Ed Miliband = strikebreaking scab scum
Ed Miliband has
told Labour MPs to walk through picket lines on the June 30 strikes tomorrow.
It's time for all the unions to review their support and withdraw their funding from Labour. It no longer even makes a pretence at being a party that supports workers, and it's completely forgotten its roots as a political party that was founded to represent the voice of the Unions in Parliament.
Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail is thoroughly unpleasant
Paul Dacre is editor of the thoroughly unpleasant Daily Mail, and therefore almost by definition a thoroughly unpleasant man. He is a man who makes a very good living by essentially printing stories that tell millions of people who they should hate. He also, by all accounts, is a thoroughly unpleasant man to work for, one who uses abusive language and fear to "persuade" his staff to do his bidding.
But despite the fact that Dacre lives his life by doling about abuse, he doesn't seem to like it when the same is done to him.
Paul Dacre recently sent a strongly-worded legal threat against a blogger who had the cheek and temerity to have written a rant about how despicable a man Dacre actually is. Because the libel laws of this country strongly favour those who can afford to pay for a potentially very expensive court case, the blogger and his UK-based webhost had no choice but to remove the post. You can read far more details at the link above.
Labels: daily mail, hypocrisy, paul dacre
Save the People's War website!
For quite some time in the early 2000s the BBC had been running a messageboard on its "DNA" platform, asking for people to
send in their memories of the Second World War, either from direct experience or from information given to them by parents or others who'd been alive at the time.
The project was enthusiastically promoted, and
outreach teams travelled to libraries and communities around the country to try to find as many tales as possible. In many cases very elderly people, who'd never used a computer before, were taken through the steps needed to set up a DNA account and upload their words and photographs, thanks to very patient help and advice from hundreds of volunteer staff at libraries and community centres across the country. The
Open University got involved, and use the information as part of their British History courses.
This information was then lovingly curated by editorial staff working at the online section of BBC History, and gradually a tremendous wealth of information about the War was being built up. And this wasn't the reminiscences of politicians or generals, this was the War as seen through the eyes of ordinary people, soldiers who were fighting across Europe and Africa, and civilians at home in bombed cities. What's more, because of the messageboard format of the system, people could reply to the memories of others, and reminisce about shared experiences that happened 60 years ago.
Then in 2006, as part of the
Graf Report's review of BBC Online, it was decided that it was too expensive to pay for a couple of editorial staff to curate this information, and unfortunately it would have to close. But fortunately it was realised how valuable a resource this information was for the nation, and it was decided that although the "dynamic" messageboard system was too much effort to maintain, if the information could be published as "flat files" then it could
remain on the BBC website forever.
This is where I got involved. Myself and another developer spent a few months setting up the necessary databases and conversion software to create a permanent archive of this information. We wanted to ensure that this information would be available forever, so we didn't just simply create a non-dynamic flat-file version of the DNA messageboard, we also
converted all the information into XML files so that even in the future, if HTML stopped being the language of the internet, there would still be an easy way to convert this information to some other format.
We also wanted to tag and classify the data as best we could. This would be an impossible task to do manually over 100,000 files or more, so we wrote a Bayesian scanner which was run over the entire dataset to try to provide some degree of classification. It wasn't perfect, but it was an awful lot better than nothing.
It wasn't just the BBC who thought this was a worthy project. The
British Library asked for a copy of the final XML files and the associated scanned and uploaded photographs. So did the
National Archive.
This really is what a public service broadcasting's online service is for -- producing things of permanent national interest, but which have very little commercial viability. If the BBC hadn't spent years obtaining this information, it would all have gone forever when those who remembered the War firsthand all eventually passed away.
And now?
Note that's getting rid of. They're not going to archive it. They're not going to hand it over to someone else. They're intending to completely delete this information. Forever.
It's not even as if this decision saves any money. The site is already an archive and there are no staff overheads involved in keeping it. The disk space required is minimal, a few hundred megabytes -- you can't even rent that small an amount from a commercial provider these days. It would fit comfortably in the memory of most people's mobile phones!
Yes, the data exists at the British Library and the National Archives. I know this, because I remember transmitting the data to them. But as far as I know it's still in the raw XML format we gave them. They've never unpacked it and turned it into another website. It's not accessible to the public. For all practical purposes this only exists at the BBC.
The People's War website is a genuine "national treasure". Please help save it!
Write to Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC. Write to Erik Huggers, Director of Future Media at the BBC (until he takes up his far more lucrative position with Intel, anyway).
Write to your MP, and explain to them why this data needs to be saved. Please!
Lastly, here's the link to the
WW2: People's War website itself. Have a look round, read some of the stories. Thanks.
BBC execs more powerful than MPs?
Are senior executives more powerful than MPs? It sounds a ridiculous question, but apparently that's what a small number of Conservative MPs believe.
A couple of days ago my MP,
Nick de Bois (he's a Tory)
mentioned on Twitter that he was prepared to support an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons
which calls for an annual vote via the internet "
on the BBC's programmes, the level of BBC operational activity and administrative overheads, salaries, and on the standards of BBC programmes".
