Vox Polis

Yes, it’s a year to the day since the first post went up on Vox Polis. Some birthday statistics:

• In a year we’ve had 110098 hits.
• In the launch month we had 1299 hits; this month we’ve had 23265 hits so far.
• We’ve written 198 posts.
• Currently the most read post is Anniversary of No vote! (also a fine example of what happens when I don’t hit DogPatch with the grammar stick enough).
• Most common search term was “defra wiki” (second most popular was the ever popular “polis sex”).

So, all in all, a good year. Champagne all round!

The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property has brought the issue of copyright length into prominence in the past couple of months (and brought out swarms of music industry lobbyists). The BBC reported last night that the review is to recommend that copyright on sound recordings not be extended from the current period of 50 years. Whilst I am personally in favour of a significantly shorter terms the music industry, figure-headed by the likes of Sir Cliff Richard, had been lobbying for an extension to 95 years so a recommendation of no change does feel like a victory of sorts. The Review will be published next week as part of the Chancellors pre-budget report.

Via The Register.

We’ve mentioned the UKs abysmal performance at battery recycling a couple of times before so I pleased to read this morning that battery collection schemes are to become more widespread.  The extension, announced by Waste and Resources Action Programme, will bring battery collections to a total of 750000 households (still quite a few to go obviously).  It has to be said that changes to the design of personal electronics from using disposable batteries to rechargeable packs have significantly decreased the number of batteries that I get through a year but recycling schemes for the remainder are still inaccessible (or very badly publicised).  With an EU target of 25% of batteries recycled by 2012 we can hopefully expect to see more announcements of this sort.

Via HippyShopper.

I think that this is more likely to cause more accidents than prevent them - but I’m not a Dane. It seems that those Danes will do anything to make their roads safer. I wonder what happens when it gets cold?

Interestingly it’s taken the BBC a week to pick up this story.

The Leader of the New Zealand’s National party, Don Brash, resigned yesterday after only 3 years as leader. He may have done well for the party in the last election, but he was boring, monotonous and had little to offer the Right in the way of new ideas. He also looked a bit like Michael Howard.

As an ex-head of the central bank he often seemed to think like an economist rather than a politician and his views were based on basic Right Wing libertarian ideas. He promised to introduce the voucher system in New Zealand. He will not be missed.

Looks like Blair’s “rights with responsibilities” agenda is going to take physical form with a real social contract. We saw some of these ideas floated back in September in Miliband’s doomed wiki experiment, where Dave showed us his environmental contract. But this social contract will extend the idea to health, policing and education. One example given by the Guardian is that you will only have a hip operation if you lose weight.

This idea is different from what a social contract, in the philosophical sense, is meant to achieve. Nosemonkey’s got a good article on this so I won’t repeat it here. Although I do think that Nosemonkey’s wrong in seeing this as a Hobbesian contract. I think it is closer to the Rousseauian idea that Nosemonkey seems to support. Don’t forget that Blair is a big supporter of positive liberty (in the Berlin sense; he even wrote a letter to Berlin explaining his ideas). This social contract seems to be based on self-government, but is the application of the Government’s will instead of the general will. We need to realise what is good for us. Only then can we be free. We will be “forced to be free”.

Although the uses of the social contract to explain how we developed out of the state of nature is interesting (although only as a thought experiment), what worries me about these proposals is that it forces the citizen to do the things that the government believes are good for the citizen to be doing. This is paternalism at its worst. Although you can argue that there is a choice - a person who needs a hip operation can refuse to lose weight and live in pain. This is not a choice that a rational person would choose. Questions arise such as do we have a moral responsibility to treat that person? Or in education, do we have a moral responsibility to teach all children at school? What about policing - shouldn’t we have a right to protection?

I’m sure it won’t be too long before the contract is extended to everything from security to voting. You serve in Iraq and we’ll protect you from terrorists. You vote for Labour and we’ll give you a peerage. - Brown might need the last one to win the next election with policy plans such as these.

It may be legal Cuban cigars all round in Washington soon. The Democrats may use their control of Congress to end the Cuban embargo, a policy that has contributed to Cuban poverty and helped Castro consolidate his position. Embargoes never work - it’s only through greater engagement and trade that democracy can be achieved.

I always believed that it was American policy towards Cuba that forced it to join the Russians back in the 50s. In effect the US created the problem themselves. This is at last a move in the right direction to begin to correct this mistake.

On Tuesday leave your headphones at home and don’t recharge your iPod, because its No Music Day. A great opportunity to tell off all your noisy, obnoxious fellow passengers on the tube, bus or train to turn their music players off - I’d like to see that.

In support Resonance FM will not be playing any music - will anyone notice?

Only feel sorry for Vox Polis contributor Jonny - he’s playing live on Tuesday evening - At least it’ll be quiet.

I’ve been reading with some interests the recent coverage by the media of the souring relations in some Universities between the Students’ Union (SU) and the Christian Union (CU). It all boils down to whether CU members can be asked to sign a declaration of their belief in God before they can join. In the SUs eyes, this breaks equal opportunity policies, which states that membership has to be open to all.

Read the rest of this entry »

Speculation continues as to what John Reid is plotting. Why go to such lengths for self-promotion if you’re not after something?

Reid’s not in a position to challenge Brown and he knows it. The Labour party voting rules means that Brown’s got it pretty much sown up. If it’s the Deputy position he wants, I’m not convinced that the Labour party will allow Scots to dominate both top jobs - it clearly wouldn’t be a vote winner.

Could he be after a seat at the table under a Brown government? Clearly he would like one, but would Gordon really be that accommodating to the Blairites? I’m not convinced.

Then what is it? Perhaps he’s preparing for a future leadership contest. If Gordon loses the next election, which is quite possible, then perhaps he wants to be there to take the reins. He may be a few years older than Brown, but that won’t necessarily stop him.