Christmas Hugh

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall will following on from his triumphant Christmas special ten bird roast (goose, farmed duck, mallard, guinea fowl, chicken, pheasant, partridge, pigeon, woodcock all wrapped in a turkey) with something even more spectacular. The original was developed by Hugh's butcher Ray Smith as more readily attainable by the average home chef than the original seven layer medieval recipe which required the boning out of each bird.
This years extravaganza is again an attempt to use an old established layer recipe but reduce the amount of highly technical butchery required by cutting fillets of as much of the best meat as possible and creating a forcemeat stuffing with the rest. All of the creatures of course will be free range and where possible organic. So the River Cottage special Christmas roast this year will be "fly, spider, bird, cat, dog, goat, cow and horse (of course) in a boned out old woman."

Time for action?

The call to arms for a coordinated effort to resist the government's ever expanding encroachment into the liberties of everyone is gathering more and more momentum. Added to the continuous campaigns by the likes of No2ID and the Open Rights Group a slew of commentators are now making pronouncements that there has to be action and soon. Blog posts have appeared this week from Sunny Hundal, Henry Porter and Anthony Barnett promoting combining efforts to our safeguard our rights. But can it be done, can the various interest groups involved actually find enough middle ground to put up a united front against Gordon's land grab on our personal data and freedoms? The other question is even after a coalition of the unwilling is created, can it have any effect? The countryside alliance couldn't put the kibosh on the hunting ban and "Stop the War" hasn't.
What do you lot think?

X-Posted to: ORG-discuss and ljrevolution

Not feeling good about it

The defining characteristic of this blog is that it is my opinion on whatever is making me feel particularly angry or happy or whatever when I sit down to write it. Anything I present as fact, I spend a reasonable amount of time looking for items to cite to back them. When I am quoting the writing of others I hope that whether I am using quotations marks or put it in a block it is noticeable. The rest of it however is my thoughts and feelings on the matter and mine alone.
So it comes as a great shock to find out that some of my blathering has upset someone, they have taken my opinion seriously and feel that because things in their life are different this is a bad thing.
Don't think this means I will be changing my opinions on anything, or that I will be pulling my punches, but I may well try and warn my friends when I cover topics that affect the fundamental parts of their lives and in this case start thinking about ways to make it up to the people involved.

Can we salvage something from this?

Can we get the government on board with some of the thinking in the real world about data security after this calamitous data loss?
After a series of security breaches involving databases of Credit Card data the card issuers started working on security standards, these have now coalesced into PCI DSS a minimum security standard that you have to adhere to if you want to process credit card data, full stop. Very soon this will be a non-negotiable requirement, play ball or don't get paid. Should the banking industry now produce a similar standard for those holding bank account details. Either your systems conform to x level of security or you don't get to use BACS or set up direct debits etc. The government would probably ask for many years and give much money to those such as EDS and Capita in order to get compliant, but wouldn't it all be worth it?
On the other hand from the geek half of the real world I am thinking of sending them a guide to how asymmetric cryptography works. With some recommendations on key lengths to use.

