Frappr - 1 comment

We have a Frappr map - add yourself if you have a moment.

Live Bowls - 4 comments

No offence, but why does the BBC inflict Live Bowls (from the Hopton-on-Sea stadium in Norfolk) on licence payers, when there are perfectly good Open All Hours and Keeping Up Appearances tapes lying idle in the BBC archives?


A bowls player bowling his ball, yesterday

Democrat - no comments

Quite surprised by the results - would be interested to see a breakdown - as these people have decided to switch the usual meaning of "Economic Liberal" to mean "interventionist economic policies traditionally favoured by American Liberals and the centre/left" rather than the usual "supporter of an economic system based around free markets".

Via Stephen Pollard ("Capitalist" - duh) originally, and Forceful and Moderate ("Strong Democrat").

You are a Social Liberal (78% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (33% permissive) You are best described as a: Democrat Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

On their "famous people" chart, this puts me roughly at the point where Hilary Clinton parts her hair, and covering the right eye of what looks like Bono.

Citizen's Income and the Minimum Wage - 4 comments

A number of challenging posts have come from Stumbling and Mumbling recently, and the latest one lays into that Labour Party stalwart, the Minimum Wage, in stark opposition to the blogger's favourite, Polly Toynbee, who urges its extension in the Guardian today:

[...]
Is there a limit to how high it can rise before jobs really are lost? All economists agree there is, but none can say when: just suck it and see. Keep pushing upwards until it begins to do more harm than good. But that level would be quite different in each sector and each region - and it hasn't happened yet.
[...]
There is a climate of opinion ripe for change, but with no one to lead it. Why not start that debate?

Well, according to S&M, the emphasis on the minimum wage and its role in poverty alleviation: ignores the high marginal tax rates that the poor encounter, has been judged based upon employment figures that actually reflect all sorts of other economic changes, is blind to the fact that more people can be employed for shorter hours than before, and may be responsible for unintended changes in the composition and skill structure of the workforce.

I quote the final paragraph:

The real way to help the poor is not to raise the minimum wage but to introduce an unconditional basic income. This would give people the choice of whether to accept low-paid jobs or not, and so genuinely empower them. But then, New Labour's mission is to harrass and manage the poor, not to liberate them, isn't it?

... and ask whether "a climate of opinion ripe for change" would be better considering a radical policy like this, rather than unquestioningly adhering to the existing policy, but bumping the limits up a bit, under the tutelage of Ken Livingstone's economic team.

Now, there has been some discussion on a Citizen's Income within the Labour blogosphere, but not an awful lot. Neil has been assiduously making the case here and here, though the point raised in the final paragraph is concerning:

Now I'm not saying any of this will be politically easy, there are lots of self interested parties to overcome, particularly the massive redundancies needed in the civil service and such a massive change could not be done overnight, it would take political consensus over 2 or 3 parliaments as it is gradually introduced, but without ID cards making ID fraud much more difficult, it would be virtually impossible to properly introduce a CI.

As far as I'm concerned, whatever our attachment to the minimum wage and the political capital we have earned, if it is really the case that it costs tens of thousands of jobs - without improving incentives into work - and that these losses have merely been concealed by job creation elsewhere, and if it is really the case that the impact on poverty is negligible, then people who claim to be both radicals and concerned with the elimination of poverty should debate the Citizen's Income more widely, encourage its adoption as a matter of principle, and kick the minimum wage (possibly with Polly in tow) into the long grass.

London venue - 13 comments

No recommendations yet for a venue for February's B4L London meetup...

What I'm looking for is, ideally, a place that's reasonably central, 'does' food, has Wi-Fi, and isn't too far away from a capable railway station. Here are a few possibilities, courtesy of BeerInTheEvening's search form, in no particular order:

The Bunch of Grapes, London Bridge
The Apple Tree, Clerkenwell
The Knights Templar, Chancery Lane
The Lord Moon Of The Mall, Whitehall
The Morpeth Arms, Pimlico

If anyone knows these joints, and can keep me up to date with whether or not they've been demolished, or gutted and turned into a Tesco Metro, that'd be handy.

I'll update this with new recommendations that I'm sent.

