So asks Justin McKeating. Now, normally I wouldn’t indulge in such things but I was fascinated by this response to a Liberal Conspiracy article:

According to the moonbats the Is Brown Bonkers? meme is cooked up by Guido on the orders of Andy Coulson at CCHQ.

But if you read the actual article he links to, no mention of Andy Coulson or CCHQ is made in it. There are a couple of CCHQ refs in the comments, but the only person who refers to Coulson is Guido himself.

Rebutting an allegation that isn’t being made against you is a pretty cast iron example of paranoia. Maybe Paul Staines needs to get out of this gig. It isn’t doing his mental health any good at all.

Small bit of advice to Andrew Lansley. If you have to insist that you are not “nannying” that is almost certainly what you are doing. Finger wagging doesn’t stop being finger wagging just because you have the fingers of your other hand crossed behind your back.

I know I need to read the actual speech rather than the media precis, but my kneejerk reaction is: what on earth has happened to Reform? They used to be the thinktank that so-called ‘Orange Bookers’ slammed in everyone else’s face as the epitomy of laissez-faire economic liberalism. In the past few months they’ve transformed themselves into one of the usual thinktank subjects - constantly harping on about how government should intervene here, and regulate that.

* * *

I’ve now read Lansley’s speech - I’ve even skimmed through Alan Johnson’s speech on obesity last month for good measure. I struggle to find much in the way of a substantive difference between the two. Both proudly unveil partnerships with the private sector. Lansley states “Providing information and example is empowering, lecturing people is not.” Johnson states “vilifying the extremely fat doesn’t make people change their behaviour.” There is a subtle difference there but it is not immediately apparent.

In the comments below, Dale Basset makes much of the fact that Lansley states that “Legislation will be a last resort.” Is he honestly suggesting that Alan Johnson would say anything different? It isn’t as if the government have been falling over themselves to introduce legislation. In fact though, it simply isn’t true. In Lansley’s bullet point list of steps to take, legislation - specifically European legislation - is right on the top of his list. Points 3, 5 and 8 are also primarily regulatory and/or concerned with state intervention.

His prescription for tackling adult obesity may be legislation-lite, but it is very heavy on “supportive rôle models and positive social norms.” Be honest, given that this is supposed to be aimed at adults, does it not sound more than a little patronising? He actually suggests a teenage version of Lazytown, but by implication he is suggesting an adult version as well.

And as for the children, he explicitly calls for more nannying, merely questioning the nannying style: “we need more of a ‘Mary Poppins’ than a ‘Miss Trunchbull’.”

Bearing all that in mind, he is lucky that he doesn’t get done under the Trade Descriptions Act for calling his speech “No excuses, no nannying.”

Finally, regarding the ‘no excuses’ stuff, it varies between the nonsensical and the deranged. He explicitly attacks the government’s Foresight report for sending out the ‘wrong’ message to obese people. Since when did obese people, with the obvious exceptions of Lansley and myself, sit around reading government reports (admittedly, this may change if they end up cancelling Countdown)?

The line “Tell people that biology and the environment causes obesity and they are offered the one thing we have to avoid: an excuse.” is all too reminiscent of John Major’s call for society to “condemn a little more and understand a little less.” In short, it is classic Tory Flat Earthism. Who cares if there may be important biological and environmental factors behind the increase in obesity? Whatever you do, don’t tell the fat people.

I speak from personal experience here when I tell you that we fatties are perfectly good at finding excuses ourselves. We don’t need government reports to provide them for us and we certainly don’t need populist politicians to protect us from ‘unhelpful’ things like scientific research. I’m happy to take responsibility for my own body shape, but that is another thing entirely from dismissing external factors. One external factor for instance is being singled out as the fatty every day throughout your school career. While I’m no scientist, I have no personal doubt that there is a link between obesity and mental health, as this interesting Ben Goldacre article suggests. Not only might the “no excuses” culture of Toryism not work, but if its main effect is to simply make fat people feel even worse about themselves it could prove counter-productive.

One of my favourite David Boyle books is Tyranny of Numbers. Way before its time, in it he comes up with a number of ‘paradoxes’ about our target obessed culture. Paradox Number Seven states that “When you count things, they get worse.” It certainly seems to me that the more our society obsesses about obesity, the bigger a problem it becomes. Why this has become such a big thing over the past decade I can only guess at, although I suspect it has something to do with irresponsible medical professionals getting carried away with numbers which suit their budget submissions, and a burgeoning diet industry that can now afford to hire sock puppeting lobbyists (and even MPs). I look around me and don’t seem to see much more obesity than there was 20 years ago, yet everyone I know with a bit of muscle on them is BMI classified as obese. It strikes me that a proper ‘conservative’ attitude would be to not get carried away with all this at all. And ultimately, it if boils down to a choice between traffic light labelling on food and having Chris fucking Hoy rammed down my throad as the latest Lansley-approved ‘rôle model,’ I’ll stick with the regulation thanks.

