conservative

Which region elected this Tory tosspot?

Jock — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:45:25 +0100

There has been a bit of a spat at the Euro-parl about whether some amendments to the "Telecoms Packet" (how romantic, is that like the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Packet Company's packet?) that I encouraged readers to respond to a couple of days ago.

One of the movers of one of the offending amendments has, according to the BBC, said...

BBC NEWS | Technology | MEPs back contested telecoms plan

But Mr Harbour claimed the legislation has entirely more innocent
intentions. "It is about new provisions so that users can find out
about new services. It will make price comparison sites easier to set
up, it will force regulators to give equivalent access to disabled
users and enhance emergency services with caller location," he said.

What a fuckwit. I doubt there has ever been any piece of legislation in any legislature which was claimed not to have "innocent intentions". But in a month when his own party has been moaning about, amongst other things the use of RIPA in ways for which it was not intended, surely the extension of "innocent intentions" into overbearing surveillance and so on should be obvious.

If there are drafting issues that permit an interpretation of a law that increases surveillance then the lawmakers should protect against it. The world is littered with "innocent" laws that have been interpreted to allow more sinister applications. A Tory, if committed to small government, should know this and not continue to protect his corporate sponsors.

Can anyone point me to a Euro-parl equivalent of "Public Whip" so I can determine if any of my supposedly liberal Euro-reps agreed with this Tory tosspot? read more »

Protectionist Tory euro-snoopers

Jock — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 10:47:59 +0100

Thanks to Liberal conspiracy for highlighting protectionist amendments being sneaked into the Telecoms directive which MEPs will decide on tomorrow:

Liberal Conspiracy » And I’d Have Gotten Away With It Too, If It Hadn’t Have Been For Those Darn Bloggers…

Purple Cthulhu and prominent Brussels-ite Nick Whyte
both report on the sneaky Tories being sneaky and urge you to write to
your Euro MP before they introduce a Euro Law which could take your
internets away. Andrew Ducker has already written, as have many others.

The amendments basically set the scene for forcing ISPs to monitor all their customers' traffic to catch them sharing copyrighted material on the web and to cut customers off if they keep doing it.

Over in the comments on Matt Wardman's blog posting the other day I suggested that this whole surveillance obsession smacks of "we do it because we can". Why should one's electronic communications, voice or data, be any more permissible to be snooped on than any other communication - snail mail, face to face or similar. Just because we can. For a variety of reasons electronic communications leave traces, and traces can always be tracked, but why should they be?

It is true that we need to have a debate about intellectual property and how, or indeed whether, it should be enforced in an era of global instant communication. It appears that the artists tend to be ahead of their production companies in exploring how to use the massive marketing opportunity that is the internet, such as recent experiments in releasing music for free, or on honesty box terms, on the web. But of course it is the media corporations and production companies that are lobbying for this sort of protectionist measure. The debate needs to be held much more widely than that though, and not snuck through where these measures were explicitly removed from the directive last time the European Parliament discussed it.

I have written to Sharon Bowles and Emma Nicholson. I suggest everyone take a look at the details of these amendments and give some thought to writing also to any of their MEPs. It is being debated tomorrow, so act fast!

I very fundamentally believe that the internet in particular is seen as a threat by both governments and corporations who feel they are not able to control it. For me, it is the greatest advance in people communicating with people and eventually needing far less "government" to broker their international relationships or trans-national corporations to broker their trade. But for it to bring about the vast benefits of voluntary co-operation amongst individuals around the world it needs to find its own rules, not have them imposed by those very bodies that are scared of it! read more »

David Davis is the sort of person...

Jock — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:06:26 +0100

...who makes it quite impossible for me to even think about joining or voting for the Tory party. Paul Walter today quotes from Ben Bradshaw on Davis:

Liberal Burblings: Davis: "Libertarianism" that is extremely narrow

Today, Ben Bradshaw points out Davis' far from libertarian approach to equal rights:

The notion that David Davis is a libertarian will provoke hollow laughter from Britain's gays and lesbians. Davis has opposed every freedom extended to gay and lesbian people, from the freedom to register one's partnership to the freedom to serve one's country. He has one of the worst voting records in the Commons on such matters. Like most Conservatives, Davis is very selective about whose liberties are worthy of support.

