My rugby supporting ladder

Rugby is one of those games where I can happily get into watching a match even if my team aren't playing. For domestic I don't really have *a team* if I can make it I'll go and support Rotherham Titans at their home games. I have a friend who is a mad Tigers fan who is kind enough to take me along to matches and it is only polite to support them when he does, even when they play west country teams who I tend to support over other clubs but not with any great loyalty to any one. Internationals are a different matter watching 15 man test matches or sevens I have a scale of support as follows.
England
Wales
Scotland
Ireland
New Zealand
Fiji
Samoa
Italy
France
Kenya
Any other team
Argentina
South Africa
And the bottom of the list but never supported as they are the bottom of the list and below every other team is Australia.

Lamb faggots

Lamb faggots

In a food processor whiz up 400g lamb's liver, 250g lamb mince, 2 small heads of roast garlic, 1/2 a tube of anchovy paste, 1 bunch of spring onions and a good grind of black or mixed pepper.
Combine the mix from the food processor with 750g of lamb mince and 150g of breadcrumbs, shape into balls and put in the fridge for 30 minutes to an hour. Cut three large onions in half reserve one half and quarter the other five, place them in a roasting tin with some oil into an oven pre-heated to 180^oC, after twenty minutes place the faggots on the onions and cook for 40 minutes.
In the meantime, blend 500ml of lamb stock, 50g of pea shoots and 28g of fresh mint to make a risotto with the reserved onion half, 200g Arborio rice, 150ml of vermouth, 60g of parmesan cheese and some butter & olive oil.

Arthur Miller's "The Crucible"

Arthur Miller's "The Crucible"

"The little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom and common vengeance writes the law!"
The play takes place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 and is a powerful account of the events surrounding the Salem Witch Trials a time when paranoia, hysteria, and deceit gripped the Puritan towns of New England.
The production will run from Wednesday 27th to Saturday 30th January 2010 at the Drama Studio Glossop Road more information on the production.

A stunning version of the classic play with a fabulous cast directed by Ed Bancroft. Tickets on sale now

'tashe-tastic

Personal fund raising total for Movember currently at: £523.36 there is still time to donate at http://bit.ly/1xD0hq (closes 09/12 at 22:00)

I want your money

Purple 'tashe

As you may know I have been growing a moustache this month to raise money for The Prostate Cancer Charity via Movember it has been a very itchy experience. Today is the last day, but I have dyed mine purple and keeping it on until the end of the week to get just a little bit more money.
This is my last ditch attempt to squeeze a few more pounds from you lot.
You can see the development of my 'tashe over the whole month: on flickr

please donate to me

Winter warmer

Winter warmer

Chop 500g of back bacon and place in a lightly oiled lasagne dish or Pyrex roaster, put this in the oven and turn it on to 180° C. Peel and slice to varying thickness 1Kg of Maris Piper or similar potatoes and bring them to the boil in a saucepan of water, meanwhile slice and soften 1 large leek. When the potatoes  have been simmering for 5 minutes, drain them and leave them to steam. Gently warm 600ml of double cream in a saucepan and drop in 500g of ricotta cheese and season well;  as this slowly melts (don't worry if this isn't a perfect process, some of the cheese being left un-melted is fine) wizz up 150g of breadcrumbs, 150g of grated mature cheddar and 5g grated parmesan. Pull the dish of bacon from the oven and pour off any excess water (if there is too much of this consider a new brand of bacon) and mix in the leek, then layer over first 225g of washed spinach then the potatoes, pour over the cream and cheese mix then sprinkle over the breadcrumb mix. Bake in the oven until the topping is golden brown on top the sauce is bubbling up from underneath.

Variations: use white fish fillets instead of the bacon (will need to be watch much more carefully while you complete the remaining steps) or just use more leeks plus some peppers and courgettes for a vegetarian alternative.

A big step in the right direction.

The news flew around twitter last night that Gordon Brown was announcing the opening up of a raft of data lists for use buy everyone whether for commercial purposes or otherwise. Although it is only speculation at this point it looks like the data involved will included Ordnance Survey maps down to a scale of 1:10,000, traffic and transport data allowing for better 3rd party journey planning applications, House price data and offense data for how nice is my locality sites and legislation as Free our Bills has been campaigning for.

There are still a lot of detail missing, such as is this all going to be directly added to data.gov.uk or will the OS run a separate system, what licence will the data be released under and will this solve the problem that the OS currently cause stopping people from overlaying the data onto google maps.

