On 18 October Andreas Whittam Smith and his team had organised a meeting in London for the Democracy 2015 movement. It was well attended and some of the debate was very good. So far, my feeling is that the group have set themselves and impossible target of forming the next government.
I think that the idea of promoting independent MPs has real merit and should be supported though as a movement, there needs to be a bit more focus on process and less on ideas at the present so that achievable goals can be set and then reached.
We will have to see how it progresses.
Friday, 19 October 2012
Monday, 24 September 2012
The Independent Democracy 2015 campaign
After the initial flurry of announcements for this, the campaign is starting to take shape though some of the stuff on their Facebook page is very unfocussed. They do seem to be getting moving though with a series of public meetings in October. The London one is on the 17th.
They are slowly getting a proper web site up now
Democracy 2015
A lot of what Andreas Whittam-Smith wrote has a lot to recommend it. However, I am not entirely convinced about the idea of having MPs sit for one term only. Some very worthwhile policies that a strong independent contingent of MPs could help to develop would be very long term goals and the risk is that it would take more than one parliamentary term to get through.
Still, it is good to see a major newspaper take an interest in revitalising political life.
We shall see what the meeting is like anyway.
They are slowly getting a proper web site up now
Democracy 2015
A lot of what Andreas Whittam-Smith wrote has a lot to recommend it. However, I am not entirely convinced about the idea of having MPs sit for one term only. Some very worthwhile policies that a strong independent contingent of MPs could help to develop would be very long term goals and the risk is that it would take more than one parliamentary term to get through.
Still, it is good to see a major newspaper take an interest in revitalising political life.
We shall see what the meeting is like anyway.
Saturday, 8 September 2012
An Exciting Development for Independent Minded Politicians
Recently the Independent newspaper has launched a campaign called democracy 2015
click here Democracy2015
Andreas Whittam-Smith, the founding Editor of the Independent has summed up the concern of many with the professionalisation of party politics and is seeking to get a significant number of independent MPs elected at the next general election.
I am not sure about becoming a Westminster MP but the idea of joining the London Assembly or Borough is perhaps another thing.
I basically agree with what the aims of the campaign but it should be widened to include local democracy. One of the big problems with government is the reduction in grass roots involvement. Local Authorities have seen their powers undermined over many years and this is in part aided by the very low turnout at local government elections. Were there more independent minded candidates with a real connection to their ward, it would be more likely that participation in local affairs could be improved.
Of course, plans for standing for this may be severly curtailed by our other big project as outlined here
We shall see but I will be contacting the Democracy2015 team.
click here Democracy2015
Andreas Whittam-Smith, the founding Editor of the Independent has summed up the concern of many with the professionalisation of party politics and is seeking to get a significant number of independent MPs elected at the next general election.
I am not sure about becoming a Westminster MP but the idea of joining the London Assembly or Borough is perhaps another thing.
I basically agree with what the aims of the campaign but it should be widened to include local democracy. One of the big problems with government is the reduction in grass roots involvement. Local Authorities have seen their powers undermined over many years and this is in part aided by the very low turnout at local government elections. Were there more independent minded candidates with a real connection to their ward, it would be more likely that participation in local affairs could be improved.
Of course, plans for standing for this may be severly curtailed by our other big project as outlined here
We shall see but I will be contacting the Democracy2015 team.
Monday, 13 August 2012
Observations on the London Olympics
Like millions of Londoners I was delighted to have to eat my words about the Olympics. I can claim a lot of consistency though having been opposed to London getting the games from the original bid seven years ago. Then, I wound up being delighted with the whole thing from the opening ceremony. That said, I was less impressed with the closing ceremony. The thought uppermost in my mind now though is the so called legacy. How can we build on the success of the games?
A lot of people have talked about the decline in PE in schools as being a factor in increasing levels of poor health amongst children and also pointed to it being a factor in making it more difficult for elite athletes to come to the fore. I find myself partially agreeing with that though as someone who hated PE at school I don't entirely agree with that analysis. Compulsory humiliation of non sporty types being forced to humiliate themselves on the football field is not the way to inspire a generation. There is also the fact that the UK have had a very successful Olympics with the current situation in schools. I really doubt that selling of playing fields is going to be a factor in preventing someone who loves Judo and has a natural talent from seeking to get trained and then make the best of their talents.