However well they might be doing, however their policies on other issues may be right, when they finally develop them, I would rather cut off my right arm or emigrate than countenance the election of reactionaries who, frankly, do not recognize me, as a gay man, as equal in rights and dignity as any other person.

Now, I know gay people in the Tory party who seem to be quite happy. I know stories, even of David Davis himself about how "some of their best friends are gay" and they are supportive of them. But there seem to be still an awful lot of them whose public policy agenda appears to want to diminish a bit of my humanity, and I can't hack that.

I think I understand the Libertarian Alliance position as explained a bit more by Sean Gabb over the weekend. But for me, there's no way I could vote for Davis or his party regardless of whether the entire election is somehow run solely on the basis of his stand on 42 days and the like. It may sound selfish but it's really not. I care less that his social conservatism focuses on gay people than I do about the fact in my mind that this means he chooses for himself what people are entitled to equality and who aren't - and nobody has that right as far as I am concerned.

Indeed, the Human Rights Act, whilst I personally don't like the way it works and would like to see most of it enshrined in a constitution and bill of rights instead, seems to me to be our sole bastion against such antediluvian attitudes amongst our "rulers".

If I still lived in the constituency of my birth I think I am being told by both Lib Dem and Libertarian leaderships that I should be grateful this man is standing up for some of my rights and they have no better candidate to offer. read more »

If I were thinking of joining the Libertarian Party...

Jock — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:52:20 +0100

...this is one reason that would give me pause. There has already been much written and said about David Davis's decision to stand for re-election to his own seat. Lots still seems uncertain - whether he will stand as a Tory or an Independent and so on. His stance on the 42 days issue and what I would call our constitutional liberties is all very well and good, but I cannot see him as a truly classical liberal or libertarian. Indeed he has been quite the opposite on all sorts of touchstone issues for a libertarian - drugs and sexuality for two examples.

Maybe I've missed some subtle nuance of the man. In the fight for our constitutional liberties, in the face of this government especially, every voice is welcome, but it doesn't make every defender a libertarian. I hope, for the sake of the Libertarian Party, Davis politely declines their offer. I feel there will be better opportunities to make their mark than this one.

I absolutely endorse what DK says in his blog on the issue of the 42 days as a whole though. read more »

Never say never again?

Jock — Tue, 06 May 2008 00:08:37 +0100

I feel I've been tagged in a strange sort of a meme for my thoughts on Oxford's recent local election results by Antonia [From Oxford elections round-up]:

We await with bated breath the thoughts of Stephen Tall, no longer Lib Dem councillor for Headington, his colleague David Rundle, and the third-placed Lib Dem candidate for Headington Hill and prolific blogger, Jock Coats.

Well thanks, she just had to rub it in by mentioning that third place. I am embarrassed and humiliated to have come third. There are of course official post mortems to come yet on the campaign, but whatever their verdict, one simple fact is that I am a "bad candidate". Whatever fresh ideas I may have brought to the council (and I doubt my Labour victor will be doing much of that, sad to say), I cannot escape the fact that I hate knocking on strangers to talk politics with them. So for me, the literature and word of mouth amongst people who have met me outside that context is more crucial than for most. Such glad-handing ought to have happened long before the campaign proper started with voter ID canvassing in late March. And been followed up with a leaflet introducing me properly and extolling my virtues before the cross city campaign started with its more party led focus on whole city issues.

Then there was "that leaflet." On the last weekend of the campaign I had the dubious honour of having a Labour leaflet, apparently partly delivered by Mrs Dromey (I rather hope, Antonia, that you were unaware of that leaflet's existence when we exchanged pleasantries on the Friday evening), using quotes from this blog about drugs policy obviously intended to give the impression that if I won I would probably be found standing outside the primary school handing out various narcotics to the year sevens, or perhaps to their parents! Several opponents have commented that they thought it was one of the worst personal attack leaflets they had seen. I suppose I ought to feel flattered that Labour were sufficiently alarmed by my candidacy to feel the need to drag the contest into the gutter.

You can read it for yourself here. By my reckoning, it at least breaches copyright law (my moral right not to have my copyrighted work treated in a derogatory fashion or in a way designed to be prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author or director), if not possibly electoral law. Enquiries are ongoing. I am not a sore loser, but I was upset by it. I know it cost me both votes and reputation, even amongst my deliverers.