I suppose the Wi-Fi isn't that important, but a food capability would avoid everyone having to up sticks with the munchies at 9 o'clock. Bear in mind that this is looking like a Friday evening.

Just noticed, here are a couple that are up for "Pub of the Year 2005":

The Market Porter, London Bridge (that's not me in the photo)
The Royal Oak, Borough

Quality control - no comments

So the morning's crises (my work - you wouldn't be interested) have been averted and I find myself, uncharacteristically, with time during the day to blog (though "think, then blog" might be too much to hope for).

I've noticed that I have 11 unpublished blog posts this month alone: some were just overtaken by events (remember when "Ming the Merciless" was a pithy observation?), some were based on lousy memes that I later decided ought to be starved of further oxygen, some are quite big but unfinished, and one is the next "Link Log", which now contains something like 60 links - too big.

A certain amount of self-censorship also goes on. I mean, it's hard for me to respond to things like this without potentially offending a lot of people, but both the B4L moniker and 'the ideal' make me think twice before posting such things. Well it's not finished anyway, but maybe I should just publish and be damned when it is.

Dark energy / Rooney - 1 comment

An interesting story that has escaped the mainstream media, but was reported in the current - uncharacteristically excellent - issue of Viz:

A WORMHOLE in the space-time continuum opened up outside Dolcis shoe shop on Peebles High Street last Saturday. Shoppers looked on in disbelief as several trainers, half a dozen Dr. Scholls and 3 brogues, all left feet, were sucked into a parallel universe. Manager Hamish McTavish said: "The annoying thing is, the missing shoes are still there, but I can't get at them as they exist as so-called 'dark energy' occupying a parallel dimension. So the right ones I've still got in the shop are no good to me."

Viz also report on a vigil in support of Wayne Rooney, as doctors reveal he is on borrowed time, and that every day that passes brings the superstar striker closer to a tragic and inevitable death:

[...] amongst thousands of possibilities, the star could be finished off by bowel cancer, lung disease, or drowning in his own swimming pool. "It's a matter of when, not if," says Dr. Barry Evans of the Royal Hospital, Whitechapel.

Incapacity Benefit - no comments

As everyone else in the country knows, it's called incapacity benefit, not invalidity benefit, as I seemed to believe. I can't really rename the article as Blogger will ensure we end up with a broken link, so I'm adding this correctly-named post to link to the original.

Invalidity Benefit - 11 comments

According to the BBC,

Prime Minister Tony Blair says getting one million incapacity benefit claimants back to work within 10 years can be "a win for everyone".

He spoke out as ministers prepare to unveil plans to cut benefits for claimants who refuse to take part in back-to-work schemes.

The more severely disabled people will receive a higher rate of benefit and have no obligation to look for work.

If it can encourage people who are capable of working, using both carrot and stick, into the labour force, while protecting those who are genuinely incapable of work, then that's a pretty obvious, and a pretty sound basis for reform.

Nobody's saying it will be easy for many of these people to find work - especially with lingering symptoms and side-effects of their sickness - but at least a job search can begin, people have something to aim at, to train for, and can try to change their lives. I can't take seriously the idea that these measures should be resisted because there are "only so many jobs" - the idea that the economy is of fixed size, and that every vacancy is taken - and therefore that it's either not worth bothering, or that looking for work will only serve to put someone else on the scrapheap. Reform has to be tried first, then we'll see what the employment consequences are.

I also can't really take anyone seriously who claims that the Government - or rather Tony Blair personally - is "blaming, attacking and bullying the poor and the needy", that we should turn a blind eye when so many people's lives are marked by unending poverty, apathy, and boredom, and that this unreformed system - which permits severely disabled people to live in poverty - should be funded in perpetuity by taxing the evil Rich. It belies a lack of empathy for the people concerned - who become mere victims of society, and pawns to be played in one's own game of ideological politics - as well as a deadening conservatism.

OK, that became more of a rant, but you get the idea.

Update: I know, it's called incapacity benefit.

Cartoon War - 2 comments

You may have heard about certain controversial cartoons of Mohammed that have attracted a lot of controversy, and calls for censorship of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and other Scandinavian papers that have published them. According to the Pub Philosopher, who has been tracking the issue:

Radical Muslim groups are turning up the heat in the cartoon war by using mass e-mails and text messages to organise a boycott of Danish goods in Islamic countries.

