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Ideal Government - UK (10 unread)

August 15, 2008
13:58
Premier Electoral, spawn of Diebold
» ‎ Ideal Government - UK

From xkcd:

I hadn’t realised the Wikipedia-tinkering evil Diebold corporation had renamed its evil e-voting subsidiary Premier Electoral Solutions . The reason, I suppose, is for Diebold to appear less evil, or rather to contain the evil in one bit which Diebold can then flog off to someone with a strong stomach. Man, just imagine the legal disclosures needed to complete that due diligence!
August 12, 2008
16:09
Onion News Network: the spokesdrone
» ‎ Ideal Government - UK

From The Onion News Network:
Pentagon’s Unmanned Spokesdrone Completes First Press Conference Mission
August 07, 2008
3:50
Admin note
» ‎ Ideal Government - UK

William is sort of on hols. I don’t care how many e-passports they clone, I’m probably in the pool.
August 01, 2008
0:16
Jordan, snobbery and the arms trade
» ‎ Ideal Government - UK

Sir Bonar writes
I do deplore these constant attempts by the news media to denigrate great British success stories such as BAe. I see the FT today is saying BAE paid £20m in bribes to a Robert Mugabe ally.

So what? Do people want a thriving manufacturing base in this country or not? Do they not understand that is simply how one does business in these places?

Speaking of BAe Dick arranged a wonderful leaving do for Mike with a polo outing. I’d been hoping to meet Kate Price there, but it seems she was prevented from coming. Now that’s a story the news media might usefully pursue - she’s an excellent horsewoman, a fine figure of a woman and a remarkable conversationalist. Euphorbia and I are tremendous fans of hers. She can only have been excluded from the event by sheer snobbery.

Now, what about her human rights to watch polo with us? And my human rights to continue our fascinating conversation? We hear barely a squeak about these things from the news media as they scribble away about bribery, corruption and the arms trade.
July 31, 2008
2:11
Fusion centres realise full potential of “astral soup”
» ‎ Ideal Government - UK

Sir Bonar writes
Yesterday we attended an intriguing seminar in Downing Street by Raytheon. It seems they’ve managed across America to introduce something entirely new called fusion centres.

The way they work is that all the different public services - local police, FBI, NSA, and CIA work together at local level to tackle terrorism at state level. To achieve this they pool and link all the information they come across, as described in my “astral soup” theory of data sharing.

Once they’ve set up the fusion centre (or the ring of astral soup as we’d call it this side of the Atlantic as per my theory) there’s nothing to stop them ramping up the service. For this they deploy a technique they call “mission creep”, so it tackles all sort of anti-social and suspicious activity. They actualy showed us examples beamed over from Los Angeles, and we saw, “in real time” as they say, shocking live cases of people taking notes in the street, drawing diagrams or using binoculars. I need hardly go into the sorts of consequences that such activity, left unchecked, might lead to.

The clever thing about the fusion centre approach, as the IPS man there rightly pointed out, is that we can achieve desirable social outcomes without the single large database our critics accuse us of wishing to create. I continue to be unimpressed by our own IT manager, who just nodded sheepishly and said we were doing all this already. His time will be up soon, I predict.

This is what I admire about our American cousins. They invent things. They find new words for things. They’re not afraid to spend a bob or two on what is really needed. And they are excellent salespeople; one is hardly aware one is being sold to, such is their subtlety. We shall have no difficulty in turn selling this to Ministers, I’m confident.

So there is a new word in the corridors of Whtehall his morning, and it is fusion centres.
July 30, 2008
14:56
Annoying consultation vibration: common travel area
» ‎ Ideal Government - UK

It seems the Home Office wants to abolish the Comon Travel Area in the British isles, and is doing a sort of pickled figleaf of a consultation in preparation. It’s a sort of
1. Do you agree that new powers to enable border controls on all air and sea routes from the republic of ireland to the UK for non-cta nationals should be introduced?

Yes/Don’t know/No

If you say “No” you are given a lot of space to explain yourself, because that’s what they plan to do. And ditto with the question
Do you agree that identity controls should be introduced on all air and sea routes from the republic of ireland to the UK for CTA nationals?

It feels to me that there has to be a damn good reason for introducing all the extra hassle and expense. Where can we now travel without being hassled by control phreaks?

They clearly desperately want to get rid of the CTA. But why? Where is the evidence that there’s any need for it? Is it IRA revisited? Scary route for import of illegal substances and weaponry? Are we being infiltrated by paedophile Irish priests?

