#murdochgate

On of the upsides of the way that the Tories targeted Damian McBride earlier this year (getting Iain Dale sued in the Mail in the process) is that Andy Coulson is now fair game following #murdochgate (and if you're thinking of trying Twitter to see what it's for, now is a good time to start just to post things with '#murdochgate' in them).

Full story here. Let's hope that the Tories take a while to read the writing on the wall.

If they want to play the kind of war-of-attrition that they've started this year off with, they can start to see that it cuts both ways.

About a month to go

I'll be off to Belmullet for the usual holiday (regulars here may recall this is always the destination these days).

They've had particularly good news in town lately (via Slugger)

Anti-politics = pro-community?

This post has two virtues.

1. It uses the word 'politics' in a way that will annoy Shuggy (and the result is always worth a read)

2. It's quite good.

I'm a bit too busy to think it through at the moment, but my instant response is that it's a mistake to mix up the current stalemate for 'politics'. 

Meet the master race

Here (ta Warren)

Should probably find something more serious to be annoyed about

I've been annoyed every time I've watched the news today at the way they cover the tennis.

Why do they show clips of players and their families (in the crowd) celebrating winning a point - in slow motion?

They do this with football as well. Slo mo is supposed to be there to highlight the skill - it says so much about what sport on TV is for.

As I said, this really annoys me.

Lottery numbers

On the subject of Rab C Nesbitt....

Soil & Pimp - get your free live album here!

If you like a bit of exuberant soul-jazz then you're probably already aware of the Soil & Pimp sessions. Here's a YouTube taster:



And if you go here, there's what is, in effect, a free live S&P album taken from their Bush Hall and Roundhouse gigs last year - I missed both of them and I've been kicking myself ever since. I don't want to overdo it, but it a great recording and full of good surprises.

I'm probably going to the Hop Farm festival tomorrow to see Mr Weller (among others) so if you're there, tweet me baby! http://twitter.com/paul0evans1

Garlic comedy

My friend Torcuil has co-written a sitcom, and it's been aired on the BBC Alba Channel. It's in Garlic which is the language that the sweaties are supposed to speak... it's probably in poor taste to lapse into any comments about Rab C Nesbitt (which for some reason, most of the English can't make head-nor-tail of - I've not spent long in Scoland, but I always have to translate it for people here) and it's available on BBC Alba's i-player for a limited time.

The premise for the drama is an everyday administrative disaster scenario:

The government has decided to send ALL the rival Gaelic language development agencies to ONE office, in an ACTUAL Gaelic speaking area on the Isle of Skye. When they're not fighting each other to leave, the professional Gaels are barricading the door against the Gaelic community. It's job dispersal gone mad. It's Broadford or Bust!

The glorious day cometh....

• Post Office sell off 'shelved'
• East Coast rail line 'nationalised
• ID Cards scheme 'teetering'

Now where did I put those blindfolds and cigarettes?

Will it work?

Too busy at the moment to think this one through, so here's a question:

Will a Labour version of the 'Tax Bombshell' campaign from 1992 ('cuts bombshell'?) do for Gordon Brown or Alan Johnson what it did for John Major?

On the admittedly adventurous assumption that it's possible, do Labour really want to win an election in the way that Major did? I suppose a low-majority Parliament would be less awkward for Labour than the Tories, Maastricht rebels and all.

But surely Labour - communications-wise - are totally stuffed? I'm conscious of all of the really solid stuff - the economy, the MPs expenses, the irresistible siren call of change, the disenchantment with a squabbling party (squabbling over what, exactly? If Labour could do itself one huge favour, it would be to deselect loads of it's prominent faces - they really are a complete dead-weight).

But for me, the whole error is compounded by the contrast with Obama. For Labour, it's like there's a fantasy world in which their great plans - all cooked up behind closed doors - will somehow be greeted with a fanfare of approval and that the only thing we've not quite got is Blair's ability to present these solutions.