There are then, two issues here. The first is to combat the issues with poor health amongst school children without severely affecting the self esteem of the ones who aren't sports oriented. The other is to inspire people who do enjoy sports to seek to reach the highest levels of their chosen sport.
Many educational experts will doubtless have lots of ideas about how to encourage wider participation in and benefit from sports and I would not presume to impose my ill informed views on them. The only observation would be that in my experience, I started enjoying PE at school when I got a relaxed teacher who allowed us to do what we wanted. There were a few of us who played tennis and we enjoyed that while some played soccer (I went to school in Canada) while a few others even enjoyed cross country running so they did that. I will come back to the issue of allowing children to chose what sport they would like to do.
The selling off of playing fields is not a good idea as it prevents the school from even being able to offer different sports. Even rugby and football have different requirements for this. I used to travel pas the fields of a South London school which were completely neglected including the cricket nets. They clearly used to have a cricket field which had been allowed to decay. I presume they did not sell it off for development as it had poor access to roads other than via the rest of the school grounds. Perhaps we would have won a few more test matches had that school still offered cricket as an option.
Coming back to the issue of offering a choice of sports, I would like to focus on sailing as an example. This is mostly because I have a passionate love of sailing and followed the fortunes of everyone in Weymouth most closely but also because it provides an excellent example of how a traditionally inaccessible sport could be made much more widely available.
Sailing has always been perceived as an elite sport that can only be done by the very rich. Now, granted, ocean racing requires very large sums of money and most are now sponsored though not always. Recently someone I know slightly completed the two handed Global Ocean Race with no headline sponsor.
Dinghy racing on the other hand is much more easily afforded. A quick check on Ebay showed that you could acquire a very nice Laser dinghy for around £1000. A good quality competitive bicycle would cost a similar amount. By setting your sights even lower, it is possible to pick up a Mirror dinghy for less than £500. Granted, it will not be in the best condition but the Laser is a very strict one design Olympic class and it would be identical to the one in which Tom Slingsby claimed gold medal in. In the cycling event, the cycle ridden by Victoria Pendleton would set you back on the order of £20000.
None of these facts are hidden but it is an uphill struggle to persuade people that this is true. Even with larger boats where the running costs become more significant can compare with other sports. When I owned my 22 foot Hurley cruising boat, I reckoned that the running costs would be on the order of £2000 a year including the mooring and winter storage and one major piece of maintenance a year. This compares well with having a season ticket for a premier league football team. Keeping a Laser in race trim is going to cost a quarter of that.
The way to get round this lies with the Royal Yachting Association and the education authorities. I would like to see the RYA work with local authorities and sailing clubs to set up a series of fleets of dinghies including such things as Optimists for the youngest, Lasers, 420s and even 470s or RS200s where schools could allow their pupils to try it out. A lot will not enjoy it. After all sailing a dinghy, racing in particular, does involve a fair amount of getting cold and wet! However, I am confident that some will really take to it and then go on. We might then have an even bigger pool of talent for the selectors for the Rio 2016 and wherever the 2020 games are to be held. Some will discover that racing is not their thing but, like me, will take to cruising.
This is where independent politicians can come in. They could work to persuade authorities and as a group, they could put these proposals to the RYA and we could see inter school laser championships where an Inner London comprehensive gives a Southampton Grammar a serious run for it's money!
A lot of people have talked about the decline in PE in schools as being a factor in increasing levels of poor health amongst children and also pointed to it being a factor in making it more difficult for elite athletes to come to the fore. I find myself partially agreeing with that though as someone who hated PE at school I don't entirely agree with that analysis. Compulsory humiliation of non sporty types being forced to humiliate themselves on the football field is not the way to inspire a generation. There is also the fact that the UK have had a very successful Olympics with the current situation in schools. I really doubt that selling of playing fields is going to be a factor in preventing someone who loves Judo and has a natural talent from seeking to get trained and then make the best of their talents.
There are then, two issues here. The first is to combat the issues with poor health amongst school children without severely affecting the self esteem of the ones who aren't sports oriented. The other is to inspire people who do enjoy sports to seek to reach the highest levels of their chosen sport.