For more information: Ordnance Survey maps to go free online - Guardian

Bam! Lets knock it up a notch

I am not a fan of 'bog standard' even if I am using time saving ingredient from the supermarket I like to add something to them to bring out their best.  Unfortunately none of the mustelids on earth have yet evolved into a Spice Weasel, so what to use instead?

My first port of call is a pepper grinder that contains a mix of Bristol blend pepper^[1] and crushed dried chillies. I use this pretty much anywhere I am using black pepper (including making pepper crusts) and it adds a nice smidgen of extra pep when going to full on chillies isn't required. It gives that something extra even when all you are doing is personalising a pizza by adding extra toppings or trying to enliven some pasta and pesto.

Next is mustard and horseradish, any sane omnivore will have these in the house for roasts etc but I find for day to day usage I am more likely to put them in things than on them (to the extent that while having cooked with Colman's mustard flour for probably 2 decades I have only recently used it to make mustard). Both go well in mash, potato or otherwise, and while I have always used mustard when turning Béchamel into Mornay I have found recently that if I am going to be putting that over vegetables then horseradish goes lovely in there as well. They also are part of my salad dressing armoury when I break all good rules about how to make a Vinaigrette^[2]

There are many other things that in their place liven up stuff but that is some of the generic and besides I dread to think what the food police would think of my pickled cabbage products in toasted sandwiches habit.

^[1]black, white, green and pink peppercorns with added pimento
^[2]That reminds me I need to right up my Caesar salad and seafood sauce recipes.

Variation on a theme

I have been a fan of the River Cottage pumpkin/squash baked with cream recipe since I first saw it. Tonight I tried something a little different. Inspired by a the success of a fondue at a recent party instead of the usual filling I went for fondue –like mix of wine and cheese with a little garlic oil.

It worked really well, it shows off the squash if anything better than the original and while it won’t replace the cream version for me, I will make it again.

Remember remember the whole of November, clippers, tweasers and wax.

First Movember shot

This is the standard Movember blerb:

I am growing a moustache this year for Movember. I have decided to put down my razor for one month (November) and help raise awareness and funds for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer.
What many people don’t appreciate is that one man dies every hour of prostate cancer in the UK, more than 35,000 men will be diagnosed this year and that prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK. Facts like these have convinced me I should get involved and I am hoping that you will support me.
To donate to my Mo, you can either:

• Donate online using your credit card, debit card or PayPal account or
• Write a cheque payable to ‘The Prostate Cancer Charity - Movember’, referencing my Registration Number 391004 and mailing it to: Movember - The Prostate Cancer Charity, First Floor, Cambridge House, Cambridge Grove, London, W6 0LE.

Movember is now in its third year here in the UK and, to date, has achieved some pretty amazing results by working alongside The Prostate Cancer Charity. Check out further details at: http://uk.movemberfoundation.com/research-and-programs.

You can follow the progress of my Mo online. Also, http://uk.movember.com has heaps of useful information.

Thank you

But you don't need that any more than you do when someone posts about race for life or bungee jumping for the RNLI, if this is your sort of cause or you just want to support me looking stupid, please donate.

Glengarry Glen Ross

Written by David Mamet - Directed by Tony Kennick

14th to 17th October at the University Drama Studio doors open at 7pm for a prompt 7.30pm start.

Lies, flattery, threats, intimidation, four desperate estate agents will do anything to sell.
Mamet's Pulitzer Prize winning play is edgy, exhilarating and blackly comic as the characters plot, plead, and betray each other in a paradigm of the energy and cruelty of capitalism in action.
Contains very strong language throughout.

Our online Box Office is now open

Google Calendar - Facebook event - iCalander file

As Neil Gaiman would say:

"I'm closing a few tabs"^[1]

• http://timetric.com/ - simple idea elegantly done, collect data sets, graph them, let people add more data sets, produce their own graphs etc.
• Kevin Anderson on Visualisation for news and community discovery the Visualisation landscape from a journalism point of view, with some very interesting examples and a reminder to me to look into the google visualisation API
• Resetting Expectations: Some Augmented Reality Links an O'Reilly Radar article doing pretty much what it says on the tin.
• A skim-read introduction to linked data The blog post is pretty brief just a background to what the slides are, but do click through to them (they are in s5)

^[1]Yes I know I should be doing this in a more geeky way by pulling in from my delicious feed but hey *shrug* what you going to do?

