government would have voted with them?

The parties had to act, the poor dears. Well, they could have cut down on TV and billboard display ads, on tele-harassment, and sent the MPs to hammer the streets more. Perhaps they might have had to reconsider their policies, if they had discovered a lack of activists. Perhaps, with less money for neat debate-framing tricks and mass bullshit, we might have had some token of a real debate on institutions, aims and values. Who knows? Instead, they accepted bribes.

Or take the BAE Systems inquiry. Yes, it is humiliating that a multi-million pound corruption investigation should be pulled in the interests of keeping onside with the Saudis. Lord Goldsmith's announcement that the rule of law at home has to be sacrificed to our failing foreign policy entanglements will haunt him - though he also says, and it can't be merely ignored, that he thinks a prosecution would fail. The whole saga underlines that close relations with the House of Saud come at a price - which others remain happy to pay - that is neither politically perverse nor materially trivial. Oil supplies matter. Middle Eastern peace, stability and security matter, even though, Lord knows, we get these things badly wrong. Defence contracts and jobs matter too. It is too easy to brush aside the complex web of practical issues as if they are of no account. Ministers do not have that luxury.

So - it is wrong to kill the SFO inquiry, our foreign policy is failing, Goldsmith will be "haunted" (may I suggest a donation to Combat Stress? some people have had to do more haunting things than give the Prime Minister what he wants, when he wants it), but nobody should be responsible. Trebles all round. We don't import very much oil, although we will more and more, and Saudi Arabia is not the obvious place to get it (Norway isn't far). Obviously, if they were to stop exporting, the price would shoot through the roof - but why, pray, would they do that rather than just buying French?

The TYR research staff recently did a simulation of Saudi Arabia stopping oil exports, and we gave up at the point where the king was lynched by a screaming mob. It is not, by the way, beyond the bounds of possibility that they might export a lot less in the future simply because they run out - perhaps a more useful topic to direct a national newspaper column at. Anyway, "Middle Eastern peace, stability and security"? Have these ever been served by sending more guns? Is Tony Blair really the best man to ask what might lead to them? (After all, Lord knows, we get these things badly wrong.) And these jobs? Well, the aircraft being sold to Saudi Arabia are the ones the RAF was told it couldn't have by the Treasury. They are not additional airframes. Had Lord Drayson not signed his historic piece of paper with Lockheed - on the same day! - they might have gone to the Navy. BAE would have got rid of them somehow.

Similar realities dog every decision across the political board. It's what politics and government are about. Expand our airports or keep them as they are? Things to be said on both sides. Close down lots of barely used post offices or maintain them as a community resource? Pros and cons again. But in the end, decisions must be made. I think the way we raise political donations is wrong. I think the government should not have killed the BAE probe, especially, post-Iraq, for security reasons. But I can see what was at stake, and even respect its seriousness. The bigger the issue, the bigger the stakes and consequences, as John Major rightly said about withdrawal from Iraq yesterday.

This is not to maunder about how difficult everything is. It is to insist that we must not oversimplify. For the past five years, far too much of the British political conversation - disproportionately dominated, as ever, by the educated middle class of both right and left - has been reduced to an assumption of contempt and superiority, above all towards Blair himself, but also towards the Labour government and to politics in general. This is both wrong and dangerous. Our politics has never been as sleazy as we pretend, either in the Major years or now. Our politicians are not moral pygmies. Ultimately such talk paves the way for a Le Pen or a Pinochet - or worse. We may be drifting towards such a point.

Worse than Pinochet? Worse than thousands of dead, 40 per cent unemployment, electric shocks, death squads sent abroad? Apparently, we now have a duty as citizens to forget our citizenship, to ask no questions, to help the enlightened ones (and who the hell are they but the educated middle class?) in power in their aims - or face the slide to fascism.

The bigger the issue, the bigger the stakes and consequences. Very true. Doesn't that mean that "the issue" affects all the citizens? Kettle seems to argue that the more important something is, the less scrutiny is required. This is roughly how the state functions, anyway - it is true that planning decisions in local councils go through tortuous examination and careful precautions against corruption, and civil servants' mileage expenses are scrupulously audited. But the odd open-ended guerrilla war goes through on the nod. This is, at a deep level, the whole Kettle argument - that pomposity sanctifies. He argues that

The continuing and inevitable disappointments of the last decade have been legion. Thursday was a shabby day.

But:

It is whether the particular record of compromises and best efforts that they make over a generation means that they have passed on a better country than the one they inherited.

