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!

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!

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!

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.

Further Thoughts

When I was at school we had a grade 12 course called Civilisation based the BBC documentary series of western European art history presented by Kenneth Clarke. The whole series was infected with Kenneth Clarke's enthusiasm for his work and each episode had an artistic hero. That was until the last episode where he saw the horrors of the fall out from the first and second world wars. He then quoted a couple of lines from the WB Yeates poem The Second Coming.


TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It would be easy to fall into Yeates' pessimism, and looking back to the seventy or so years ago that he wrote this it is easy to see where his ideas were coming from with an inevitable confrontation between the Nazi fascists and the Stalinist state socialists. Both absolutist utopians and both seeking to create the worst dystopia imaginable..

At the moment, there is a bit of a feeling that matters are not dissimilar to the 1930s. We are in an economic crisis and the governments of the day do not seem able to find a pragmatic solution. There is more and more unfocussed extremist violence around. In one part of the world a nihilistic interpretation of the Koran makes it legitimate to fly packed passenger air planes into buildings while in other parts of the world it is OK to blow up innocent civilians with unmanned drone air planes in the name of seeking out and neutralizing terrorists.

Closer to home, politicians make the argument that the inhabitants of Greece must embrace massive cuts to their living standards so that errors committed by their government can be prevented from causing banks in other parts of Europe from going bankrupt. People are then horrified when these Greeks complain about having their wages cut to a third of what they originally were. And still, no leader is able to suggest a solution.

Modern politicians do not possess sufficient historical perspective and so are doomed to perpetuate the mistakes of their predecessors. This is in part because they are tied into too rigid a party structure and admitting that something they have previously backed is a mistake is not something they are prepared to do. Mainstream media (and new media) exacerbate this by criticising any politician who admits that they were in error as being weak and indecisive.

Independent politician cannot of course change the way they are portrayed by the media but they can seek to help redress the balance when it comes to assessing policies in a historical light. By not being tied to a party dogma, they can bring a more measured assessment to ideas and policies that can benefit society as a whole.

Is the Time Coming?

I have been getting increasingly disenchanted with politics despite having always having been a big P policially engaged person. I even joined the Green Party as a student. Tempramentally I have always supported the Liberal Democrats. However, ever since they pushed Menzies Campbell out over a triviality such as his age, I have found myself drifting away from them. The other two major parties have never really attracted me. I am too left wing for the tories and Labour have always been too inward looking for my comfort. I would also struggle to join the party that took this country into the Afghan and Iraqui wars.

The independent idea though now looks increasingly interesting.

So. The question is. Should I be thinking about a change of direction as an idependent polititian?

We have plans that I am not prepared to forego in the near future. Details of that saga are here.

There is no way that anything will inturrup those plans which rules out standing for elections in Lambeth in 2014. However, we do hope to be back from our ocean wandering by 2015 so the next set of GLA elections might be a goer.

Time to think but this blog itself is a bit of a committment really.

Getting Publicity and Coverage?

Elections are all about getting yourself noticed by the voters such that they will chose your name in the ballot box. In this respect parties are enormously useful and this is one of their primary purposes. A political party is always much more than the sum of its members. Not least is the fact that party members all pay for their membership and the party can receive donations from organisations (businesses, unions etc.). An independent candidate cannot use this resource.

In the past, this was a major impediment to the independent and restricted their ability to make an impact on an election. In recent years however, the so called new media has provided an alternative way of getting your name “out there”. Facebook allows you to very quickly accumulate a group of supporters, who then with their “Friends” can distribute your message much more widely, quickly and cheaply than would be possible with, for example, a series of newspaper advertisements.

Twitter, is an even newer way of getting messages out to an audience. Even the now traditional blog can give you an essentially free platform for proposing ideas. A blog has the additional advantage that you can put together a much more coherent argument or statement of policy than would be possible in the very limited format of Twitter or Facebook.

The trouble with these new media routes to publicity is that they are self selecting. Therefore they do not carry the same weight as an interview in a newspaper – even a local paper. Thus, an independent candidate is caught between getting their message out very effectively via Facebook and their blog but then not being taken seriously while getting exposure in traditional media is an expensive and difficult process. Television is especially bad at this. They ignore all but the best known candidates. It is possible that one reason for large mainstream media outlets such as the BBC is that they would then have to give coverage to candidates whose views are offensive or otherwise unwanted. In the UK such parties as the BNP fall into this category.

Practically speaking, the BBC should not be worried about this as extremists are generally very bad at presenting themselves and their offensive views usually mean that they quickly marginalise themselves amongst the electorate as soon as they are given any publicity. Violent thugs usually manage to show themselves as violent thugs given enough time to talk about their beliefs. Of course, the BBC need to be persuaded of the validity of this idea.

All this makes it much more difficult for independent candidates to get their voice heard and makes the job of winning the election more difficult. Thus, political parties will always dominate electoral democracy. That is not to say that it is impossible for independents to make headway.

There are other means by which independents can communicate well other than via new media. It is a cliché to say that society is much more fragmented and the old consensus' of the past are not holding together today. There is however a lot of truth in it and this is to the advantage of the independent. They can bring a distinctive local perspective without the shackles of a party line to restrict them. This takes us to the next strand of how to get taken seriously by the electorate and it is a very old fashioned one. Basically, you have to get out there and meet people. There are always lots of residents associations and community groups and such like. By getting to meet these people, you will be able to connect with local people who are much more likely to remember you than just a talking head on the TV. Chances are, they will all be on Facebook so they can then follow you on there.