Channel switching

Sunny Hundal asked

Observer columnists asks readers to follow Archbishop Dr John Sentamu. But fails to link to his twitter page. WTF?

and this got me thinking. I assume that this was in response to Vicky Coren bringing it up, I'm not sure if the plural was a typo or if someone else had mentioned it as well. Now a lot of this is speculation, I don't know the minds of the people involved if I were a real journalist I could go as far as to ask but...
The strongest reason I suspect is that the piece was written for a real ink on paper newspaper, and newsprint currently rarely has the extensions installed to make links clickable and have the request handled by an adjacent web browser. So you have the problem of how to communicate such a link:

• In full? That is quite a lot of typing to get right and there isn't much in the way of error correction if you miss a letter^[1].
• As a shortened URL using tinyURL or similar? This reduces the amount of typing but is even less forgiving of error when glancing between page and keyboard to type it in from the page.

No the easiest thing to do is to let people use search. It took a matter of moments using a popular internet search engine to find what I was after even with a spelling error. I expect that the set of people who actively use twitter but couldn't find Dr Sentamu without the help of a printed link is very small indeed.
This is actually a current trend in getting people to channel shift from offline to online, look at the next billboard poster for a blockbuster movie for example and it is more likely to have a stanza starting "search online for:" and some carefully chosen keywords than one starting "www" (and heaven forfend anyone use the dreaded "http://"). Previously attempts to get you online where more information can be fed to you, and in a marketing context you can interact enough to help them target you, have included 'innovations' such as posters with infra-red transmitters that would send you a link to online information and two dimensional barcodes such as the QR Code neither of which really caught on here.
Now back to naked unjustified assumptions, suppose Sunny wasn't reading a paper copy of the Observer but the online edition, in which a hyperlink has been added to the text which links to the guardian.co.uk aggregation page for the Archbishop. Now it could be reasonable to expect that this story could have had a link to the twitter profile in question, it would have been virtually uncontroversial to add it to the piece, there is no doubt that it would fit. But I suspect that if you had the job of trying to mark up stories in this way on the site as they transitioned from print to online more often than not you would need to consult the author of the piece to confirm that what you were linking to was correct.

^[1]Some ISPs catch requests for non-existant domains and redirect you to a search page in the guise of being helpful but this breaks a number of things that expect when a domain doesn't exist to be told so. Luckily although my home ISP does this it also allows me to opt-out.

Media oversight from the unexpected angle.

Much has been written about how the Daily Show with Jon Stewart can often be the hardest hitting political show on the American networks despite being produced by and aired on a cable comedy channel. In terms of television output luminaries such as Marcus Brigstocke and Iain Lee & Daisy Donovan have tried to mine the vein of satirical current affairs but none of them have worried Jeremy Paxman and television satire in this country remains mostly the preserve of impressionists and panel games.

There is one area in this country in which a programme you might not expect is doing a fine job at holding people to account. More or Less goes out on Radio 4 after the World at One on a Friday lunchtime and is a co-production with the Open University. This seemingly unassuming half hour of statistics can be (glibly) described as doing for numbers what Ben Goldacre does for medicine. While not the first important figure they have picked apart (there is a very good piece about how many CCTV cameras there are in the UK for example) they hit the geek headlines over the weekend over "7m illegal file sharers". After first finding out that the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property was quoting a figure that came out of unpublished research commissioned for the BPI which had been laundered through another report from the same research outfit via UCL they then examined the methodology and numbers from which it was derived which brought both the small sample size and seemingly overstated overall population figure under scrutiny.

The programme is also blessed in that it has its archive online going back to 2003 so the good work can be cited.

Why us?

Sheffield now has a wheel, or an eye, or something else round; perhaps a sphincter^[1] of some sort. But in any case we have one and I really have no idea why.

My adopted city has many things going for it, hence me having lived here for so long and one of those is it isn't a tourist destination, in fact it is barely a destination city at all. There will be a chunk of people during the nicer weather month who will base themselves here for doing exciting things in the surrounding area and I expect that some folk swing by on tours of the grand old cities of the north but you don't find the place knee deep in grockles. Various people are doing their best to attract visitors with festivals like Cliffhanger and Tram Lines but they are localised in appeal and duration (and in some cases location). So I don't think there is much in the way of passing trade so to speak.