Well, they can all be viewed here, with commentary. As you can see, they're not exactly hot stuff - not when you've been brought up on a diet of Steve Bell.




Update: Paul Anderson says he likes the virgins cartoon. Well, I guess there isn't one that's obviously better...

Somewhere in the Capital - 9 comments

Bloggers4Labour will be a year old on February 16th, which just happens to fall on a Thursday, so why not celebrate somewhere in London among blogging chums? Here's an account of our last meetup in Brighton, back in September.

Let me know, or leave a comment, if you're interested and will be free (either for the Thursday or the following Friday, so we can see which day is most popular).

Venue is totally tbc. I only really know the West End, City, and inner SE, but a venue close to the corridors of power would be interesting, and might encourage a few shy Portcullis House types to join us. Suggestions, anyone?

I'm well aware that this is a bit hard on our many members from - in particular - the Midlands, Wales, and Manchester, so get in touch if you're a B4L member and fancy arranging a rival/complementary get-together a bit further up the map.

NO2ID - 5 comments

No dissenting voices?

In that case, we're backing:



I'd still put myself in the camp that argues that ID cards and the "database state" are not wrong in principle, and that perfect machines and intelligent systems could liberate us from bureaucracy and form-filling, replace all our various cards and documents with one magic card, and so much more. I suspect something like this will evolve over the next decades, but it sure as hell won't be anything like the nightmare that's planned at the moment, for the reasons spelt out here, and on so many blogs.

Spammers roll call - no comments

Some of the most amusingly-named spammers to have hit me in recent days:

• Pennington X. Ulysses
• Contention D. Pyongyang
• Pretentiously Q. Imposition
  
• Afterlife G. Inexpressible
• Denominations H. Dogie

Parents can be so cruel. Some amusing genuine names here, and here.

Campaigns - 7 comments

I've linked to the Elect the Lords campaign that I backed when I was running the Hove Labour blog, and forgot to transfer over to here.

Not a terribly hard choice, that. Now, how would people feel about Bloggers4Labour officially backing No2ID? Seeing as we supposedly went from only one person in the entire blogosphere backing ID cards, to zero, and then someone else making it one again, perhaps this isn't a difficult one, either. Especially when you read things like this. Provided the campaign stays non-partisan, I don't personally have an objection. Of course, any contrary views are welcome.

I don't think we need another debate about ID cards, I just thought I'd better invite comments before adding any link.

Britain Day - 13 comments

The BBC report that:

Britain should have a day to celebrate its national identity, Gordon Brown has proposed in a speech portraying Labour as a modern patriotic party.

So, patriotism: well, if the definition is a woolly kind of "backing Britain while giving other countries their dues, and agreeing Britain has done some pretty good things, as well as some pretty atrocious things", then I suspect Brown will be gratified that most of the Left here would be prepared to sign up for it, though few would volunteer this information, nor put patriotism very far up their list of things to make the world a better place. My dictionary defines patriot as:

a person who vigorously supports their country and is prepared to defend it against enemies and detractors

On that definition, patriotism falls even further down my list of priorities, even though I've spent the last week supporting England players in the BDO World Darts Championship (an ultimately fruitless task).

All the same, there certainly is a case for specifying one day in the year for promoting British cultures, community involvement, social inclusion, and avoid a sterile debate about what Britishness 'is'. It needn't be a "National Day", selected by the government to tie in with some carefully-selected historical event (such as the defeat of the Spanish Armada, or the end of WWII), complete with pre-arranged events, pageantry, and wall-to-wall media coverage. No, it would be far more involving for all events to be arranged by local authorities in association with community groups, with all communities strongly encouraged to arrange activities (off the top of my head: sports matches, food stalls, talks, films, etc.) that can interest and attract people from across the locality, especially those people who don't normally play any part in society at all.

I'd be optimistic about the success of something like this.

I suppose it would have to be a public holiday, but if it followed every other one and resulted in people being stuck at home, lazing in front of the TV, it would become a complete waste of time.