Another reason for LVT can be found in the Guardian today:

Property tax leaves cities ‘looking like broken teeth’
· Government adviser attacks Darling policy
· Empty buildings torn down to avoid payment

I won’t bore you endlessly with the details, suffice to say that LVT is charged on the land itself, irrespective of what is currently built on it. So, you couldn’t avoid it by demolishing buildings, yet it would still function as a means of encouraging land owners to fully develop their properties. If Swindon BC are willing to find half a million pounds just to bulldoze over a perfectly functional industrial estate, you can bet that with LVT they would find a tenant to cover their bills in no time.

When I twittered Rory Cellan-Jones to ask why he didn’t mention Wordscraper in his blog post about Scrabulous, he replied “cos i couldn’t be bothered!” Years from now, when British journalism has finally breathed its last, this phrase will be engraved on its tombstone.

The thing is, the Wordscraper thing is about the most interesting thing about this whole sorry saga. Cellan-Jones misses the point. Badly. While Scrabulous did indeed cross the line by using the same look as Scrabble and using a name that was far too close to a trademarked property, the fact is you can’t copyright an idea and they have been free to set up an almost identical game.

Intellectual property law is at its murkiest when it comes to games. History is littered with people who sold their ideas to companies before their games made it big, least of all Scrabble-inventor Alfred Butts. How do you make money out of a boardgame when people can replay it countless times? Ironically, the answer that Mattell and Hasbro have come up with is to produce a whole range of merchandise. You can buy the official Scrabble dictionary of course, and a special turntable for your board. You can get the deluxe edition and if you want a really big game why not try Super Scrabble (unbalanced in my view)? In a hurry? Try Scramble. On the move? Try Travel Scrabble. They’ve even produced a pink edition to raise money for breast cancer research. Scrabulous hardly dented that market - if anything it helped it.

The point is, they’ve already realised that the real money to be made is not in the game itself but in creating a range of branded tat for the fans to buy. With that in mind, getting Scrabulous banned looks like a pretty bad business move. It probably won’t cost them much, but it has created a lot of ill will and has been built around getting people to sign up to their own, flash heavy and vastly inferior Facebook app. Meanwhile, the Agarwalla brothers appear to have got away with it. The big guys may have won, but it is a pretty empty victory.

Ultimately, this isn’t how big businesses are going to survive in the global internet marketplace. The Agarwalla’s may have overstepped the mark, but it isn’t hard to stay on the right side of the law. Frankly, if Mattel and Hasbro had any sense, they’d encourage developers to compete to produce the best internet version of the game, offering a license that would allow people to publish the game with their blessing, so long as it included a prominent link back to the official website (admittedly, contractually they may be prevented from doing this even if they wanted do but given how long it took their developers to produce a Facebook app and the poor job they made of it, it looks like we can safely add this to their list of cock ups). Think of the free advertising! Ironically, at a different end of the empire, Hasbro has been experimenting with something very similar. Their Wizards of the Coast publishing arm, which produces Dungeons and Dragons, positively encourages other publishers to use their system (albeit with restrictions, something which has admittedly caused some bad feeling). The result was to take a failing brand and catapult it right back to the top of the industry.

Not only are intellectual property laws becoming increasingly hard to enforce, in many ways they are becoming a serious hindrance to making money, which is what they exist to do in the first place. Properties such as boardgames that were devised in the middle of the 20th century (and superheroes for that matter) are a particularly interesting cultural battleground because to those of us who have grown up with them, they feel like public property. Ultimately, this becomes a question about who owns popular culture. The corporates won’t be allowed to win that battle, whether they want to or not.

To see how fondly Tony Blair is remembered, you only need to see the “related searches” in this image.

That is the question I constantly find myself returning to when I consider the Bones Report. The quandary can best be summed up by the paper’s claim that “across the whole party we have expenditure of £15m, yet only just over 10% of that was campaign expenditure through the main Federal Party budget.” You could be forgiven for thinking that 90% of campaign expenditure is controlled locally and regionally. Is then, the main agenda of Bones to centralise the party still further or democratise that which is already centralised? The answer seems to be a bit of both, but I’m concerned about the practicalities of either of them.

My fundamental problem is that there is nothing, or at least very little, to object to in the Executive Summary and I doubt many people within the party would disagree with it either. It isn’t paranoid to view such soft soaping with suspicion - only good common sense. What it does not answer is how the Commission proposes to do, pretty much anything.