These were (and still are!) my primary disagreements with the proposal:
- If you ask people in general what they want from any kind of public service, the answer is usually "as much as possible". If you ask them how much they want to pay for that service, the answer is nearly always "as little as possible". Therefore putting budgetary decisions of any kind of public service to a public vote will inevitably result in a sharp decline in that organisation's budget.
- Determining the budget for an organisation the size of the BBC is hugely complex, which is why the Licence Fee agreements between the BBC and Government often take many months to conclude. The recent stitch-up between Jeremy Hunt and Mark Thompson doesn't negate this point.
- Television programmes take a long time to plan, film and produce. Any organisation making them needs to have some idea of its budgets, not just for the current year, but for at least the following one. Leaving the licence fee to be determined annually at the whim of an electorate would make the BBC un-runnable.
- Even if you think the idea in this EDM is a good one, there are many public and pseudo-public organisations which could have their finances determined in this way. Why are BBC employees being singled out? Why not also vote for the "salaries and administrative overheads" of the police; judges and the court service; social workers; teachers. Or ... how about this ... MPs?
The EDM has been proposed by
Robert Halfon, the Conservative MP for Harlow. Mr Halfon is
also on Twitter so I struck up a brief conversation there with both MPs on this subject.
Eventually
I got Mr Halfon to admit that his idea wouldn't apply to all BBC staff, but only to "
board and celebrities". Well the
BBC Executive Board is less than a dozen salaried people, and the majority of "celebrities" who appear on TV shows are contracted freelancers and not actually employees of the BBC. They negotiate their fees individually, usually via their agent. So Mr Halfon's idea is half-baked at best.
But, more importantly, I tried to get both Mr Halfon and Mr de Bois to agree that if it's important to have an annual vote on the salaries and programmes of the BBC (because it's a public service), surely it's even more important to have an annual vote on the salaries and policies of MPs (because they're public servants, and far more powerful).
Initially both MPs fell back to the tired old "oh but you have the opportunity to sack us every 5 years" claim. But that's not the same thing at all as an annual appraisal, and I've never seen a General Election ballot form with "how much do you want your MP to be paid?" on it.
Despite a little bit of pushing (not much, I admit, I got bored with it very quickly), neither Nick de Bois nor Robert Halfon would agree that MPs should have their policies and salaries put to a public vote every year. However they both seem to agree that senior BBC officials should face such a vote.
My conclusion is that both these MPs believe that senior BBC executives need to be kept in check more than MPs do
because they must think the BBC staff are more powerful than MPs. So there you have it, two Members of Parliament who are in completely the wrong jobs. They presumably went into politics to be able to change things in this country, but they both believe that it's easier to change things as (say) the Director of Audio & Music at the BBC, than as an MP.
Holding the country to ransom
Back in the 1970s the Trades Unions in Britain were quite a bit more influential than they are today. Thatcher's anti-Union laws hadn't yet been implemented, and unionisation was the norm rather than the exception, even in many private-sector employers.
As a result, whenever a Government (of any political hue) tried to implement policies that would affect the standard of living of ordinary people, they knew the Unions would defend their members' interests and cause an awful lot of trouble. So we had the miners' strikes in 1972 and 1974, resulting in the
three-day week and eventually bringing down Ted Heath's Conservative Goverment. A few years later Jim Callaghan's Labour Government tried to fix inflation by limiting pay rises, leading to the
Winter of Discontent and ultimately the end of
that Government.
The establishment and newspapers were (and have remained) absolutely livid about this. Union leaders have been called unelected troublemakers, accused of holding the country to ransom and only interested in lining their own profits.
Now fast-forward to 2010 / 2011.
The banks -- especially the investment banks -- have brought the global economy to the brink of collapse. All round the world sovereign states have had to invest hundreds of billions of pounds to prevent their banks from going bankrupt. In doing so Iceland, Greece and Ireland (so far) have themselves been brought nearly to the point of bankruptcy.
So how do the Governments around the world propose getting back this vast investment and starting to reduce their deficits? Well the obvious solution would be that those who made the mess should pay to clear it up. But as soon as there's any suggestion of putting any kind of extra taxation on the financial sector, we're told that if we do that
the bankers will leave the country. And because the UK in particular is
so dependent on the financial sector, if the banks just up and leave the country's finances will be in an even worse state than at present.
So ... we again have a situation where a bunch of unelected people, seemingly only interested in their own profits, are able to dictate Government policy. They're ... yes, you guessed it ... holding the country to ransom. So why isn't this on the front pages of the Telegraph and the Mail?
Fred Goodwin was briefly public enemy number one, but even he never faced the same level of vitriol and bad press as Arthur Scargill, for example. And what about the others? The CEOs and Boards of Directors of Northern Rock, HBOS, Bradford & Bingley should -- if there's any justice in the world -- be in prison, not retired on million-pound-a-year pensions.