Waste of words

Today Timothy Garton Ash wasted just over a thousand words debating which term out of Islamofascists, Islamists or jihadist we should use to identify those "trying to kill us" and almost by accident hits it in the first 18 with "just plain murderers".
My personal view is the motivation behind the attacks, the group they belong to, the cause they are espousing, may be relevant to the avenues of investigation that those trying to stop them on our behalf use but shouldn't be part of the public reaction lest it cloud the picture. My argument for this is even in his article, in the same way that it wasn't all the Irish^[1] or all Irish Catholics, etc etc that were blowing us up, then not all of any of the groups mentioned above are doing so now and suggesting they are is actually going to piss people off enough that they will consider join these groups.
We only need one word to describe the people doing this, Terrorist.
Of course the problem with that is how to tell this current crop of terrorists from the other large group that is doing its best to instil fear into the population of the UK and other countries? I suppose we could use a very old label that describes them, Her Majesty's Government. Unlike last time, as well as oppressing and alienating a minority group in the population and thus often driving recruitment to the bad guys, they are using the situation to terrorise the whole population. Gordon, and Tony before, have ensured they are brushed up on their Orwell with measures such as requiring every possible statistic on you from your hat size to the number of moles on your arse before you can leave the country or wanting to double the period you can be imprisoned without charge which is already one of the longest in the world. All of this is done in a way that makes the shoe bomber look like a master criminal, for example the government thinks that putting bag searches at 250 railway stations and other points of departure will prevent terrorists travelling. It won't even protect the railway stations they will have the searches at, because they can travel from any other the other 2250 stations by train!
Finally the biggest deception to come out of the "Ministry of Truth" is that ID cards will stop all this, I am still utterly mystified as to how they can think this, unless the bit they haven't told us is that the reason this project is so expensive is that each card will come equipped with a field portable gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer explosive detector and a GPS tracking device.
Oh well at least there are still a few bins left to use this time around.

^[1]No matter what West Midlands Serious Crime Squad might have thought.

FA announce new England Manager

In a further refinement of the model which saw the takeover of Ebbsfleet Utd by myfootballclub.co.uk, the subscribers of Sports Interactive's Football Manager Live will control the selection of the England team. The player picked most for each position who satisfies the eligibility criteria to play for England will get the spot, the formation that is used most successfully in the online game will be the one used by the team.
A head coach will be appointed to run training sessions and may be given the power to make substitutions, although this maybe done through the game, if enough Football Manager players can be found online during a match.
Each player will get a share of £2.5 Million when the whole thing collapses during the qualifying for the 2010 world cup.

Access to Information

Both the topics I had planned for when I got home tonight were about information

1. What I could and couldn't blog about my time at the moment
2. the Open Rights Group's two year birthday

strangely a third added itself to the list. They are however all are intertwined.
The first is jury duty which is currently breading a post on the inefficiencies of government run organisations.
The second is about an organisation which is trying to bring digital rights and safeguards to the forefront of everyone's mind, especially the governments.
The last is of course the loss of the name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and, where relevant, bank details of 25m people.
WORDS FAIL ME
This government tells us we can trust it with all our medical records on a central database, the ID Card and electronic voting. Right now I wouldn't trust them to take a breath out after they have breathed in.

Learning to read

The current labour government is criticising the Tory party for their pronouncement that testing should ensure all children have learnt to read to an acceptable basic standard by the age of six or seven. There is of course the utterly correct supposition that not all kids thrive on testing. But the really big point I am finding difficult to get past is: Six is so very bloody old to learn to read, let alone seven!
I'll happily admit that this may come across as idealist snobbery, but children should should be reading a round about three or four. I personally think that teachers should be expecting that all kids should arrive at school with reading as a skill. Now I don't think that this needs to be an empty politicians promise, it surely would save money to catch those that need extra help reading early and give them a little help before they arrive at school behind. I would like to see the statistics on how many children learn to read by when and any research on why. I would like to know if my knee-jerk reaction that there is a significant cadre of children who arrive at school without having had any proper guidance in reading is correct. I say guidance rather than "being taught" because there is a big body of evidence that suggests children don't benefit from early formal learning (this is the line that the teaching unions are using) but my personal experience is that children want to learn to read, they want to be in the club of deciphering those enigmatic runes. The problem is it takes time and effort, reading stories, sounding out words, playing with phonetics, being willing to spend the time and effort all day every day to help the children in your life to do that sounding out and answer the questions. This is why I may go looking for research in this area, to see how many hours each week an ordinary parent spends helping their child to read and how many parents in this day and age have the extended family or support network of friends to give their ankle-biters the best start in life.
Recently many conversations I have had with new acquaintances have been about the contrasts between the old concept of right and left and how the political compass gives the whole thing another dimension, well this is an issue I am firmly in the authoritarian camp on, the state should do its utmost to ensure parents are kept in line and help their children to read, with any learning difficulties identified early and appropriate assistance rendered. Any parent deliberately not engaging with encouraging this most fundamental of skills, far more so than understanding science or mathematics as hugely valuable as they are as building blocks, is tantamount to child abuse and should lead to the same amount of scrutiny from social services.