Anyway, enough of the campaign itself. Will I ever try again? I don't know. For many years, since in fact I was last on the council in 2002, I have wondered whether the present system of local government is fit for purpose. As an ideological descendent of the individualist-anarchists and a mutualist, I find the state, in all its guises, terribly coercive. I believe sovereignty should lie with the individual and he or she should only cede power upwards to representatives over things that they cannot arrange for themselves or in small groups or local communities. Local government is so tied down by Whitehall and Westminster that the current arrangements simply cannot be responsive enough to local peoples' needs.

The main reason I wanted to be on the council was to continue to promote, from the inside as it were, my mutualist agenda of hiving local authority functions off onto social, community led partnerships. The more things compete for the crumbs of council budgets within the tight control of Whitehall oversight the less satisfactory the outcome. Leisure services for example cannot hope to compete in quality at least with private providers while it is within the constraints of council budgeting. Similarly, whilst more difficult, I think the solutions to our housing problems are community led, rather than council, landowner and planning led.

Every time I've lost so far I've come out of the contest wanting to do other things that will make a difference one day outside the council structure. Almost as if to prove we can cope without the psychopaths who are so good at saying the right thing at the right time to get themselves elected. This time it is to continue to promote the social enterprise "alternative" for producing social and public goods and to work on promoting local community e-democracy.

It will be interesting to watch Labour finally explain where they think there is a "£5m cash crisis" at the city council - reading the latest annual accounts I cannot see it myself. But there's another argument for local government reform - despite us being the tax payer/employers their finances are even more opaque than any company's I've ever seen.

It will be fun to see Maureen Christian defend the Northway Playing fields from something or other she seems to think threatens them (certainly the only "threat" i heard was my own idea to see if we could fit a cricket square on there by budging up the two football pitches and see if we could get a local cricket team going).

I think it will be a retrograde step if Labour succeed in removing planning decisions from area committees. They were not perfect there, but I have always maintained that was as a result of the bad legal advice that both sides in any disputed application had the right only to speak for five minutes each - where they have open discussion at area committees they manage to get better decisions and more fruitful interplay between applicant and objectors and a better outcome for both.

It will also be interesting to see whether the Tories, who, despite not winning a single seat managed to come in second in many wards, and at least the ones in which they tried to put up a full campaign, will be able to keep up that level of work, for example, next year, when their declining reputation in control of the county is up for defending.

And it will be interesting to see whether this marks the high water point for the IWCA, who lost two of their councillors.

But I also don't really expect the city council, under any party, to set Oxford on fire with bright new ideas that will markedly change the quality of life for its citizens.

Finally, if anyone has any ideas about what little thank you gifts I can get for two teenaged Muslim boys who managed throughout to deliver most of the half of the ward for which we did not have regular deliverers - not a happy situation to be in at the start of a campaign and one of the first things I hope to put right for next time - I'd be very grateful to hear them! Their father has resisted all my requests for his advice so far! read more »

Protection or Free Trade - Tories debate

Jock — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 02:18:23 +0000

There's this extraordinary debate going on (well actually the comments are closed) on ConservativeHome about a piece by a chappie called Tony Makara who is advocating a protectionist trade policy the likes of which has not been seen in the UK for a generation:

Anthony Makara: Britain imports too much

Over the last weeks I've read much about the subject of welfare reform. The arguments about incapacity benefit and workfare. However all these strategies for welfare reform fail to answer one fundamental question. How are we going to get people into work? I believe all the proposed plans for welfare reform will fail because they do not tell us how we are to create the one million plus jobs needed to end welfare dependency. This is because the British economy no longer produces the jobs that the unemployed need. Lets face it, a person is either in work or they are on benefit, it really is that simple, the answer to unemployment is to create jobs. [From ConservativeHome's Platform: Anthony Makara: Britain imports too much]

The outrage in the comments is interesting. We all know the Tories made a seismic shift in the mid-late seventies in embracing what they liked to call "free trade". Of course, without radical tariff eradication and resolute policing of monopoly and cartel, there is no truly free trade. But what is interesting is that this was the debate over which Winston Churchill first left the Tories at the turn of the twentieth century and joined the free trade Liberals.