And what's the odds that the Coalition Government will enact a series of anti-banker laws, akin to the anti-Union laws of the 80s/90s/00s? Yeah, that's right, not even the most audacious of stockmarket gamblers would take a punt on that one!
The students have brought down this Government -- they just don't know it yet!
*tap tap* is this thing on? Been a while since I wrote here ...
It's been fantastic to see the students protesting against the fees increase for three weeks running, especially as after the first week they knew they were likely to be up against the Met in all their baton-wielding, head-cracking splendour. Amazing bravery for people so young to continually put themselves in that position.
They may think that
they lost as the vote went narrowly in favour of the Government's proposals. But although this battle may have been lost I think they've effectively fired the opening salvos in a war which will definitely been won.
The Evening Standard's (printed edition only I'm afraid) editorial this evening pointed out that for the MPs who've "crossed the Rubicon" by voting against their party, any further rebellions will be much easier. And that's the thing. This was always an uneasy coalition and the protests against the fees increase has caused huge cracks to appear in it. All it will take is one or two other points of conflicting interest to cause the whole thing to come crashing down.
The Lib Dem senior leadership will hang on, come what may, until the AV Referendum has passed in May next year. But after that I think the cracks will widen very quickly, the Coalition will collapse (probably over something fairly minor) and the government will fall.
There'll be a General Election by the end of September next year. Without a doubt.
AIG
Look away now if you're bored/scared by financial issues and the credit crunch.
Otherwise ... when Lehman's collapsed yesterday I was wondering why quite a lot of the papers were also mentioning AIG Insurance.
This post from Robert Peston explains why: basically banks around the world have insured their dodgy mortgages with AIG to the tune of over $300 billion. If AIG goes down, it'll make what's happened so far in the credit crunch look like a minor detail. Or in Peston's own words "
a number of banks' balance sheets would be mullered".
What a bunch of bankers, eh.
Labels: finance, news
Tube service status graphs
Combining both tube geekery and statistics, I've produced an application that plots graphs of the
Tube service status over the course of a day, on a line-by-line basis.
It's quite basic -- more a proof-of-concept than anything else -- but does work, so
feel free to have a look. A couple of caveats: as it says in the small print, it won't yet show any results for the current day's tube situation, and the data only started being collected since the last few days of June 2008. Also, bear in mind that it's currently running off my ADSL line, so although it's a fairly low bandwidth app, try not to hammer it too intensively!
One future enhancement that I've already got planned is to produce weekly and monthly charts, as well as the current daily ones. I'm open to suggestions on others!
Cor, that was easy
There have been
lots of
stories over the past few days about very large rises in the
medium-term wholesale market prices for gas and oil, and how that's likely to lead to increases of 40% or even more in domestic electricity and gas prices this winter.
OK, I thought, it's already pricey enough, maybe I should do something about this. So I phoned my
fuel supplier, gave them my account number, and said "Hello, I'd like some information about switching to a capped tariff please".
"Certainly" says the call centre bloke, *
tappity tap* that will be £19.95 a year more expensive than the tariff you're on at the moment, and will be fixed at that price until
October 2009.
"Bargain!" is what I thought. "Yes please" is what I said. A little bit more
tappity-tapping from him and then "OK, that's all done for you. Is there anything else I can help you with?"
If only everything was as quick, simple, and inexpensive to sort out!
How much to fill 'er up?
If you're in the UK, then unless you had the television and radio off all day today you can't fail to have noticed that there was
a protest by lorry drivers about the cost of fuel. So it was probably not coincidental that The Guardian chose today to publish a blog post by their Technology Editor
Charles Arthur, claiming that
petrol is not that pricey really.
So when you plot petrol prices adjusted by inflation, they're not particularly excessive at the moment. Interesting, and quite a surprise (well, to me anyway). Ever the sceptic, I decided to calculate the same set of data for myself. Additionally, spurred on by one of the commenters on that post, I also decided to see what would happen if you plotted petrol prices against average earnings (also adjusted for inflation, of course).
My results for the first set of data (price per gallon adjusted for inflation) agree broadly with those created by The Guardian:
(
click to view larger)
There are slight differences, presumably because we've used slightly different sets of data for petrol price or RPI calculations, but broadly the graphs show the same thing: namely that in real terms petrol prices peaked during the First World War, reached all-time lows in 1927 and 1948, and have fluctuated around a common point throughout the post-War era. Obviously there have been ups and downs (a notable low in the late 70s with peaks either side of it) and the price today is somewhat above the average, but nothing ridiculous.
Now I produced a graph comparing real-terms price per gallon compared to real-terms average earnings. This one really
is a shocker!
(
click to view larger)
Astonishing to behold, but in terms of cost per earnings petrol hit an all-time low in about 1989 and has hardly changed since. Petrol has literally never been as
affordable as it has been for the past 15 years!
If anyone wants to view my figures, or check my methodology, the spreadsheet containing my data (in
OpenOffice format) is available
here.
Labels: politics, statistics
