Nick Clegg is on tv right now saying it’s unfair to saddle future generations with our debt. What he seems to forget is that this isn’t ‘our’ debt – it’s britain’s debt. If the future generations don’t like it there are plenty of other countries to move to.

The first 2 times I voted really meant something. I was a few months past 18 when South Africa had a referendum on whether the country should continue down the path of dismantling the apartheid state. This was largely symbolic – the vote was overwhelmingly yes and the world knows the results of the process that followed.
The next time round was the first free election in South African history. Nelson Mandela was elected and proceeded to do the impossible. South Africa today has some significant problems but their neighbours are doing far worse.
These votes mattered! What happened has and will affect Africa for decades and ushered in a new era.
I believe Barack Obama represents a similar opportunity.
No, not because him and Mandela are both black – I think Obama’s blackness is almost completely irrelevant. What inspires me is that he’s the first politician in a long time to have an actually vision and be real and practical. The controversy over his preacher I think exposes what we could expect from the man. I’ve never seen a politician admit that you need to take the whole measure of the man and simply by association you cannot give credence to bad opinions. I disagree with Wright’s comments but there are many people I know who I disagree with but would never disown.
Obama seems to be trying to actually do something and sensibly understands that you need to get the best out of people like Reverend Wright – not vilify them. This was the most honest admission I’ve seen from a public figure (possibly aside from the rather amusing confessions of the new New York Governor about his sexual history) and I think it reflects how he’ll govern.

Wow! Great excerpt from an interview in a German magazine with a Kenyan economist. He basically begs the West to stop sending aid and screwing up the local economy and just allow Africa to grow up as normal.
I’m from South Africa originally and this strikes a chord with me – SA rarely gets aid as it’s pretty rich compared with the rest of Africa, but there are many poor people there and the spirit of entrepreneurship I see amongst them makes me feel the country would do just fine without any help. I’m a great believer in the future of Africa and have money in some business down there (telecoms and other services businesses are huge).

News last night on the radio which brought a smille to my face. No-one in the House of Lords has picked up a bill from the commons which would have exempted parliment from the freedom of information act.
A bit a background – about 3 years ago the labour government in the UK passed a freedom of information acct which allowed access to government information except under a set of defined circumstances. Naturally, this has been resisted by all and sundry under the excuse that “It’s too expensive”, “The requests are all trivial”, “That’s too secret” etc. Despite this it’s been a generally good thing.
Being the government, they couldn’t let something useful carry on working – terrified that the publiuc would be able to request access to their expenses (requests have shown that eco-chancellor Gordon Brown flies to scotland about once a week instead of taking the train as he’s trying to force all of us to do) MPs concocted a story that letters from the public to them could be exposed and this woudl stifle people’s expression (love the way they always look out for us). This information is covered by legislation detailing data protection and confidentiality but no, only a blanket exception to the FoI act for MPs would do.
They duly voted themselves an exception, passed it to the House of Lords (something like the Senate in the USA) for ratification and they promptly ignored the whole thing. Literally — they didn’t even put it up for debate. MPs are understandably apopleptic – about the poor letter writers of course.
This brings to the surface a deep conflict in me about the House of Lords. It’s an unelected body – if you get a title you get in and can vote and the title is hereditary – your sons or daughters will be able to vote when you’re gone. This is about the most undeocratic thing I can think of and it makes me pretty annoyed.
Except that everytime it comes to a crucial issue, the unelected, unrepresentative, immunue from public opinion House of Lords does the right thing and stands up to the increasingly strident and rights trampling government. They tried to stop the fix hunting ban, hold up all kinds of legislation and now this triumph.
In some sense the House is the ultimate expression of campaign finance laws – they are essentially unbribeable since they’ll never be challenged in an election and many of them are rich and wouldn’t be bribed except for the kinds of money that would be easy to trace. I don’t think these people are smarter or better than the average person, they just don’t have their own interests quite so seriously compromised by the need for money.
I predict this gets forced through parliment by foul means.