Link log 3 - 7 comments

More good articles from the last week or so that deserved a fuller response:

• Impeach Blair over Iraq - general
• Once more, political amnesia - a response from Norm.
• More on electoral legitimacy
• Close the door! - Norm (again) on Pilger on the Fa*cist threat to Britain.
• Fellowship of the Ring captioned in World of Warcraft speak.
• Purging Oneself of Political Correctness, the Anthony Browne way.
• From which a tyrant springs - Bush "... is most certainly a tyrant."
• Another paedophilia scare
• Dawkins and the religious scaries
• You WILL Respect, respect Thomas Hobbes, that is
• Tebbit the Conservative Prophet
• " Brighton Regency Loony" (ouch)
• Clinton backs Blair as UN chief - "... I think he will find immense rewards when his service is done".
• Six reasons to oppose the monarchy
• Power: the missing ingredient - "The great benefit of democracy, he said, is that it (in the long-run) creates a civic spirit, and an active interest in improving one's community".
• Respect, Power and the Personal Domain - an excellent piece on the limited applicability of managerial politics to the 'respect' debate.

New Look Update - 2 comments

Well, it's a little bit different, isn't it? Slightly more 'attitude', and manages (I hope) to look a bit more vibrant without rendering the thing illegible.

There's always a chance that IE6 will turn into a kind of mush (in fact, most probably, the header will be left-aligned, not centred), so please send a screenshot if it looks weird.

Dawkins and Religion - no comments

This is a bit of a cheat, really, as I haven't yet had time to type up the piece I scribbled down on the train home on Tuesday night, and this placeholder will have to do until then. I am determined to get it done though.

It is a bit contrary and, though not exactly inspired by Doubting Dawkins from the Demos Greenhouse, that article did appear at an opportune time, and is a good one. It also ties in with my earlier post on the atheist consensus, given that I probably feel uncomfortable being part of any consensus. One thing that did stick out from the documentary - which I'll mention now - was Dawkins' tying-together of Blair, Bush, and Sharon. All are labelled as 'believers', and this is no doubt true, but wasn't the real intention to imply a kind of cabal? A coalition against reason? Or was it just a rhetorical shot-in-the-arm for the intended audience of atheist liberal lefties? That's not necessarily a problem, but any temptation to redefine modern atheism as belonging to the centre/Left, being against Blair/New Labour, or in opposition to Iraq-style intervention, must surely be resisted.

My angle here, if you're wondering, is that atheism is far too sound to be spoilt by ridiculous arguments about believing in fairies that some atheists resort to, and to be compromised by attempts to 'reinvigorate' it by tying it into the political zeitgeist.

I should add that I only saw the first half of the documentary on Monday (I cannot miss University Challenge), and that there is another show, next week. Norm noticed Dawkins' failure to address "the question of whether religion meets any important human needs", and hopefully we'll see this next time.

New Look - 9 comments

Does anyone out there have any ideas for freshening up the look of Bloggers4Labour: changing theme, designing a logo, etc.?

I don't think it's that important, after all I quite like the red/grape combo, but then it's hardly the last word in blog design, and I'd be interested to see any ideas that are bold and distinctive (ideally red-based, but I'd really rather not display article text in white). I'd be prepared to consider a screen-filling, three-column layout. As a guide, I do like the new Talk Politics design, except for the white/cream on grey/black, and it's also a little "busy" above the fold.

Update: In a flash of creative dynamism, I put together this mocked-up page. It reduces the grape presence (I like grapes) on the page by about 80%, reasserts our "red" credentials, and removes the grey rounded-corners that I could never be bothered to fix when I modified the original template. I would have liked to have a nice image strip at the top, a watermark-style background image, or perhaps a background image pinned to the bottom-left as you scroll, but I couldn't find the right one. All the same, I think the font/colour choice and bold background gives us a bit more "attitude".

The Battle Ahead - no comments

How things have changed: the Lib Dems, apparently full of the young, the sensible, and the saintly, find themselves engaged in a sour-tinged leadership battle that seems highly likely to crown the dull, patrician Menzies Campbell - who must now attempt to hold together the SDP and the Gladstonian wings of his party.

