Post Political Times

Gestation

All has gone quiet lately because I have been out of circulation on my summer break, But I am also planning to update this site with a relaunch due in September.

This is aimed at moving away from Movable Type as a platform for the blog. This is for a number of reasons. I am being driven nuts by all the fake advertising comments that MT blogs attract. This is an inevitability with it being such a popular platform. MT’s solution seems to be to create a user registration scheme for MT blogs which I am not keen on.

The other susbtantive reason for changing is that I do want to use free software wherever possible (that is free as in speech not free as in beer). There are some good packages available that are released under the General Public License and I have been exploring these as an alternative.

A couple more techy weeks and I hope to be back to political comments which is what this space is supposed to be for.

That Mysterious “Recess”

The summer break for MPs is called the long “recess”. This is often confused with summer “holidays” which are usually taken during this period but not for the whole time. (I am always tempted to call it the Parliamentary “recession” but this is just my pantomime sense of humour).

So what does happen? This will vary from MP to MP but the general pattern is probably the same. Parliament stops sitting in the third week of July and does not meet again till the first week in September. This is about the same period as the school holidays. The September sittings are new having come in over the last couple of years.

During this period of around 5 weeks we generally take some proper holiday. But it is also a time to catch up on all the constituency work that builds up during the Parliamentary term. And there is usually a lot of it as I have found over the last ten days. Catching up with friends and family can also be a good use of this time when you do not have the silly Parliamentary timetable tying you down.

It is a good break, there is no denying it. But, the idea that it is one long holiday is the exception rather than the rule for most modern MPs.

Before the Defection Rumours Start…

According to a piece in today’s Guardian Online section I am a Labour MP. Curious. This is not the first time this has happened. It is perhaps less of a problem for me than for Clive Soley MP who has been in the Labour Party since before I was born and is therefore very piqued to be described as a Liberal Democrat in the same piece…

Copyright Considerations

Thanks for all the comments to the previous post on copyright and the Parliamentary Record. Lots of helpful pointers for me to follow up.

For information, work on implementation of the Creative Commons licenses in UK law is being led by Damien Tambini at Oxford University.

Having read the comments, it seems that the simplest solution for the UK Parliament is to look to Crown Copyright. I was especially struck by the guidance set out by the Welsh Assembly which not only allows free reproduction but also positively encourages people doing this with the paragraph –
The Assembly actively encourages access to both versions of the Record. The availability of the Record is a key aspect of the Assembly’s policy to be open and accessible..

This contrasts very favourably with the guidance on Parliamentary Copyright material which is very restrictive and is what causes problems for TheyWorkForYou or anyone else doing similar work. What we should be doing is moving towards the Welsh Assembly approach of both permitting and encouraging others to carry our material with a generous copyright waiver scheme.

There is a lot we can learn from newer bodies like the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament that do not have the Victorian baggage that encumbers the UK Parliament.

Parliament and Copyright

The website TheyWorkForYou.com is receiving a lot of praise at the moment (including from me) because it is such a good way to present information about what MPs are up to. But, it appears to be in breach of Parliamentary copyright as it takes the material that Parliament produces and re-publishes it without a license.

What this is doing is forcing Parliament to look at how it handles other people reproducing the material on the Official Parliamentary Website. It would look awful if Parliament were to try and stop people from using what is and should be public information. But the public interest would not be served by people of dubious motives giving false information by doctoring the official record.

What is the answer? Perhaps a Creative Commons license for the House of Commons which can allow re-use of material without payment but subject to conditions such as repetition in full without alteration? I am starting to think there is a good campaign here to ask Parliament to use appropriate Creative Commons licenses for all its output?

Ofcom Telecommunications Review

I was at a lunch today to talk about the review of telecommunications being carried out by OfCom at the moment. This is a very important process for anyone interested in the future of the internet in the UK. But it can be very obscure and riddled with jargon. I was therefore very pleased to find this plain English summary of the review which I thought was excellent and would recommend to everybody as a good way in to the subject.