First of all, let’s not kid ourselves that this is the first time the party has attempted to do anything like this. Back in 1998, the party unveiled what it called the “Mid Term Review.” We had a big debate about it at party conference. It included a number of proposals, the one which I most clearly remember being the idea that the party should move towards 4-5 year budgeting over the Parliamentary cycle, rather than the annual process. Proposal adopted but never happened. Many of the proposals I remember seem remarkably similar to these ones.

I’m sure I could quote you at length a whole series of other proposals found in the MTR, but for one problem: I don’t have a copy (or rather, I might have a copy in my parents’ loft but I couldn’t find it last time I looked). Back when I was on the party’s Federal Executive, I asked for a copy only to be told that Cowley Street did not have one either.

Back in 2002, the then Chief Executive Hugh Rickard drew up what was then dubbed a business plan for the party. At the very first FE meeting I attended, this paper was passed (nem con if I recall) by the FE, with the promise that there would be six monthly progress reports to ensure that it was carried out. Six months later, the first one didn’t happen. Eighteen months later, I was brusquely informed that the business plan had been dropped (and that the Mid-Term Review had been quietly dropped as well). Given that the committee as a whole did not object to this analysis, it is fair to say that in effect this did indeed happen, but there was no discussion and, prior to that, no attempt to implement either plan had ever been made.

I relate all this to set the context of this new report. Regardless of the details, within the next six months, the process leading up to the final recommendations of this Commission will have been completed (I’m genuinely confused as to whether or not the Commission’s work has already finished - we have what appears to be a final report yet there is to be a consultation at conference). What happens next is what is important. If the party’s various committees and sub-committees then proceed to carry on regardless then the whole process will have been a massive waste of time, even if a couple of the ideas which are in the final report end up going ahead anyway. It will only have been worthwhile if it results in a plan to which all the various bodies are signed up to, and progress is checked regularly against it.

It is clear that the authors intend for it to work in that way, but do they really understand why it hasn’t worked in that way in the past? Speaking as the individual who was, post-Donnachadh McCarthy, regarded as the chief troublemaker on the FE (a position I never sought but found I had inherited by accident), my recollection was that the party bigwigs were quite happy with the lack of clear delineation between the management and governance functions of the party. This was not because they enjoyed the FE interfering with management (which was always slapped down ruthlessly) but because it allowed them to interfere with the governance side. The unilateral dropping of business plans is one example. The constant refusal to budget for projects which had been agreed by Conference and the FE was another. The people who got singled out and marked as troublemakers on the committee were the people who tended to read their papers. Scrutiny was a dirty word, yet does Bones deal with this?

The lack of a clear plan in the Executive Summary concerns me greatly. Indeed, I question whether the term “Executive Summary” can be fairly used to describe it. It is a 20 page document, which is far too long to be a summary, and yet the number of executable actions within it are extremely small. Some action points are highlighted in bold, some aren’t, so you have to read extremely carefully even to get a gist of what is being proposed. Some sections are so vague as to be essentially meaningless, such as:

We therefore believe that post the general election there needs to be a radical overhaul of resource allocation in the professional party to improve regional impact, the management and development of staff in local parties and to support the capacity development that regions will have to deliver if we are to succeed. Significantly we propose a radical revision of the campaigns activity which will have to double in size if we are to succeed with a split between a central strategic organisation and regional execution activity.

This may mean more central co-ordination of best practice across and within regions and certainly does not imply simply providing more money to regional parties. If we are to provide more money to regions, it must be to those regions where we have the greatest prospect of electoral advancement and where funding can make the greatest difference. This may mean that some regions should not expect so much.

The emphasis is mine. Leaving aside the shocking standard of English, what does “regional impact” mean? And does it mean certain regions getting less money or not? What all these “may”s? If it “certainly does not imply simply providing more money to regional parties” then what does it mean? Spit it out for God’s sake! And this is one of the prescriptive paragraphs!

What this section might mean is that as part of the need for an increased number of target seats across the country, we will need to allocate more resources regionally but that those resources will largely be controlled from the centre. These resources will be focussed on target seats, meaning that some regions will receive more investment while others will receive less. But if that is what it means (and by all means put me out of my misery in the comments below), why spend two paragraphs saying what can be said in two sentences? And why couch it in so many weasel words?

Another great example is this set of proposals in the section on “building a network”. Much of it will sound familiar - be nice to volunteers, build up our supporters’ network, introduce a members’ “package” - none of this is new. The pertinent questions are “how?” and “what?” It wasn’t that long ago that the party decided to scrap its existing package to members (proposed in the MTR) in favour of sending them a couple of all-member issues of Lib Dem News. What does “ways of engaging that are more than just leafleting and donating cash” mean? A couple of examples maybe? Superficially, we already offer a range of extra ways to engage people, such as flocktogether and consult.libdems.org.uk. No one would dream of saying these are perfect, but how would the Bones approach differ?