As for the locals, I have a feeling that once all the grannies and separated parents on access days have taken their charges on then that trade will dry up as well. People round here really want value for their hard earned pound and I can't see them seeing this 'attraction' as delivering that. It isn't tall enough to save you much of a walk to the various pretty buildings you will see from it in the city centre (there are some) and no-one really spends their day wondering what the roof of orchard square looks like. So given you can get better views of the city from a much cheaper bus ride or an entirely free walk^[2], I imagine people will do that instead. Leave the gimmicks to the touristy places where they will be appreciated.
^[1] On that subject this like many blogs has an underdeveloped Sphincter of Oddi and lets in too much bile.
^[2] I recommend popping up to the Cholera Monument.

Civil liberties hero of the week: Hampshire police

Hampshire police have suspended its use of stop and search after reviewing 2007/8 figures which showed that despite using section 44 powers on more than 3,400 occasions, they arrested no one connected with terrorist activity. - liberty central

To use a terrible cliché 'a victory for common sense'

Very disappointed in the Sheffield Star

Of course they couldn't have said anything as it would have diluted the anger and upset of a local woman that sells papers but, I am still disappointed.

They know that the response to:

The whole thing is a mess, why hasn't this been publicised? The last time there was a number change it was drummed into us for a year.

is "yes dear, you were told for a year that the code was changing to 0114 and that numbers under that would eventually start with all possible numbers not just 2, that is the whole point, we get more numbers in Sheffield" and the reason the Star know this? They will have been paid an extraordinary amount of money running full page adverts for months about the switch over. Perhaps Ofcom should take a little of the blame, they could possibly have avoided this by not using the two hundred thousand block first as I believe this re-enforced the confusion amongst the masses of people who find telephone numbers to be overly complicated.

The other thing they decided not to report is that these numbers started getting allocated in 2004, so are hardly "new".

Dogs in pubs.

Let me put forward a small confession, I don't really like dogs, they are to me smelly and vicious not so little buggers that shouldn't be kept in towns and cities. Feel free to carry on having them on your farm or for your shoot or hunt, but in the middle of urban sprawl don't expose them to me.
See the problem is unlike other things I don't like, it can be difficult to avoid dogs, people take them places with them to socialise.
I'm not asking for a ban on dogs in pubs, just dog and no dog areas so I can sit and have a beer without fear of being savaged to death by a wolf descendent.
Not to keen on them tied up outside shops either.

Can lightning strike twice?

This time last year, after trying via a web feedback form to ask the BBC a loaded question about their RSS feeds I posted it on this blog and got a prompt and positive answer from Jem Stone.
Today I am going to try the same with the Guardian and blog something that I have sent to their user help email address but so far have had no response to. As you will see if you read the slightly dull and geeky details later on I don't actually think the issue is their fault; but as things stand I feel it is more likely (despite this blogging platform being owned by google and them being quite good at searching for content on the internet) that this will reach people with the power to make changes at the Guardian than in Mountain View.

My problem is due to how much information I try and absorb on the move, sometimes on a netbook (as I am now, it is far easier to type on than my E71) but mostly on my phone. My browser of choice is Opera Mini, my aggregator is Google Reader and a number of the feeds I read, especially to do with politics and liberty are from the Guardian.

I am gettting an XML parsing fail looking at Guardian feeds, looking at the source the error shows that in the conversion of the encoded html in the <description> element. One out of Google Reader or Opera Mini is seeing '&lt;p style="clear:both" /&gt;' not recognising that it is self closed, deciding that it needs to add an extra closing p tag, and therefore breaking the parse.
As I have little in the way of web development tools on my phone I can only speculate that it is Google that is doing the insertion (as it would be strange bug for Opera to do so then choke on it).

As I said above I fully understand that this isn't technically the Guardian's problem since their feed validates as is but I am also hoping that it is a simple change for them to the template used for RSS presentation that can fix this issue for me and anyone else in my predicament.

If you are from the Guardian and reading this, thank you in advance for any help!

Please stop inviting me to sign your petition.

People keep asking me to sign a petition or join a facebook group protesting about the age and alcohol based segregation during gigs at Corporation.

Feel free to join/sign yourself if you want to but I won't be.