You see, for forty years, free trade was a policy of the "left" (indeed much longer if we go back to the Radicals and the Corn Laws debates), a key plank of trying to increase the returns to labour and in reducing the cost of necessities to make the average working person better off, either through higher wages or through lower prices (they have the same effects). It was Philip Snowden, the Labour chancellor of the exchequer, who wrote in a foreword to a new edition of Henry George's book of the same name "Protection or Free Trade" that...

"Each new generation has in a large measure to re-learn the truths which its ancestors established by discussion and practical experience. Free Traders have been so confident in the fundamental soundness of their faith and in the security of the system, that they have neglected to keep the rising generation well grounded in the principles of the faith."

He was writing in response to the Tories' re-adoption of a protectionist stance in the face of the beginnings of the Great Depression.

I have no doubt that most Tories today believe in something called "free trade". I don't believe that most of them actually realise how far away we are from it and what steps will be necessary to get there. But I am sure myself that if we get there, we will all benefit. As Snowden also wrote, "Protection is the foster-mother of monopoly, and monopoly in all its forms...is the robbery of the community for the benefit of private interests" (you can see why Tories would like the idea!).

It is worth mentioning that the Lib Dems have a consultation paper out on the UK Response to Globalization. Go respond - we must resist any attempts at introducing protectionist policies.

The Pub Philosopher

Jock — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:56:56 +0000

Don't know much about this person but he or she clearly thought my post about Europe interesting enough to link to it! Looks Tory, and so categorized, unless told otherwise!

Tory selection processes

Jock — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 01:43:10 +0000

And so, having linked, I may as well cite The Daily Pundit who writes about the number of NuTory candidates who were once NuLabour members. But it's not so much their political backgrounds that I want to take issue with - to me the interchangeability of such political favours merely highlights that both parties are really merely sibling subsidiaries of the post-Thatcher Managerial Clique.

No, what I'm more interested in is how a serious political party, claiming to be democrats of some sort, and on the one hand with its leader wanting to hold "public primaries" for some of its candidates, selects its candidates through some sort of appointed committee and without an all-member vote in the consitutency or jurisdiction concerned.

It's not just the successor to Doris that was selected this way, but apparently the Judas Karim for the North West Euro-Parliament list. No wonder the latter thought his chances better with the Tories if he really only needed to butter up a few committee members rather than reach out to the activists and members.

Daily Referendum

Jock — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:32:38 +0000

I tried to fix his blog and failed. He linked to me, so I'm linking back!

Yes, but it's our "thin air"

Jock — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:42:57 +0000

I recently discovered a Conservative version of the Lib Dem Blogs aggregator and so my eyes have been opened to a whole new genre of political blogging! Today I spotted a chap called Mike Rouse writing about "spectrum auctions" as it was called:

I am hoping, nay praying, that Gordon Brown is out of office when the analogue TV signal is switched off. You see, that old airspace is very valuable to mobile phone operators and the likes of Google. They would be able to use it to send fast data to mobile devices and other cool things like that. The last time this government oversaw the sale of airspace to mobile networks it managed to amass itself millions of pounds, in fact it actually got too much money for it, leaving the people that bought the space with not much money to do anything else with it. Going by the track record of this government in screwing things up I wouldn’t put it past them to screw up this potentially lucrative deal when it comes around. We have to be careful to balance the government’s desire to fill its coffers and the need for a competitive marketplace that will benefit the economy in the long run. [From Not Bad for Essentially Privatising Thin Air | Mike Rouse]

Er, no Mike, the sale of 3G spectrum was an auction. That means the bidders decide how much they feel it's worth to them. Yes, they may well have made catastrophic miscalculations, but, as they say, you live and learn. These "locations" on the electromagnetic spectrum - so called "Electromagnetic Frequencies" or EMF - are, in economic terms, "land" - finite bits of nature that everyone wanting to operate in a particular technology has to share. So they should be auctioned, or leased, for whatever the market can bear and the proceeds used for public revenue (which was £22 billion in the UK). It is a form of Land Value Tax. It encourages ingenuity in ensuring the optimal use of a precious and finite natural resource (though I accept the point, that the operators chose to pay so much they could no longer raise the money to exploit it properly - but that wasn't the government's fault).

One thing I wish the government, or Ofcom, would do, is to make local bandwidth genuinely local, however. The current wireless spectrum for example is only useful over distances of a few hundred meters at most with present technology. It should be a source of revenue for local authorities rather than central government.