Vox Polis

The government’s latest venture into citizen interaction and the crazy world of teh Interwebs has just been bought to my attention.  With the assistance of mySociety.org (the folks responsible for PledgeBank and many other worthy projects) Downing Street have launched an online petitioning system.  The site’s currently in beta but seems to be working well (although at the time of writing it’s down for maintenance) and is attracting a lot of interest.  There are several worthwhile petitions already active; I’ve signed up to scrapping ID cards and fair-use copying rights so far.  As you might expect, the Internet’s lunatic fringe have also been busy - if you’re so inclined you can back the castration of paedophiles and ask the government to intervene to keep the manufacture of HP Sauce in the UK.  Whether all this interacting with the proles will actually have any effect on government policy is, of course, highly debatable but at least it’s an opportunity to bask in the warm glow of not being complete apathetic.

The Environment Minister Ben Bradshaw has suggested that the best way to deal with excessive packaging is to dump it at the checkout, forcing supermarkets to deal with it. One example of wasteful packaging Bradshaw mentions is 4 apples in a polystyrene tray wrapped in plastic - which can’t be recycled.

Clearly we need to do more to tackle waste. Yesterday’s Today programme mentioned that we throw out our body weight in waste every 2 months. The Waste and Resources Action Plan is also far from meeting its targets. Unfortunately there’s not enough incentive - yet!

Supermarkets sell goods, such as the apples in a polystyrene tray, for a premium, because the shopper is convinced that those apples are picked from magic trees more hygienic and look prettier (that’s usually the plastic that makes them look shiny). It’s also a matter of convenience - think how many seconds you save grabbing pre-packed fruit and veg instead of choosing them for yourself. It’s this that has to be dealt with.

One way forward would be the one layer policy i’ve mentioned before - but this won’t tackle the above problem. For that you have to convince people to dump their packaging at the checkout. That incentive isn’t present yet.

“We all suffer crime, the poorest and vulnerable most of all, it is the duty of government to protect them. But we can make choices in spending too. And instead of wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on compulsory ID cards…let that money provide thousands of extra police officers on the beat in our local communities. But the truth is that the best two crime prevention policies are a job and a stable family.”

Who said this?  Who else but Tony Blair in 1995.  Thanks to Peter Black for the insight.

It seems that the new EU wine label logo is not as uniting as people hoped.

The French have complained because the logo doesn’t look the same when you translate it into different languages, and supposedly it’s in English on some EU sites (not French). Here are the French changes:

…and the original one:

Some also believe it looks like Google and the ‘r’ at the end is like the copyright symbol - symbolising capitalism. Clearly these aren’t things the EU should be celebrating. That’s also no problem if we keep the French version.

According to the Times, the Germans are also unhappy - and plan to produce their own logo.

I can’t wait for the celebrations next year.

After the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) last week the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) are the latest organisation to jump on what’s fast becoming a bandwagon of support for fair use copying rights. Taking a slightly different tack the BPI have suggested that fair use could be allowed via an authorization granted by rights holders rather than through a change in the law. The BPI have already announced that they won’t prosecute anyone for copying music from e.g. a CD to an MP3 player.

Whilst authorization would in a practical sense get rid of the problem there are a number of issues that it doesn’t solve. The first issue is constitutional, as Kay Withers of the IPPR put it “It’s good that the BPI have said they’re not going to prosecute but it should be the government deciding what the consumers and citizens rights are, rather than citizens.” The second issue is the question of whether and how this authorization can be granted retrospectively, I don’t see how changes to the licensing of CDs that have already been sold can be enacted without contacting all rights holders involved which would clearly be a mammoth task. The third issue is ‘future-proofing’, the BPI only speak on issues concerning music but the legality of personal copies of DVDs (and who knows what else in the long term) is also in question. All these problems can be solved by the government enshrining in law the right of UK citizens to make reasonable use of works protected by copyright.

As a bleak side-note - whilst I was writing this post it occurred to me that after the changes brought about by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 which made all offences arrestable you could, presumably, be arrested, DNA sampled etc. for carrying an iPod that had music stored on that you’d ripped from your own CDs. Just something to think about.

Via Out-Law.com.

The Lib Dems have come up with proposals for a Great Repeal Act and are asking people to suggest more - here. There are only 10 laws on the list at the moment, I’m sure we can at least double that.

David Rennie is arguing on his blog that the attempt to introduce transparency in EU proceedings is a failure. This is because letting the cameras into meetings prevents deals and compromises from being made, resulting in all the “productive” discussions being taken during the unfilmed lunch.

Rennie goes on to explain that journalists know what goes on in these lunches anyway so there are no secrets. He compares the filming of meetings to the attendance of the CEO to a regular meeting, and asks “just how much really useful work would you get done?”