Having a suspicion that there was probably a reason why this licence condition had been put in place I made a Freedom of Information request to the council to see all 'reports, notes, minutes, agenda papers or other documentation' that had been put before the licensing committee to do with Corp. As I suspected it was all about the "Protection of Children from Harm" objective of the Licensing act 2003. The documentation from the council included reports from South Yorkshire Police and Sheffield Safeguarding Children Board about issues in the past with breaches of their license with respect to under 18s. So there are restrictions in place for Corp because they have been caught out so the anguished cries about this are getting no sympathy from me.

You don't *have* to believe me but...

The Taming of the Shrew is going to be fabulous.

Last night we had the final rehearsal before getting into the theatre and the show has really come together, the meaning is coming out well and even if I do say it myself the comic relief is very funny ;-)

To book please visit the box office at http://www.thecompanysheffield.co.uk/boxoffice/index.php

A seemingly ill informed MP

Twittering has to be a symptom of a dysfunctional society. You know the one I’m talking about; when people don’t talk to, care about, help, consider or even interact with each other anymore.

Nadine Dorries's Blog.

Now far be it for me to ever suggest that the MP for Mid Bedfordshire has a habit of believing things that don't stand up to research but this is a doozy. Where as she has a history of professional involvement with abortion, she doesn't seem to have any time working in the field of social networking on her cv. I don't have any expertise in doing scientific research on this kind of subject, but the whole 'facebook causes cancer' fuss caused Ben Goldacre to review what research was out there on internet use and well being and shock horror the picture wasn't all that bad.

To specifics, firstly the quote above, it is a well reported phenomenon that the Twitter community are always willing to help and will do things like passing on questions and crowd sourcing answers, to the point where people are now turning to twitter as the first port of call for information. Secondly (and you'll need to read the original blog post, I'm not quoting it all) the idea that the number of people who turn up to your birthday party is a measure of how well rounded you are and how functional your society is is crazy. Thanks to the social networking there are people that I would to invite to any such celebration but as they thousands of miles away it would be a little pointless. It would be very interesting to find out of the people psycho analysing how many of them were experts in either social networking or Psychoanalysis (note no space).

Test post for Rory Cellan-Jones

Dancing with the stars

As you can imagine I am not a huge fan of the dancing or singing "competition" programs that are the staple of Saturday prime time on Aunty Beeb's number one channel and care even less for the more populist version on the other side. I have no real interest in watching people, whether celebs or otherwise being humiliated supposedly for entertainment (unless they are in on the joke, I have watched a bit of the comic relief variant) and I certainly have never been interested in watching the overseas variants that BBC Worldwide have successfully sold.

I am however interested to follow the fortunes of the unlikely, the underdogs, I never watched him dance but it was always fun to hear the lightly humoured outrage that John Sergeant was still on Strictly. So it looks like the 'unusual choice' contestant is now part of the format as licensed as Woz is on 'Dancing with the Stars'

Bulk Data Downloads: A Breakthrough in Government Transparency

Got your attention? Yet again this is something we in the UK can only dream about but there are people in America trying to make it happen. Tim O’Reilly has the story.

OpenSourceGov

There is a new instance of mediawiki in town:

This site has been created to support the UK government's open source strategy and action plan. Hopefully soon, anyone who wants to know a bit about what open source is, and what it can do, will be able to find plenty to read here. – OpenSourceGov.

Didn't take long to find out who was behind it (whois helps with this sorts of thing) Dave Briggs, who says on his site:

Last week, the Cabinet Office published a new action plan for government and open source, to level the playing field when it comes to procuring software. [Snipped]
Excellent stuff. There is a Netvibes dashboard set up to help monitor what is being said online, some of which is a little cynical and critical. I tend to prefer to be relentlessly positive.

Anyway, the situation with open source is a little similar to that of social web stuff, in that knowledge about it, and its possibilities, are somewhat limited. We need open source digital mentors! Alternatively, we just need a wiki. – davepress.net

It will be very interesting to see how this develops, as with all of these kind of things^TM it will need to strike a cord and build a community to give it momentum and keep up to date.

Once again something cool and underground goes mainstream.

This is a guest post from esteemed presentations and speaking expert Olivia Mitchell.

People used to whisper to each other or pass hand-scribbled notes during presentations. Now these notes are going digital on Twitter or via conference-provided chat rooms.

Up until now, this back-channel has been mainly confined to the Internet industry and technology conferences. However, a survey of leadership conferences from Weber Shandwick shows that there is a significant increase in blogging and twittering at conferences.