Meanwhile, David Cameron (who is also dull and patrician, but is a long way from being a pensioner) appears either to have rediscovered the Conservative Party's ability to pick policies that aren't completely crass or designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator - an ability that few alive today can remember in action - or to smell Lib Dem blood. No doubt his new commitment to adopting our policy of replacing up-front, flat-rate tuition fees with variable fees, repaid over many years, won't be a big hit on campus. However, he has at least given his party a hope among professionals and progressive graduates, who want to see more people going to university, but don't believe that taxpayers should pay for tens of thousands of middle-class students to attend underfunded courses at underfunded establishments. This, I believe, can only hasten the decline of the Liberal Democrats among the "Generation Gap" group of 25 to 34-year-olds that the Tories have been targetting.

There's not much here to cheer Labour: the weaker the Lib Dems, the more likely their marginal seats tip over to the Tories, and the more the anti-Labour vote concentrates in the hands of a party that - under our current electoral system - is able to profit from a large, evenly-spread vote, the harder it's going to be for us. That's not the whole story, though: Cameron's attempts to provide a safe haven on his side for anti-Labour-government voters who would previously have balked at his party's reactionary tone, makes it less of a gamble for Lib Dems and for our own disgruntled supporters to protest.

Labour can't help what goes on inside the Liberal Democrats. The only course we can pursue is to continue to enhance the reputation we have earned for the running of the country since 1997, ensure we set the progressive agenda, and not seek reelection by default, but apply as much energy, and as much critical thought as the Tories' spin doctors say they are doing. Bear in mind, though, that David Cameron will continue to rifle through the bunch of keys as he seeks his exit from the Thatcherite graveyard, but that skeletal hand will creep ever closer to his ankle, ready to yank him back into the crypt.

Paul Anderson, Harry, and others, have interesting takes.

Link log 2 - no comments

Top reads of the past couple of days:

• pop music has gone digital
• Sex discrimination: what truth?
• John Stuart Mill, Tory?
• Richard Dawkins on religion
• The Root of all Evil
• No more grammars, Tories pledge
• Heretical thoughts and heresy-hunters
• Blazing mouse sets fire to house
• Penniless footballers?
• 'Historical Jetsam'

Fingers - no comments

Part 1 of an occasional - and possibly long-running series - on why I would be ill-suited to follow my parents into the teaching profession (well, it's a bit late anyway). According to this, there is a "group of girls" who still routinely add and subtract on their fingers after the age of seven:

He [Tim Coulson, director of the national numeracy strategy] said this group will not have understood other quicker ways of problem-solving so will have difficulty as the class moves on to bigger sums and will fall behind.

"They get to the juniors and questions get harder. They can no longer do them on their fingers and suddenly their mathematics world falls apart."

That's so bizarre. Not only is it a lousy technique, but if you're counting on your fingers you're pretty much restricted to operands less than 100, as almost any human being will get bored or distracted counting up from zero in this manner. So it's practically useless for solving the traditional "I go into the greengrocer's..." / "Mummy's purse" question while using 2006 prices. It's hard to believe any children could still be allowed to resort to this at the age of 11.

There certainly are a few "why?"s missing from the article. For starters, why just girls?

Bugs and non-bugs - 1 comment

I've made two more changes to the B4L system this evening.

The first came about because the format of the title of comment posts in WordPress-published comment feeds appears to have changed. I suspect it's a version 2.0 thing. It only seemed to affect Jo, and Owen.

Secondly, there was a flaw in the logic I was using for my 'adjusting-future-posts' fix. My assumption had always been that the problem was caused by UK bloggers who were publishing under PST, causing the articles to be projected forward 8 hours by thick-headed blogging software. I worked on the basis that any posts we discovered with dates more than 3 hours in the future were likely candidates, and they would be shifted back by 8. Problem is, what happens when you find something posted an entire day in the future, as was the case earlier today? Obviously it still ends up hogging the top of our recent posts list for the next half-day.

The rule is now: anything between 3 and 8 hours in the future is shifted back by 8; every other future post is shifted back by enough hours to put it in the past. This should all be completely unnecessary, but there you go. Hope that puts an end to the problem.

Tony Banks - 1 comment

Not again - our own Tony Banks (Baron Stratford) is critically ill in hospital after suffering a "very serious stroke".