More and more I’m struck by the growing disconnect between people in society and the structures we use to manage that society. A few examples are the massive surge of resentment against DRM and anti-copying technology in DVDs the increasing number of people who are labelled criminals. In the UK we also have the unique example of a society increasingly being monitored by ubiquitous CCTV and traffic enforcement cameras.
Speed cameras are a good example for the point I’m trying to make. Most people I know are unhappy being caught by them but no-one would label them criminal masterminds or speed demons. They’re people doing 40 in a 30 limit early one morning with no-one on the streets. On the one hand they have been speeding but sensible people would never think that this is a real issue as long as they’re being safe in their driving.
I think one of the problems is that the world never worked the way the law thought. People broke the law in minor ways all the time but it was at the stretchy legal edge: They speed a little when they’re late; They park for 5 minutes while they run into the store; 2 guys who’ve had a bit too much to drink have a scuffle outside the pub, a few blows are exchanged and their friends drag them apart and everyone goes home.
In years gone by these things would mostly have gone unnoticed by the police. I remember clearly about 7 years ago being pulled over by a policeman while zipping along about 10 miles over the speed limit one evening. He pointed out an accident on the other side of the road, the damp road and gave me a stern talk about being sensible. I drove very carefully for months after that. He didn’t need to ticket or arrest me – the situation called for a stern talk. I didn’t feel any resentment or that I’d been ill treated and he slowed me down.
These days that kind of sensible reaction would never occur – I’d have been ticketed and probably asked if I’d been drinking and potentially tested. I’d feel resentment and annoyance, relations between the police and the community would be mildly worse off and no-one would have gained.
You see it’s becoming more and more possible to enforce the law to it’s letter. We can measure average speeds over 100 miles and fine you for going 1 mile over the limit. We can record everything you say for a year and construct a circumstantial case against you. If you shove someone outside a pub you will be seen and can be prosecuted.
The issue is that when you can run to the letter of the law society tends to do that and it doesn’t work. Unions had (probably still do) an option to ‘work to rule’ – they stayed at work but did exactly what the rulebook said and it generally caused everything to grind to a halt. Trains would be stopped 10 yards from a station as the driver would not work 30 seconds past the end of their mandated rest break.
I’m not recommending that we should all get to break the law all the time, but society needs the flexibility of work at the edges in sensible ways. And people need to interact to solve their problems instead of using the police everytime little Johnny trips little James in the playground.

I finally got my video iPod set up to play all those videos I’ve downloaded over the last year so I actually watch them. This included a whole set of talks from TED which has become my number one must attend conference.
Last week I watched the Al Gore segment. Now I’d seen An Inconvinient Truth and while it was well done, it’s a powerpoint presentation. This session was less than 19 minutes (the TED length limit) and Al literally had me chuckling away to myself (I was on teh tube so any sort of noise or emotion are verboten).
For some strange reason I was in the USA just after the 2000 and 2004 elections and I lived through the week of televised obsession about hanging chads and the like. At the time Al came across really badly. Either he was cleverly hiding all this skill and emoting in order to loose the election deliberatly or he’s just become more confident – whatever this video is great. Do yourself a favour and watch it here

Solveig Singleton over at IP central presents a view that breaking DRM might not be a good thing. The post pulled me up a little. I’m very happy that the DRM has been broken on the next generation of DVDs. Solveig asks why it’s a good thing and the answers to his questions are not obvious.
Is DRM bad for consumers? They’re free to walk away are they not he asks. I don’t think this is sufficient but I’m happy to be proved wrong.
First of all, it’s simple to walk away from commodity items or find substitutes. Creative works such as films are not easily substitutable – you can’t argue that if you’re unhappy with the DRM on the latest Tom Cruise film, you can just not watch it or watch the BBC instead. Each work is a little monopoly in it’s own right.
Could you simply buy the DVD instead of the High Defenition version? Sure but it’s got it’s own DRM and I challenge anyone to be able to find a VHS copy of this years oscar winners.
Secondly, the markets argument implies that DRM protected content will be cheaper since the studios will be able to charge different prices for people that want different versions of the film. But they’re clearly not even attempting to do this. There’s no version of any film available today which allows me to pay extra to copy it onto my iPod and the studios have shown no willingness to do this.
Yes it’s wrong to copy your friends DVD, but it’s not wrong to make a backup of that copy of Shrek 2 so your kids can’t destroy the original, or to move a copy to your iPod to watch during a train ride. These legal rights have been taken away by DRM and as such it should be good that it’s been broken. Don’t even get me started on region coding which is a transparent attempt at market manipulation.
People are willing to pay for entertainment as shown by the amount of money spent on DVD sales today. For some reason they’re even willing to pay more to watch it in high defenition. The studios are attempting to turn a simple purchase transaction into a one sided licience and this drives people crazy. You bought it, you own it, you can do a bunch of stuff with it as long as you don’t copy it and sell the copies. No sane person would argue with this. Why can the studios not see that?