How to Present While People are Twittering | Pistachio.

The backchannel is dead, long live whatever we will call it now. I questioned a friend the other day when he used the term "Official backchannel" and mentioned that the organisers of the conference had a projected display of the activity that was going on using a specific hashtag. I suppose the name could stick as I was never sure whether the use of the term in a social media sense was borrowing more from the diplomatic term (unofficial/underground communications) or the Psycholinguistics one (the use of a nod, 'yes' and 'uh-huh' to indicate that you are paying attention and the other person should continue to speak) but it seems now that the former use has been seized upon as useful and it has been brought into the mainstream (conferences are opening embassies in twitter, to continue with the analogy) which means that it can actively work as the latter.

As many of you will know I spent my Saturday in a concrete bunker in Bloomsbury at the Convention on modern liberty and blogged and twittered all day. While at some points we would all loved to have what we were saying to be communicated to the panels whether directly or mediated, at other times I am probably glad they couldn't see what I was saying in real time, mainly when I was insulting them. On balance the usefulness of this communication methodology being absorbed probably outweighs the disadvantage of having to refrain from suggesting someone is talking utter rubbish. I mean how cool would it have been for Henry Porter to be able to whisper in David Davis ear on Saturday that he had just misattributed Clarke's Third Law to Robert A. Heinlein.

Evening Plenary

Billy Bragg was surprised to find himself agreeing with David Davis, but want to talk about the role of the artist “in this struggle. The issue we have and why we don’t have a document that starts we the people is because our revolution was 100 years to early. As we have no framework it is difficult, David Davis had problems protecting our rights because of it. It doesn’t really matter if it is called a British bill of rights as long as it is fair to all.

Lisa Appignanesi says she noticed a lot of talking about silence in the context of people not wanting to talk about things. She is revisiting Dominic Grieve’s point about repealing of laws. She would like the parties to say what they would repeal. 1st on her list are the anti terror laws, she talks about kids being arrested protesting, people being arrested reading at the cenotaph and then she moves on to a topic mentioned in my stream in which she finds laws to be abhorrent, “seditious” libel and criminal defamation. Penultimatly she wants to deal with what she refers to as concentration camps for asylum seekers. Lastly she supports the human rights act and isn’t sure why the media is so down on it.

Feargal Sharkey is here to talk about the oppression of music in the UK under the licensing act and other regulations especially in the Metropolitan area rather than here to do his normal trick of asking for extension of copyright. Tells a very funny story about belly dancing to lead in to a discussion of form 696. Apparently only 21 London councils have included the wording that enables this to be a licensing issue. He is reading from the form the implied threats if you don’t fill it in correctly.

Paul Gilroy wants to ensure that all of this is done in an intelligent and sensible manner, and brought what had been absent (from what I had seen) apart from Chuka Umunna all day which was the perspective that us white guys havn’t had it as bad as other people and provided a good bit of context about the UK and the rest of the world.

Cory Doctorow has been called a geek for twittering from the platform then he suggest that the US didn’t spot 9/11 because it collected too much info. Taking photos of public buildings can’t be considered a security issue as we all know what they look like. All of this would be less painful if the government delivered what it promised. I think that is a big disconnect  from a lot of people here who don’t want to give this information up even if it did the things the government suggests it should (Cory FFS slow down!).

Sorry this is patchy had wifi and power and helping out people with wikipedia lookups during the talks, huge apologies to the panel especially Paul :-(

How do we secure modern liberty

Afua Hirsch, starts by saying that she thinks it is far harder to do this than the day job(s), as a lawyer she challenges misuses of rights as journalist she highlights these abuses to the world, but  this saying what is the way forward. She also (relevantly) talks about the hairdressers and how the people there feel a disconnect with politics. Why aren’t rights part of education why don’t children get taught how they should be treated by society (and also how they should treat other people to not infringe their rights).

Chuka Umunna agrees that part of what needs to happen is making rights mainstream, it should be part of the bread and butter of the countries daily life. He is relating a very personal tale about liberties being infringed and wondering how to widen this to relate it to people who haven’t yet experienced these problems themselves. Discussing the real on the ground experience of CCTV and DNA databases in the the constituency that he is the PPC for. He is suggesting that we need to ensure that the whole picture of government and corporate incursion is considered, so that spam, direct mail and other big brother business concepts are considered alongside database government not 100% convinced about the snail spam threat. This is a PPC who says he wants it to be an election issue.