Thre’s lots of tough stuff about new checks and ID cards and biggest shakeups for God knows how many years. But nothing about why there is any need for vile new controls.

Liam Byrne used to be such a nice chap when he was unemployed/struggling with a dotcom startup. He was my mate. What is it about working in the Home Office that makes his output now seem so toxic? I just don’t feel I’m honestly presented with the difficult problems we all need to solve together. I feel I’m being fobbed off with fibbing, conniving, disrespectful nonsense. Isn’t that awful? Well, it is far from ideal.

Wibbi: the Home Office treated us with respect and consideration, and consulted with us as if we were intelligent human beings?

Wibbi: we could go online and click a button somewhere to turn off all their pensions if we were dissatisfied with how we were being treated?
1:21
People deliver common-sense verdict on DNA - Home Office disagrees
» ‎ Ideal Government - UK

From the BBC:
DNA profiles of innocent people should be removed from the national database, a government-funded inquiry has said. Control of the database should be taken from government and police and an independent body should be established to run it, the Citizens’ Inquiry urged. Javed Aslam, one of the 30 members of the public on the panel, said keeping the records would be “the first step towards a totalitarian state”.
”First step” shoud read “latest in a long series of steps”. As soomeone put it - we’re not sleepwalking into a surveillance sociey - at least, it’s a funny sort of sleppwalking that involves a series of wide-awake episodes in the House of Commons passing intrusive and restrictive laws, including the retrospective legalisation many years of illegal DNA data retention by the police.
July 29, 2008
14:36
Wordle shows what IdealGov words look like…
» ‎ Ideal Government - UK

Here’s an IdealGov Wordle:
5:49
Power of Info gives rise to severe risk of democracy
» ‎ Ideal Government - UK

It can only be a matter of time before a scene like this is acted out somewhere in Whitehall:
July 28, 2008
4:53
Bandits at 2 o’clock high?
» ‎ Ideal Government - UK

There is a potential danger on the horizon, bandits at 2 o’clock high, a danger which manifests itself in the form of the following WIBBI:

WIBBI there was less regulation and there were fewer laws and people just did the right thing because they want to?

This WIBBI has been advocated over the years most energetically by Daniel Finkelstein in his Comment Central blog in the Times and in his opinion pieces. See for example his Comment Central post, ’The five sexiest ideas in politics‘, where he summarises these aphrodisiacs – social norms, reciprocal altruism, situatioinism, prospect theory and cognitive dissonance – and re-states the opening WIBBI as follows:

In a nutshell, thirty years ago there was a intellectual revolution centred on economics. Now the change in the debate is being powered by social psychology ... It helps explain how we can change society without increasing burdensome regulation.

Mr Finkelstein refers there to a Sunday Times article, ’Politicians are devouring the work of academics who explain why the carrot beats the stick‘, and he has returned to the topic most recently in ’The social psychology revolution is reaching its tipping point‘.

It’s not just Daniel Finkelstein and the Times who want the government to stop legislating and start nudging people into doing the right thing. There has also been a little outbreak in the Spectator, please see ’Nudge, nudge: meet the Cameroons’ new guru‘ and ’A nudge in the right direction‘.

And the journalists and the social psychologists aren’t just making it up. At least one serious politician places social psychology at the heart of politics – step forward Oliver Letwin, Chairman of the Policy Review and of the Conservative Research Department, who wrote in the Times last year:

Cameron Conservatism puts no faith in central direction and control. Instead, it seeks to identify social and environmental responsibilities that participants in the free market are likely to neglect, and then establish frameworks that will lead people and organisations to act of their own volition in ways that will improve society by increasing general wellbeing.

As Mr Letwin says, some people are likely to neglect their responsibilities. Granted. Those responsibilities can be identified. Who by? Presumably by a responsibility neglect tsar. Then what? It will be the tsar’s job to make sure people do their duty. How? By enacting laws? No, by establishing frameworks. What does that mean? It’s not clear, but the outcome is that people end up wanting to do their duty, they will do it voluntarily, laws won’t be necessary.

A silver star to the child at the back who spots that, far from putting no faith in it, this is precisely a case of “Cameron Conservatism” setting out to achieve “central direction and control”.

And a gold star to the one next to her who points out that it’s a bit spooky, to say the least, if politicians set out to achieve central direction and control over nothing less than people’s “own volition” – at this point, the harmless-sounding WIBBI we started with takes on a decidedly sinister hue, doesn’t it?