Is homoeopathy bad science?

Ben Goldacre has written about homoeopathy in both Lancet and Gruaniad flavours.
There isn't much more for me to say apart from the second article, which is the lead article in the Guardian features section is going to to get noted down as somewhere to point people at, for it is quite one of the best bits of writing on a science topic I have ever read in the mainstream media. Actually sorry Ben, I shouldn't pigeon-hole it like that, it is a great piece in any context </fanboy>. If anyone wants to learn how special interest groups (as pointed out the techniques the homoeopaths use are also used by big pharma) to make it look like trials and studies back their point of view or indeed learn about how evidence based medicine works they should start here and then look into the references, unfortunately it looks like Sheffield libraries doesn't have the Trisha Greenhalgh book he recommends.

For once I am not sure what I really think

It started with an item from Chris Dillow painting the immigration spike as a symptom of the skills gap using the latest unemployment figures to support the idea. Then Jackart responded with the thesis:

The "skill" in question is the willingness to turn up for work, work for a full day, then turn up again the next day, sober. This "Skill" needs to be repeated 5 times a week, 48 weeks a year.

Chris has now posted over on Liberal Conspiracy something that I can only suppose is meant to be a rebuttal. It lacks somewhat given that all it actually does is throw into the ring a bunch of statistics. Yes it is fair enough to point out that the headline figure includes people who while not "employed" are making themselves useful, keeping house, or worshiping at the temple of knowledge for example, but that doesn't actually counter the key point of Jackart's argument. There are at the core of the figures a number of people who are doing their damndest to avoid acquiring or holding down a job. How long should the welfare state support these people for? Is it just a touch of crypto-fascism within me that means I occasionally agree with those that say that there should be a cut off point after which someone who has no intention whatsoever of being a useful member of society, whether through employment or otherwise should be cut off, completely. And if we go down that route how do we safeguard those that need the help, those that have genuine health problems that prevent them from being part of the workforce for example. Or is this country rich enough that we can afford to keep a few spare humans knocking around for the hell of it and pay economic migrants to do the work instead?

As the title suggests unlike most of these posts where I rant away and make firmly sure you know what I think, on this subject I really don't know my own mind.

Voting is not the place for blind faith

The title of this post was almost "Elections are not the place for blind faith" but of course they are, the faith that this time your party will overcome the odds to win, or the faith that this time the politicians will be caring, listening people.

What shouldn't be left to faith is the collection and counting of votes and the security around this that ensures that the person voting is entitled to do so, their vote is counted but only once and they can as far as possible avoid being coerced into voting in a manner against their will or for money.

During the electronic voting pilots at the last local elections, I was one of a number of people that formed an independent observation team that then provided our feedback in turn to the Electoral Commission who produced their report in August. The government has just produced it's response to this and the Gould Report on the Scottish election fiasco debacle chaos no sorry, can't come up with a suitable word. The response, in essence says that they appreciate the work everyone has put in but as the government "believes" something different they are going to carry on as they were. This is supported by such flimsy 'self supporting arguments' as "we suggested it was a good idea in another discussion document" in this case The Governance of Britain

The Green Paper supports investigating the modernisation of voting methods, as well as explicitly supporting the continued investigation into the benefits of electronic voting including remote electronic voting.

Never mind the fact that a green paper is the starting point for a consultation, not a set of binding conclusions, "we agree with what we said" is not the most compelling use of logic I have ever seen.

Another article of faith in the response is:

All the pilots supported successful elections. The Government is not aware of any instances of alleged fraud during the elections and does not believe that the pilots increased the risk of electoral fraud.