What's going on in politics at the moment? They're either suffering massive strokes, being stabbed in the back by their own useless MPs, engaging in fundamental policy U-turns, or cheating their constituents just to get a few anti-war statements on prime-time (well, for Channel 4) TV. What a strange time.

Let's hope the guy pulls through.

Update: lest we forget, Rachel Squire - Labour MP for Dunfermline and West Fife - died only yesterday, aged just 51.

Update II: And, of course, Lord Merlyn-Rees the day before that (aged 85), and Phillip Whitehead MEP on December 31st, aged just 68.

Cameron and the NHS / Rationing - no comments

Planned to say something on this a couple of days ago, but maybe it's not too late. Anyway, Cameron plans to defend the principle of an NHS that is 'free at the point of delivery', albeit with Labour's (sorry, Our) arbitrary cap on the private sector's role lifted. But the main thing is that the voucher/passport argument has been lost, or rather, kicked into the long grass.

I expect this will play well with any Conservative activist who fancies closing in on 40% of the vote (interestingly, a Liberal Democrat-voting friend has informed me that Cameron's NHS policy now gets their vote!), but that this will be loathed and despised by Conservative bloggers. Actually, I haven't checked, which is inexcusably lazy, but I'm sure it's true. There will also be Labourites on the progressive/Blairite/meritocracy wing who will also be dismayed that, by so shamelessly adopting a Labour policy that goes against the current of young, liberal, free-market Tories, Cameron has killed off the debate on the future of NHS funding in an era of ever-increasing expectations and desire for choice. Unless a newly-revitalised Liberal Democrat Party dares to challenge it's coalition of voters to back something a bit different...

Just another observation: we may all know and love the free-at-the-point-of-delivery ethos, but it doesn't take long for people to name groups who, they believe, should be denied this benefit: criminals, dole scroungers, smokers, the obese, players of dangerous sports, partakers of 'frivolous' operations, etc. for some economic or moral(istic?) reason.

If free access at the point of delivery is to be rationed to the healthy, careful, and moral, then, frankly, from a funding point of view, you might as well give up on the current system and switch to private health insurance, which will make healthcare jolly expensive for those whose behaviour doesn't meet our standards.

====

Can't write too much - about to fire up Downfall, which is 147 minutes long...

Link log - 1 comment

I do read a lot of blogs, find all sorts of great posts, drag them onto my browser links bar with the intention of incorporating them into some well-argued future post of my own, then find that - several days having past - the debate seems to have gone cold, and those fine links are replaced with new ones.

So, by way of a 'hat tip', over the past couple of days I 'ave been mostly reading (in no particular order):

Worse than Astrology (stock picks)
PC thinking 'is harming society' (no time yet for a proper look at Browne's piece)
Chris Brookes' roundup of the inconsistencies (and worse) in the aforementioned article
Minister makes organ donor plea
A quiet smile at absolute folly
Global Inequality ("inequality in world income is greater even than inequality within the most inegalitarian nations")
"Little Atoms" news
The Hawk's Dilemma
David Cameron's move to the left is great news for Labour
Predictions for 2006 - part 5: Crossing the floor: Diane Abbott??
Bob from Brockley (14 posts today??)
Ending farm subsidies: the New Zealand experience

And probably other things too, but I feel better for having got this off my chest, so to speak.

Special Days - 1 comment

A belated Happy New Year to one and all.

Given that today saw me back at work, I thought I'd treat myself to a Simpsons Fun Calendar. This turned out to have educational value, for I learned that January 3rd marks the anniversaries of the births of both (Marcus Tullius) Cicero, "generally considered the greatest Latin orator and prose stylist" ... and Mel Gibson, star of The Patriot, and director of The Passion of the Christ.

Other January occasions the calendar alerted me to include: the Iroquois White Dog Feast on the 6th, Japan's Seven Herbs Festival on the 7th, World Religion Day on the 15th, International Hot & Spicy Food Day on the 21st, National Pie Day on the 23rd, and Thomas Crapper Day on the 27th.

Meanwhile, we have 30 or so new entries on the Dead Socialist Watch archive page (and on a sidebar near you).