But the failure is not transparency. As Rennie rightly alludes to, the failure is the leaders themselves - they are unwilling to discuss things openly for political reasons. Because of this, transparency will not help to improve relations with citizens nor change the public’s view towards the EU.

So does this mean that we should get rid of the cameras?

Although the journalists might know what goes on, they often fail (I admit it’s often the fault of the editor/owner of the paper rather than the journalist) to pass this on to the rest of us. If it was passed on then clearly there would be no point in discussing things off camera because we would know what those discussions consisted of.

Also let us not forget that this is a “big” step for EU leaders who are used to late night back room deals. It takes time to adjust. If the CEO turned up to one meeting, that would clearly put you off. If the CEO was a regular attendee, then you would get used to their presence, interact with them and frankly the company would probably benefit.

But for transparency to succeed our leaders must stop assuming that people are not able to comprehend EU proceedings or understand that compromise is necessary and not a sign of weakness. They must accept that the EU should not continue as an elite and secretive project. So let’s give transparency a chance.

I’m glad to see that Burger King have launched a new “double” whopper burger - aimed at those who only feel manly having eaten at least half a cow a day. Those people probably idealise Desperate Dan and his cow pies.

I’ve always believed that people should be free to do what they like; and that includes eating as much fast food as they’re bodies can take. I believe that government and society should have an enabling role; to teach us all about the dangers but allow us to make our own mistakes. To stigmatise rather than to paternalise. The trouble is people are stupid.*

The other day I was discussing the film Super Size Me with a few “intelligent” friends of mine, who proclaimed how much they had been put off McDs after watching Spurlock’s disastrous experiment. They then went on to explain that because of this they only eat at Burger King’s now. Somehow I think they missed the point.

Burger King burgers are actually worse that McDs’ burgers in terms of calories- and have now got even worse: even McDs’ bigger big mac wasn’t as bad as the double whopper.

But to believe that one fast food restaurant is better than another is simply unbelievable. Perhaps some people should be banned from eating fast food after all. Or maybe we should just blame Spurlock for not explaining to his audience the bleeding obvious.

*I’d like to believe that people are only stupid because we have a paternalistic government; that they’ve been conditioned to believe that they need things restricted. But its probably not true.

Looks like the Sandinistas are poised to return to power in Nicaragua under the leadership of Daniel Ortega. The US is in disgust, and condemnation is likely from the Western media. But the Sandinistas are not only a shell of their former selves they also have been widely misunderstood.

For me the 1980s funding of the Contras, a state sponsored terrorist group, was among the worst things the US has ever done (and it’s a long list in many people’s eyes). Although the Sandinistas defined themselves as Marxist, they weren’t Communists in the same sense as the Soviet Union. In fact they set about creating a direct democratic state, allowing all people to be involved in the running of the country. The Sandinistas created a full working health and education programme, that was absent under the rule of the Somozas who had preceded them and been overthrown in 1979.

Under pressure from the US, and their funded Contras, Nicaragua made concessions to the Western world and introduced representative democracy for their first elections in 1984. They were acknowledged to be “free and fair” elections by everyone but the US.

For the US, Nicaragua was a symbol of the Communist threat. Reagan (or someone from his administration) famously said that the “Sandinistas were 48 hours from Texas”- creating the impression that this poor, tiny nation was a direct threat to the US at a time when US-Soviet relations were improving. To think anyone could believe that the Nicaraguans were capable of travelling to the US let alone invade it, is beyond me.

Today, the Sandinistas are a different party and Ortega is now as left wing as Reaganism is (was). To believe that they represented a threat in the 1980s was wishful thinking on the Pentagon’s front. To believe that they are capable of anything such as that today is naive.

I posted an article last week about planned changes to the FoI Act that could make it very difficult for journalists to make requests under the act.  Part of basis for the changes is a report by Frontier Economics which claimed that the FoI requests were costing the taxpayer £35 million a year.  The Campaign for Freedom of Information (CfoI) made a request to the Department of Constitutional Affairs for access to the data used to formulate the report.  This request was denied on the grounds that the information “relates to the formulation and development of government policy” which makes it exempt from disclosure under the FoI Act.  As pointed out by Maurice Frankel of CfoI “The whole debate becomes very difficult if the Government is not prepared to release the factual survey which forms the basis of the Frontier Economics report.”

Quite what’s to be done when the department responsible for the FoI act are plucking numbers out of the air and then stifling attempts to call them up on this I don’t know.  That the FoI Act contains a clause allowing the government not to reveal the information it uses in policy decisions points to how little the government really believe in openness.

Via Out-Law.com.