Again with the belief, the government does not and cannot know but in this case it seems, to believe is good enough. So from now on:

• I believe that my fellow humans are all sufficiently morally decent to never attempt to infiltrate an electronic voting company and make changes inside the black box software that could influence an election.
• I believe that large software companies are sufficiently interested in the public good as opposed to the value of the public contract to have every possible safeguard against rogue employees.
• I believe that there is no-one in the world who would want to pay large amounts of money to anyone who could provide them with an electoral back door

Given my beliefs we are all safe with black box electronic voting.

Further reading on electronic voting security.

The taxing issue of local finance

Today's Tory policy announcement is on the ever thorny issue of Council Tax and the idea that council tax level should be capped by central government but with a loophole allowing voters to approve a rise in a local referendum.
This will happen just after the turkeys have voted for Christmas!
Labour have responded suggesting you could probably do all this under current laws, but that isn't the same as a reasoned argument against the plan now is it, while Vince Cable of the Lib Dems is under the impression that no one is ever allowed to change their mind, so the Tories can never have another policy on Local Taxation ever again, oh and by the way doesn't local income tax sound fair. Well on the surface yes, but if you think of an inner city London Borough with a high proportion of people on benefits and taking other council services, those who do have well paid jobs will be paying a far higher proportional amount of tax than their friends in councils with a better average wage and level of benefit recipients, this will make them move out and set up an explosive positive feedback loop.
So what do I think the alternative is? Give up the pretence that the council tax gives an element of local accountability and abolish it. For my local council, Sheffield, council tax only contributed to 13% of the gross expenditure, so any single figure percentage increase or decrease in the tax itself is less than a single percentage point change to the council's overall budget. Why bother, why not just lob it onto central income tax and give out the money proportionately^[1], it gives the fairness of income based taxation without the potential problem of driving earners out of poor councils. Councils still get to decide what they are spending the money on in areas they are allowed leeway by central government (few) and with just as much ideological link to the people who voted for them as now (almost none :-). What about business taxes? Well they are covered by the "National Non-Domestic Rates" system, the level of which is centrally set and although collected by local councils, is redistributed by central government based on headcount. So this could easily stay as it is, although it may be more efficient to hand over collection to HM Treasury if it is nationally redistributed.

^[1]I have glibly just said "proportionately" this would probably need to be a quite clever formula to take into account the demographics of a particular council.

Slipping back into "style without substance"

Don't get me wrong, I have been very impressed with 'Call me' Dave recently, since the grammar school debacle in May he has managed to keep his party mostly on the track of releasing policy statements that have been backed with reasoned arguments. I am not saying I agree with all of that reasoning, or that I am now a supporter of the Conservative party, just that it was nice to see that they were thinking about what they were saying before they said it.

Unfortunately today it seams like the bubble has burst, it is being reported that Mr Cameron is going to get tough on rapists. And while this is a good thing in of itself, there seems to be something missing. They have identified three issues

1. A conviction rate of 5.7% the lowest in Europe, just isn't good enough
2. The sentences the small number of those convicted get aren't stiff enough
3. The very fact that one in four young people^[1] thinks it is acceptable for a boy to "expect to have sex with a girl" if she has been "very flirtatious" is of great concern

Nothing wrong with these points, but I can only see two of them addressed, I at first though that this was a reporting issue, it was entirely feasible that the Gruainad, Aunty and the Liz Hurlygraph had all missed this bit out, so I had a look on conservatives.com and their top story is still the co-operative schools one. So if they are suggesting a review of sentences to ensure proportionality and an education programme to make it clear to 'the youth' that rape is bad m'kay what are they proposing to actually increase the conviction rate? Or I suppose for that matter, raise the reporting rate, or are they hoping that if they can do the former then the increased confidence the victims will have that it is worth the additional distress, will mean that it will raise itself? We shall see whether as the news day develops we get to see the working out behind this, which is worth more than just writing the answer, especially when the answer seems incomplete.