Hard on the heels of the annoucement by the minister responsible for the road charging scheme that a million signatures on a petition do not constitute a landslide of opinion, (The Telegraph has the news that people who signed the petition from work may face disciplinary action. The petition requires that you give a valid email address (so obviously you don’t feel tracked at all) and using a work email address has been likened to “writing a letter using headed notepaper”.
The petition, now up to 1.5million signatures continues to gather momentum and the government continues to spin that it’s not important. This veiled threat is just one more attempt to scare people into not signing – the first place to mention the threat to employees was a police department.
This scheme is so corrupt that even the process of consultation includes threats.
I actually agree with the general theory of road charging — you pay for the road you use according to when and how far you drive. If implemented by the removal of the road tax and the petrol tax it could even be cost neutral for the population as a whole. It’s the terror we all feel that

1. We’ll end up paying twice – it’s already clear we’ll have to pay for the equipment and installation which looks to be a few hundred pounds
2. We’ll end up being tracked – do we honestly think we won’t start getting speeding tickets in the post when the system we pay to install squeals on us
3. It just won’t work – does anyone think the government has the capability to pull this off?

UPDATE (21/2/2007)
This morning in my mail box I received a nice mail from Tony Blair responding to the petition on ID cards which I’d also signed. Only 28,000 people signed this one so it’s trivial to ignore, still he took the time to do so.
The response essentially said “I see you don’t want these, well I do and here’s why”. If there was no way they were going to listen to the petition, why is it there? It would be more honest to simply remove the whole site and say “Look, we don’t pay any attention to this. Mail us is you’d liike us to explain why we’re going to do all this stuff anyway”

Claire Short is the previous Labour minister for international development who quit the government in 2003 over the Iraq war scandal in the UK. She gave a sort of interview/informal talk at the Frontline Club (www.frontlineclub.com) on Valentines evening of all dates. It all sounded very interesting and so I poppoed up to Paddington this evening to see how Claire comes across. The whole thing was taped so when they get around to putting up a link I’ll point you in the right direction.
The event was surprisingly well attended with between 40 and 50 people in the audience. It’s a nice cosy venue with a very intimate feel. Starting only a few minutes late, Claire answered some background on why she quit, her feelings on the war and Afghanistan and various topical internation events. She’s very impressive and able to easily come up with anecdotes and entertaining stories on the fly though obviously these topics are well covered ground for her. After about 45 minutes the floor was opened to questions.
Claire is pretty scathing about Tony Blair and sniped at him throughout the evening, painting him as all spin and media and no substance. In her own words she had a great plan for the middle east and Tony flubbed the whole thing. She holds little hope for Gordon Brown to improve anything though there is a scenario in which he could elegantly back us out of Iraq and patch something up.
The questions were for more interesting. It quickly became obvious that this audience was composed primarily of journalists and political activists. The questions were good if slightly generic. The first controversy of the evening was from a Congolese journalist who attacked Claire for what he perceived as the failing of the UKs interventions in the region and support of Rwanda. He was pretty vocal. Unfortunately, Claires response was good but contained a few ad hominem attacks that kind of diminished it. Later an american women asked if Claire “was for the evisceration of Israel”. The very left leaning audience tuttered and muttered and after a reasonably cuttinng remark from Claire laughed out loud. This topic was a slam dunk – execpt for the person asking the question no-one in the room supported Israels actions but Claire still threw in a few personal remarks about the women. For someone who criticises Tony Blair for being all about the media and soundbites she certainly knows, and doesn’t hesitate to use, the same tricks.
That said, and while I disagreed with about a third of her statements, she’s incredibly smart and well informed. I imagine debating her one on one would be incredibly stimulating (and I’d probably loose). The Frontline was a great venue and even though you have to cough up £7 for the priviledge it’s something I’d recommend to anyone interested in politics.