By-election Score Draw

So, after all the rows and the mess in the by-elections it is one each to Labour and the Lib Dems. A lot of bad feeling will circulate for some time now with accusation and counter-accusation between the parties.

Having seen the bullets being fired at the Lib Dems in the literature of all the other parties in these elections I am impressed that we did as well as we did. It was very much the Lib Dems versus everyone else as Labour, the Conservatives and even Respect spent most of their time attacking us.

The electorate, I suspect, held the claims of all parties in equal contempt and concluded that they would like to rough the Government up a little with a strong Lib Dem vote. Well done to the activists of all parties who injected some life into the political process.

By-Election Excitement

Westminster is emptying tonight as hordes of MPs head off to harass the poor voters of Leicester South and Birmingham Hodge Hill for tomorrow’s by-elections.

I was in Birmingham yesterday and came back cheerful about the party activists I met there but utterly depressed about the level of campaigning. It is fashionable, at least in Labour and Tory circles, to have a go at the Lib Dems for low campaigning techniques. Some of this criticism is undoubtedly deserved and some not. But the others should certainly not pretend that they are shrinking violets who would never stoop to the rough stuff. And the Labour campaign in Hodge Hill is about the worst I’ve seen.

I understand that Labour blogger Tom Watson MP is heading up their campaign and have read lively posts about it on his site which suggested it was plumbing the depths. The leaflet I picked up yesterday confirmed this and more. It was all about “jailing junkies and crackheads” and “handouts for failed asylum seekers” and “smashing teen gangs”.

Behind these headlines there are issues that concern the electorate and that politicians should address. But to deal with them in these terms I find scary. I’m sure I will get grief for being a Lib Dem complaining about this sort of robust language – I am no doubt one of the “liberati” that David Blunkett so dislikes – but I found it shocking in a political leaflet from a mainstream party.

And I don’t think it is accurate to say that this is all the fault of the Lib Dems for having opened up the hard campaigning box. Again there may be some blame to assign there, but this is also where competitive politics in the UK has been heading for some time. Oh dear, they do say “if you don’t like the heat….” so maybe it is time for me to get out of the kitchen.

Look Who I Bumped Into Today

I decided to pop into the Piccadilly Waterstones on my way back from a meeting to find a James Joyce biography but found it sealed off by security. Then this American fella ….
… emerged from the shop and did a “Royal” walkabout. I must confess I stayed round to shake the man’s hand and click off some snaps.

There are certain politicians who have “it” and he is most definitely one of them. We can all have views about his deeds, both political and personal, but there is no doubt that he is one of the most gifted politicians of recent times. (I didn’t buy his book though, sticking to my original intention of a Joyce biog and found one by Edna O’Brien).

By-Election Reflection

I called in at the Leicester South by-election today which has been receiving more than its quota of MPs of all parties over the last few weeks. It struck me once again that by-elections bring out the best and the worst of the political machines.

The worst is the style of campaigning that many of the press reports have highlighted. There is a very “American” tone to this, i.e. it is relentless with strong negative tinges and uses arguments and figures that are stretched to breaking point. This is perhaps not surprising given that this is the only time that the parties can spend serious money on single seats. We are blessed with very tight restrictions on how much can be spent in any constituency in the UK at a normal election and long may this continue. If the cap was lifted then we would be likely to see this sort of campaigning everywhere.

But there is a best side to it as well. Go into any of the campaign offices and you will find dozens of political volunteers who have travelled across the country to help out. It is a common complaint to say people are no longer interested in politics. By-elections are small oases of intense interest that run counter to this. And they are generally very good people who really care about their politics and the interests of their communities.

And the result? Well, in Leicester it looks to me like it will be a close contest between Labour and the Lib Dems. I say that not as propaganda (there is enough of that already going out with both parties agreeing that the contest is close) but as a prediction to be verified later on Thursday night. It can be lodged as a public political prediction alongside my view that Blair will hand over the leadership of the Labour party to Gordon Brown ahead of a General Election on 5th May 2005…