^[1] The Telegraph reports this as a figure released by Amnesty International, but I can't find the source material.

Well I know it his job

Simon Hoggart is a parliamentary sketch writer. His job therefore is to provide the public insight into the workings of the legislature through lightweight reportage that is witty and banterfull rather than bountiful. Sketch writers as part satirists have irony and sarcasm in their tool-kit, with equal measures of anger, and bitchiness putting the bite into the humour.
This Friday however he forgot that when attempting to satirise someone a key factor is that it is funny and in this modern enlightened world we live in, dumb use of stereotyping just really isn't. I expect something better from the man who has written sketch for the newspaper of choice for the soft liberal left for almost 15 years, perhaps he should look for a more appropriate job to exercise his lack of narrow-mindedness, taking over Bernard Manning's slot on the Lancashire born intolerant comics circuit that or join the Labour government as Home Secretary. Oh and Simon, I know plenty of real people hereabout that say 'reet'.

It just isn't cricket

Can someone please explain to me why the various administrators in world cricket believe they can still run a closed shop?
How is it that every year during the winter those of our finest not on tour are happily waved goodbye by their county and country as they toddle of to ply their trade in the SuperSport Series and the Pura Cup and yet Solanki, Nixon and Maddy have caused scandel by joining up with the Indian Cricket League? Sorry the "rebel Indian Cricket League" as it seems to be impossible to report on this particular twenty20 competition without referring to it in the pejorative.
Ok the ICL can't have the same impact on the game as "World Series Cricket" did, that breakthrough has already happened, but if there is space in the market for more cricket then the BCCI should concentrate on improving its offering to cricket fans rather than trying to strong arm other governing bodies into banning players who want to join.

Throwing good money after bad

Lots of people seem to be celebrating Lord Justice Moses's judgement that the petitions of Corner House Research and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade merited a judicial review. On one had I think the issue of how the investigation was stopped by the Attorney General and how that office interacts with the law as a whole does merit scrutiny.
On the other hand lots of people think that this means we will at some point know the facts behind the case. I suspect them to be sorely mistaken. The odds of the current government or the MOD revealing the details of the Al Yamamah agreement which BAe (as was) say they were following to the letter is about the same as those you could get on the man who signed it being the next prime minister.

Becky Hogge interviewed for Groklaw

Groklaw, which started as really just another blog before it's author, PJ, made it the commentary site for legal issues in the free software world and has for a while now seen it expanding the topics coverage to a wider range of digital rights topics.
Today they publish an interview between Becky Hogge, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group and Sean Daly about the BBC iPlayer. It has turned out to be a very fair and balanced discussion about the issues involved. Given that it was a transatlantic conversation there are one or two culture translation gems, this being my favourite:

Becky Hogge: ... flagship programs, like Top Gear -- do you know Top Gear?
Sean Daly: Yes, I saw a guy who like drove his car across a lake one time.

Dave pushing the Private Eye line

"Call me" Dave's policy advisors obviously seem to be reading Private Eye at the moment. Ever since that particular satirical organ decided that it would cast Gordon Brown in Stalin's mould issuing diktats from the centre of a huge centralist machine the Tory leader has been announcing a great deal of local, community policies.
He has been running with things along these line since "big idea" to encourage "voluntary and community action" to defeat poverty arrived over the summer. But now we are through the looking glass with the adoption of the co-operative principle for his Pioneer Schools. I wonder what the long time bed fellow of Labour, The Co-operative Party thinks of all this.

Sir Ian Blair

Up until now, there have been valid arguments on both sides over whether Sir Ian should resign or stay in post.
The news that he tried to prevent the Independent Police Complaints Commission from investigating the incident however damns him, he should go.
The IPCC doesn't escape untarnished, now that we know that the policy of allowing officers to confer and indeed collaborate on writing up their notes and statements was reach in agreement with them. They should be segregated and swiftly interviewed as members of the public are in these situations.