Many educational experts will doubtless have lots of ideas about how to encourage wider participation in and benefit from sports and I would not presume to impose my ill informed views on them. The only observation would be that in my experience, I started enjoying PE at school when I got a relaxed teacher who allowed us to do what we wanted. There were a few of us who played tennis and we enjoyed that while some played soccer (I went to school in Canada) while a few others even enjoyed cross country running so they did that. I will come back to the issue of allowing children to chose what sport they would like to do.
The selling off of playing fields is not a good idea as it prevents the school from even being able to offer different sports. Even rugby and football have different requirements for this. I used to travel pas the fields of a South London school which were completely neglected including the cricket nets. They clearly used to have a cricket field which had been allowed to decay. I presume they did not sell it off for development as it had poor access to roads other than via the rest of the school grounds. Perhaps we would have won a few more test matches had that school still offered cricket as an option.
Coming back to the issue of offering a choice of sports, I would like to focus on sailing as an example. This is mostly because I have a passionate love of sailing and followed the fortunes of everyone in Weymouth most closely but also because it provides an excellent example of how a traditionally inaccessible sport could be made much more widely available.
Sailing has always been perceived as an elite sport that can only be done by the very rich. Now, granted, ocean racing requires very large sums of money and most are now sponsored though not always. Recently someone I know slightly completed the two handed Global Ocean Race with no headline sponsor.
Dinghy racing on the other hand is much more easily afforded. A quick check on Ebay showed that you could acquire a very nice Laser dinghy for around £1000. A good quality competitive bicycle would cost a similar amount. By setting your sights even lower, it is possible to pick up a Mirror dinghy for less than £500. Granted, it will not be in the best condition but the Laser is a very strict one design Olympic class and it would be identical to the one in which Tom Slingsby claimed gold medal in. In the cycling event, the cycle ridden by Victoria Pendleton would set you back on the order of £20000.
None of these facts are hidden but it is an uphill struggle to persuade people that this is true. Even with larger boats where the running costs become more significant can compare with other sports. When I owned my 22 foot Hurley cruising boat, I reckoned that the running costs would be on the order of £2000 a year including the mooring and winter storage and one major piece of maintenance a year. This compares well with having a season ticket for a premier league football team. Keeping a Laser in race trim is going to cost a quarter of that.
The way to get round this lies with the Royal Yachting Association and the education authorities. I would like to see the RYA work with local authorities and sailing clubs to set up a series of fleets of dinghies including such things as Optimists for the youngest, Lasers, 420s and even 470s or RS200s where schools could allow their pupils to try it out. A lot will not enjoy it. After all sailing a dinghy, racing in particular, does involve a fair amount of getting cold and wet! However, I am confident that some will really take to it and then go on. We might then have an even bigger pool of talent for the selectors for the Rio 2016 and wherever the 2020 games are to be held. Some will discover that racing is not their thing but, like me, will take to cruising.
This is where independent politicians can come in. They could work to persuade authorities and as a group, they could put these proposals to the RYA and we could see inter school laser championships where an Inner London comprehensive gives a Southampton Grammar a serious run for it's money!
Wednesday, 11 July 2012
Quite Amusing
This has been going the rounds of Facebook and such like. Rather sums up this year.
Not much to do with independent politics except that climate scientists are now claiming to be able to draw causal links between global warming and extreme weather so it looks as if we are in for more of the same!
Not much to do with independent politics except that climate scientists are now claiming to be able to draw causal links between global warming and extreme weather so it looks as if we are in for more of the same!
Friday, 29 June 2012
More political and Banking Crises
The latest revelations from Barclays Bank and their fraudulent attempts to fix the interbank lending rate to their own benefit along with the suspicion that all the big banks were at it has, once again, left established politicians struggling to find a route out of the malaise that the current political and economic situation we are in since 2008.
This should be an opportunity for independents. Being unfettered by the ties of a party system should allow us to present a credible and viable way of reforming the system so the financial services industry can once again work in the service of the majority of the population.
More thoughts are needed on this weighty topic!
This should be an opportunity for independents. Being unfettered by the ties of a party system should allow us to present a credible and viable way of reforming the system so the financial services industry can once again work in the service of the majority of the population.
More thoughts are needed on this weighty topic!
Monday, 18 June 2012
Independent Politics and IT
overnment and IT have often been poor bedfellows and there are numerous examples of government IT disasters. One reason for this is of course that when public money is wasted on a product that is not fit for purpose it is a very public affair while a private company can quietly write it off and move on. It is my personal view that there are no more poor IT systems, implementations or projects in the public sector than in the private. There is however one glaring area where government departments are very remiss and probably costs the taxpayer more than is needed.