So if the disappointments were legion, surely things ain't quite just so peachy as all that? Ah, no. We are the adults, and we know best. We are Serious. The rest of you refuse to realise our problems. You ought to be grateful. Peter Hennessy remarked, apparently, that all British males are products of empire. Kettle, here, is a very specific one. He is the Sirkar, the "ruler as the gift of God" in the Moghul honorific hijacked by the Indian Civil Service.

The West Yorkshire Question

I've never taken the West Lothian question very seriously (how many men have we lost because of it?), and I usually don't engage with it. But there is something I'd like to fork over about the semi-federal nature of Britain. One may recall that, not so long ago, Dave from PR and other Tories were complaining about the hypothetical situation where a Labour government is elected with a working majority UK-wide, but a minority of MPs in England, implying that it depends on Scottish MPs to continue in office. They argued that, as Scotland has self-governing powers on many issues, it would be wrong for the government to legislate on anything purely English unless it had a majority of English MPs (put it another way, unless the Tories said so).

This would, in practice, create an administrative potmess of epic proportions as the government followed its own policies in all-UK matters and those shared with Scotland and Wales, the Tories' policies in England-only matters, and God knows what in cases of doubt.

But that isn't my real beef. The problem is the idea that if one area of the UK elects a lot of MPs of the other party, it's perfectly fine to chop it off so the Conservative Party can hoist a flag on the rest. I propose, then, the West Yorkshire question.

If it is unacceptable for a government with a parliamentary majority in the UK, but not among English MPs alone, to legislate for England, why is it not also unacceptable for a government with a majority of English MPs - but not if a strongly supportive region such as West Yorkshire were excluded - to legislate for the rest of England?

Update: Charlie's comment induces me to restate the problem. The Tory understanding of the WLQ is that, roughly, either there should be a new England-only level of government or that there should be an effective Conservative veto on England-only legislation. But why does this argument not also hold for, say, West Yorkshire? England-only legislation could be passed under such an arrangement by a government with no majority of MPs in Yorkshire, depending on their strength elsewhere. If this is wrong at the UK level, it's very odd to consider it entirely right at the level of England.

My conclusion is that this is purely self-serving. The Tories like West Lothian because it offers the (distant) possibility of gerrymandering a large number of Labour, Liberal and nationalist voters out of much of the parliamentary agenda. They don't draw the further inference because it would deny them the same privilege. For bonus points, consider this. WLQ assumes that the UK is a confederation, in which the centre cannot overrule the members. Devolution assumes that it is a federation, in which powers are divided among levels of government in one entity. Why do the Tories reject the European Constitutional Treaty, which would have created a confederal structure for the EU, on the grounds that it weakens the UK as a national state, whilst arguing for confederalism at home?

Spot the Difference

Which story is the satire?

Northern Irish, Serbs, Hutus Granted Homeland in West Bank, or Umm Alquwain, the smallest of the emirates, was the only one to bother to appoint voters.

An elected legislature chosen by an appointed electorate? Surely not. Not even Austria-Hungary did anything that weird. (Although, present-day Dubai and Vienna circa 1900 do have some things in common - people who are so poor they rent a bed for half the day.)

Compulsory Voting

John Reid and Geoff Hoon, apparently, believe that voting should be a civic duty. What? It already is. No. They believe it should be compulsory, and that nonvoters should be subject to fines to make the buggers rattle their dags and get down to the polling booth. It reminds me, a little, of the Ewan McColl song..."Make sure you come from Oxford/With a good degree/And then you may, with yer accent smooth/Persuade the shiftless workers to the polling booth". No more persuasion, these days. Get in there or else!

But this is missing the point. In my experience the biggest group of declared nonvoters are those who claim it's pointless, or that no-one represents them. And perhaps even more importantly, there is a far bigger group of..what? How do we characterise those who vote for a party simply because the others are marginally more emetic? Malvoters, perhaps. Their choice is clearly not directed at the best option, but merely at any option that is not intolerably appalling.

The problem, then, is one of supply, not demand. The same PR liars, fingerwaggers, superlawyers, and professional extremists make up the intake to politics. The old associational, trade union and industrialist routes are long gone. No wonder that politics looks like a row between several corporate lawyers and their wives/husbands about who can better express their loathing of poor people without saying anything obviously fascist, and policy (which involves facts) is marginalised.

My answer? I can't think of anything worse (in this connection) than compulsory voting. I would rather pay the fine, or better, defend my nonvoting in the courts. Just look at the fuckers.

I suggest, instead, that it must become the duty of every citizen to stand for election at least once. I can recommend it as a real reconnection with society. There! It's good for you! It can even be fun. And, most crucially, the flood of women and men doing their public duty will dilute the poison of a sick party structure down to a tolerable level. Now, if there was also electoral reform...who knows what might happen?