Just like buses

As one piece of good news about accessing governmental documentation arrives, another is not far behind.
Firstly, when a minister in the house says "I am arranging for a copy of this document to be deposited in the Library" it has, for a little while now, been listed on the Parliamentary Deposited Papers website with a download link where available. The House of Commons information office have now stipulated that all documents must be submitted in a format that can be downloaded from the site, no more "hard copy only" deposits.
The next is GovernmentDocs.org an attept to provide a central clearing site for documents obtained under the freedom of information act.
The last is a fairly similar idea from mySociety the people that brought you TheyWorkForYou and PledgeBank but extending the idea to the point where the site helps you end to end with the process of submitting your request and archiving the response on the internet.

Got to admire it

You are acting assistant attorney general, you have been given an assignment to put forward your opinion of one of the five interrogation techniques the United States government wants to use on prisoners they suspect to be terrorists. What do you do to ensure your opinion is valid? Go and get the US Army to carry it out on you.
I really admire the man's dedication to his job and show no surprise at all that he was one of the people who left the Justice Department when Alberto Gonzales turned up.

Labour, leave those kids alone

What was reported earlier as new legislation that would

mean not just some but all young people will be able to stay in education or training to the age of 18.

has just been clarified by Jim Knight MP, Minister of State for Schools and Learners at being something a bit more prescriptive.
The proposal is, that in the early part of the next decade the school leaving age will be put up to 18 and you will have to either stay on at school, go to college or get a job or voluntary post that includes an element of training.
This isn't even a "do what we say or we'll cut your benefits" situation, it is going to be a matter of criminal law, even if you don't accept one penny of state assistance you will have to do what they are saying or say hello to your local magistrates' bench.
It certainly backs up the assertion by the people over at the political compass that Labour is getting more Authoritarian as well as more 'Right wing'.

Free as in speech

Ed Husain has just said on the PM programme that one of the key reasons that the UK has still got a terrorism problem was "irresponsible unlimited liberalism" that was insistent on giving everyone a voice.
If I was having problems before identifying myself as a liberal then now I stand here holding my hand aloft to say "Aye count me in with the irresponsible unlimited liberals." Of the many freedoms the people of this country have lost or is threatened with loosing, free speech has to be pretty close to the top of the list of those important to defend.
It is a subject that is already lighting up the British blogging community given how strong a position a Libel plaintiff is in under English law and how quickly UK ISPs have to roll over when the lawyers knock on their door to protect their business.
In all this talk about how the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor will implement their review on Governance, with any options like a written constitution or a bill of rights are brought up, free speech must be a key plank of the rules about how our society operates.
I leave you with something that summarises my position wonderfully Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire:

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it

Mobile phone madness

So I went to Whitby last week. We were pootling down the slip road to the M1, I had reached a steady 60 and was lining up with a gap in the traffic on the inside lane of the main carriageway when the muddy blue vectra in front starts slowing down for no readily apparent reason.
After we have eventually joined the motorway, he decided that meandering over the carriageway and the hard shoulder is the way forward. As we pass him my passenger informs me that he is chatting away on his mobile phone.
Later on the A64 we passed a Jaguar wasn't swooshing along in a typical Jag fashion, it turns out that yet again the driver had a phone clapped to their ear.
So making it illegal and offering up legal punishments doesn't work.
Pointing out that there is plenty of scientific evidence that it affects concentration and causes fatal crashes doesn't work.
So they should all go and buy a copy of How to Fossilise Your Hamster: And 99 Other Experiments to Try at Home on page 97 there is a starkly simple experiment using a yardstick to demonstrate how holding a telephone conversation affects reaction time.
So what do I think? Even hands free kits should be off limits! The actual act of holding a phone to your ear doesn't make matters that much worse, it is the conversation that is the killer. How is this different from talking to someone in the car? Well mostly it isn't but when the chips are down and the driver needs to concentrate, the people in the car can see what is going on.