“A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested by the police” is Chris Huhne’s opening quote as he goes on to talk about the constituent members of what he calls the parliamentary liberal party with a deliberate small L linking LibDems 50 or so Labour MPs who voted against 90 days and by his estimation of half the conservative party who are also liberal in view. Strangely he is also pimping his new Freedom Bill ;-) Next why are Human rights more important than a bill of British rights? Because what if a future authoritarian government starts declaring people non persons then they are no longer protected, second instance of the conference ending abruptly due to Godwin's Law, Shami fell fowl earlier as well. The next way forward is to re-strengthen parliament keeping the government to account the separation of executive and legislative is so important.

Will Hutton has asked the question on what basis we put this to put across and has landed on the totally British point of making it ‘Fair Play’ and has folled this back to Chuka’s point about business, they are never going to behave better than the government and as the current government is not setting a moral bar they have nothing to live up to. The Audience is divided on comments about different cultures and how they see “public space” mainly because one of the contrast cultures was Islam.

Brian Eno puts down his Mac and hush descends, what is different about humans, imagination, this is because we practice it, we do this through arts and science. He now posits that our vision of people has changed we don’t see “the enemy” as we did in the world wars, we have empathy to their suffering no matter who or what they are and what the political machines are doing. The problem is that the though of imagination and empathy seems to be finite and as we have more feeling we have less vision of the future and aren’t seeing the coming problem as they dismantle the ramshackle edifice that is our civil liberties. Next is parallels with how much effort we need to put in to get climate change sorted how everyone should learn from the youth using facebook etc to organise etc to thwart control. In response to the earlier comments, he also supports the idea that education should immerse young people in liberty.

You should definitely watch the video, Eno is more expressive than I am.

Questions: Who would we trust in writing a constitution and what role could the convention play?

Chuka suggest web2.0 techniques to help write a new constitution, I think Chuka Umunna has just suggested crowdsourcing writing a British constitution. Looks like Will Hutton is backing him up. This would become a true Constitutional Convention.

Question about civil disobedience and asking if the “establishment” are as committed. Oh it wasn’t really a question.

Question about children being taking children from parents, Chris H responding, has moved back to the previous non question and suggesting that parliament is too stable.

Very important point from Evan Harris that all these rights belong to all, no matter what we think about them or what they have to say. Very big round of applause. All these freedoms need to fully free for all.

Eno has suggested a honoured group that should draft the constitution, Chris H cites two provinces in Canada that have done it with random people.

Who Rules: is there a Media-political class?

Liz Forgan starts of with the Lloyd-George Scott relationship and how it affected both information flow and impartiality. Should politicians fear the press, yes they should see them as an external consciences, the blogosphere is always kicking at any existing M-P class as it gets analysed and spat at from the internet, and that is keeping the media on the strait and narrow. Again discussing the fact that there needs to be a paid for media to pay for the day to day research and legal backup, references the Guardian tax avoidance pieces. Discussions about the Scott trust and how it supposedly works to safeguard liberal media to report on the erosions of liberty.

Peter Oborne is going to argue the thesis that not only does the M-P class exists and is a threat via international football. Sorry no Peter was apparently the wrong Crouch. The suggestion is that the current set of politicians are a clique amongst themselves and the supposedly opposition positions are all about maintaining the status quo of keeping the leadership in power. There is a term for this, it is a cartel. This manifests itself as a hatred of the institutions that could challenge them. He has just been wound up, in several ways.

Simon Jenkins starts with Norway and an exercise to see what the country would be like after a hundred years that was carried out at the millennium. The academics decided that the future was bleak and that the old truism (that was mentioned in the first session by the Polish editor) about it not mattering who you vote for, the government always gets in. The next point was a reflection of Eisenhower’s speech on the military industrial complex with the current security industry. What has happened to all of the campaigning politicians of yesteryear what is it that turns them into just another evil minister when they are in power.

Claire Fox is relating a Big Brother eviction into a liberty issue, which I am not sure I want to sign up to. Although her point about Endimol’s corruption of the big brother brand to stop it being as frightening as the Orwellian vision. She is continuing to talk utter shite about how reality tv is the problem. I really don’t think super nanny programs are really training people to be obedient.

Although it probably is quite good for organising questions, listing questioners 1 – 6 just really brings back memories of a certain programme that is about liberty being squashed.