The executive summary also lacks anything resembling costings or a timetable. This is crucial for its bigger ideas such as the “Leadership Academy.” Two different sources have told me that as part of the detailed plans that we mere mortals are not privy to, the existing candidate approval process is to be replaced by a system by which individuals wanting to be considered as target seat candidates will be expected to attend six weekend training sessions. In principle this is a good idea - replace a system which puts so much focus on experience with a system that develops and assesses the candidates at the same time. Potentially, this could significantly expand the pool from which we draw our candidates.

But how much is this to cost and who is going to pay? Assuming as the paper does that the party is to adopt 200 key seats, we will need 200 individuals to go through this system at a bare minimum (yes, 60 out of 200 of those seats are currently held but you have to allow for a small amount of wastage and individuals who will end up with nothing - in reality the figure is likely to be higher). Are we going to train all 200 up at once over six different weekends? More likely there will have to be multiple weekends - 4 at least. 4 x 6 = 24 weekends which means a heck of a lot of organising and a heck of a lot of trainers. If the party is going to pay for all this it will have to identify resources that currently do not exist, or it is going to have to rely on the participants themselves to foot the bill. Of course, making the prospective candidates pay will rule out a lot of people. Is there going to be a hardship fund? On all these questions the Executive Summary is utterly silent.

It also poses the question, is this really a problem that needs solving? Certainly, a more formalised process would benefit some people, but are there not plenty of people out there who merely require assessment? It is like an company employing drivers and then insisting that all applicants pass their own private driving test irrespective of whether or not they can already drive.

I and others have already gone on endlessly about the plans for a Chief Officers Group and how it is so parliamentarian-heavy. Suffice to say that the one thing that most confuses me about this is why it is intended to be in addition to the existing Campaigns and Communications Committee (which was established to solve the same alleged problem if I recall) rather an in replacement of it. To do so would not require a constitutional change and would meet the spirit of the Commission’s goal of simplifying how we make decisions. Yet only problem with this of course would be that it would force the FE to scrap a committee to which it sends representatives (politically tricky) and would bring into question the role of the Campaigns and Communications Committee Chair and whether it is really needed.

I could go on (for example I could question how the formation of Liberal Youth is “a step in the right direction” when, nice party a few months ago aside, it doesn’t appear to have halted the backwards drift that LDYS was experiencing before it - it’s website doesn’t even mention the new executive, two months after taking office), but I’ll leave it there. Fundamentally, my sincerely advise to my fellow Liberal Democrats is to be deeply sceptical of any “executive report” that:

• Can’t be summed up in two pages (max);
• Calls for a simplification of decision-making while simultaneously adds extra layers of bureaucracy.
• Is so bereft of specifics, costings and timetabling; and (of course)
• You aren’t allowed to read the full report it apparently summarises.

These are all danger signs and suggest a report that has been written by committee. My sneaking suspicion is that its only lasting legacy will be the COG. And then, in another ten years time, some bright spark will come up with the idea of adding yet another - even more centralised - layer of bureaucracy on top of that.

Jacqui Smith’s startling insight into how the details of 84,000 prisoners managed to wind up on a memory stick which promptly went missing:

“This was data that was being held in a secure form, but was downloaded onto a memory stick by an external contractor,” she said.

“It runs against the rules set down both for the holding of government data and set down by the external contractor and certainly set down in the contract that we had with the external contractor.”

Well, duh.

more animals

You’ve got to marvel at how these bozos get out of the house in the morning. Based on this statement I can only assume that Jacqui Smith doesn’t actually walk around with her door keys on her, but instead keeps them under a potted plant by the door. To avoid being burgled she has figured out the genius ruse of writing personally to her neighbours and insisting that they don’t break in without her permission.

The point, Smith, is that if it is possible for a private contractor to leave the office with sensitive data on a flashdrive, your system isn’t fucking secure. Almost a year after the Customs and Excise debacle and you still haven’t figured that one out. And now you want to put the exact same fuckwits in charge of a national identity database??!?!?!?

Give. Me. Strength.

The McCain camp is in full scale meltdown after making jibes at “the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd” (okay, I exaggerate slightly). This has lead to Wired running this rather imaginitive and amusing thread.

Truth to tell, it is an odd target of Team McCain considering the physical resemblance of their candidate:

moar funny pictures

Have I ever mentioned how much I love BBC headlines? Their obsession to bring everything into a certain word and character limit to ensure it will always fit on a line leads them to end up coming up with some remarkable turns of phrase. Take this for instance:

Clegg unveils green energy vision

I’m sure I can figure out what that’s supposed to mean, but I can’t really be bothered. The thing in my head is much more entertaining:

Just for the record, I did not write this.

That is all.