There are two very different models of IT provision and development. The first, everyone is familiar with which is the for profit closed source software company. Microsoft, Oracle and Adobe are the biggest examples of this model. You pay a license and get permission to use their product. Some of them are extremely good. Some however, are not very good and there is an alternative.
The Open Source model for software development makes the software freely available. There is a license called the GNU Public License. This allows the software to be freely distributed or modified. The restriction is that the original writer has to be credited and it can only be distributed under the GNU GPL. This last rule prevents a company from using the open source community to develop a product and then to close the source and start charging a license for it.
A lot of the idea of the Open Source model feels counter intuitive, what is the motivation for people to develop software if they can't make any money from it. This brings us to the next big aspect of what has been termed Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). One of the original inventors of the Open Source model used a pithy quote: “Free as in freedom, not free as in beer”. Basically, this means that all but the simplest of software will need support. Quite large amounts of money can be made from supporting FOSS products. This is, once again, best illustrated by looking at the most successful Open Source software which is the Linux operating system.
Linux is based on another operating system called UNIX though it is emphatically not the same as UNIX which is a proprietary operating system (originally developed by Bell in the early 1970s) it works in a very similar way and is both robust and very flexible in a wide range of applications. It is however, sadly, not really suitable as a desktop operating system. However, the LibreOffice project provides a full featured Office Productivity suite. Indeed, this was written in Writer before publishing on the web!
There are literally thousands of open source software projects and many can be of benefit to government. In particular, there are significant cost savings to be made as there is no need to purchase sometimes prohibitively expensive licenses. Some of the largest database management systems can cost as much as £10000 per CPU license. The use of Postgresql would, at a stroke remove the need to pay this sort of money out.
Another less tangible benefit of the open source software is one of openness. The GNU license permits the free redistribution of software as well as any modifications that might be needed by a specific organisation. This transparency would be of considerable benefit to governments as they need to be as transparent as possible.
Finally, to take this discussion round to the fit between independent politicians and Open Source software. Independent politicians are of course generally free of corporate ties and so can be more clear in espousing the benefits of non commercial proprietary software.
There are two very different models of IT provision and development. The first, everyone is familiar with which is the for profit closed source software company. Microsoft, Oracle and Adobe are the biggest examples of this model. You pay a license and get permission to use their product. Some of them are extremely good. Some however, are not very good and there is an alternative.
The Open Source model for software development makes the software freely available. There is a license called the GNU Public License. This allows the software to be freely distributed or modified. The restriction is that the original writer has to be credited and it can only be distributed under the GNU GPL. This last rule prevents a company from using the open source community to develop a product and then to close the source and start charging a license for it.
A lot of the idea of the Open Source model feels counter intuitive, what is the motivation for people to develop software if they can't make any money from it. This brings us to the next big aspect of what has been termed Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). One of the original inventors of the Open Source model used a pithy quote: “Free as in freedom, not free as in beer”. Basically, this means that all but the simplest of software will need support. Quite large amounts of money can be made from supporting FOSS products. This is, once again, best illustrated by looking at the most successful Open Source software which is the Linux operating system.
Linux is based on another operating system called UNIX though it is emphatically not the same as UNIX which is a proprietary operating system (originally developed by Bell in the early 1970s) it works in a very similar way and is both robust and very flexible in a wide range of applications. It is however, sadly, not really suitable as a desktop operating system. However, the LibreOffice project provides a full featured Office Productivity suite. Indeed, this was written in Writer before publishing on the web!
There are literally thousands of open source software projects and many can be of benefit to government. In particular, there are significant cost savings to be made as there is no need to purchase sometimes prohibitively expensive licenses. Some of the largest database management systems can cost as much as £10000 per CPU license. The use of Postgresql would, at a stroke remove the need to pay this sort of money out.
Another less tangible benefit of the open source software is one of openness. The GNU license permits the free redistribution of software as well as any modifications that might be needed by a specific organisation. This transparency would be of considerable benefit to governments as they need to be as transparent as possible.
Finally, to take this discussion round to the fit between independent politicians and Open Source software. Independent politicians are of course generally free of corporate ties and so can be more clear in espousing the benefits of non commercial proprietary software.
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