Maybe I'm oversimplifying here, but I really don't think any political party will ever run a successful campaign on any issue again until it learns that ideas have to come from the public in some way - that the public need to be involved in the process. 

I'd never argue that you can earn respect or votes by asking people what you should do in office, but I'd suggest that Labour could do worse than asking people to describe the problems, or to collaboratively map out coherent proposals for change, and ensure that plenty of their own people are there in the mix providing the political ballast, saying things like 'no-one will vote for that' or 'newspaper owners have something of a veto over that.'

If you want to be cynical, it's a way of looking like you're listening. Or if you want to be a bit of a lefty, it's a way of breaking the monopsony on policy advice that is provided by civil servants, pollsters, think-tanks and pressure groups.

Either way, it'd be nice to see Labour even trying to make an effort to look like this fucking obvious possibility has vaguely occured to at least one person in the Victoria St HQ. I'd strongly suggest - with one possible exception - that it hasn't. (You know who you are, don't you, matey?)

It's probably too late, and there are probably too many new factors that dwarf the 'non-inclusive policymaking' problem. But take a look at ideas like www.debategraph.org or www.mixedink.com - again, not panaceas, but pointers to what a positive e-democracy could look like, and online indicators of what a possible offline approach could be.

Labour could do worse than trying to at least look like it doesn't think of itself as a bunch of wizards that know all of the answers.

That really would be too much of a lie to get away with.

Jacko

I was in the West End of London last night - as I walked through Trafalgar Square, an impromptu and slightly incompetent 'Vigil' was being held.

It wasn't an horrible mawkish Lady Di thing. As I walked up the Charing Cross Road, there were loads of people walking along, singing Jacko songs. Later on, in the tube station, there were about 20 people standing in the ticket hall singing...

"Sunshine .... Moonlight .... Good times .... Boogie!" - lots of clapping and whooping.

London had gone a bit suntroked and bonkers and it was quite nice really. It made a change. For most people, I suspect that it was fairly unreflective. Unusually, every radio in town had been playing only one artist all day - it had quite a positive unifying effect on a big city.

It all really makes the case for national days of celebration, doesn't it? How about 'Marvin Gaye Day', or 'Shane MacGowan Day'?

Whatever else you say about Michael Jackson, there'll always be the slendour of 'Off The Wall' - a cracking LP with a 'She's Out of My Life' sized mistake on it. When I was a teenager, there was the stuff I pretended to like and the stuff I really did like but kept quiet about. Off The Wall was pretty near the top of that second category.

Dogfood

It's time that a few other people were made to eat the kind of dogfood that MPs and BBC people have had to sample this year.

We could start with Network Rail, for instance. I can't think of a better case for a consumer co-op model of management. Can you?

Pretty fundamental

Bill Thompson isn't keen on the idea of broadcasting levies because...

"They want to keep us all in a world where vast numbers of people spend most of their precious leisure time watching a flat-screen television on which the limits of interactivity are set by an electronic programming guide and, if you're very lucky, a red button that lets you vote on your most-disliked Big Brother housemate.

Of course the unions want to protect the jobs of their members, and they cannot be criticised for this, but sometimes bad things happen to good people. Many fine writers, including my partner, are suffering because book publishing is going through enormous turmoil, but there is no subsidy on offer to them.

In broadcasting actors are out of work while directors and production crews see budgets cut and funding dry up, and journalists are living with uncertainty.

This is happening because the age of television is ending, just as the age of printed textbooks and user manuals is ending, as the age of the hand loom and the wheelwright and the scribe ended before them. It is a hard change to live through, and those who are only skilled to work in the world of television will inevitably fear it, just as print-only journalists fear the online future.

But this is not a reason to distort the growth of online services in order to give television a few more years."

And that's all fine if there is a genuine universal hunger for full-on interactivity all of the time. If - when the dust settles - it turns out that lean-back media has no audience and that there isn't a sizable slice of the population that doesn't wish for passive consumption as opposed to engaging with everyone they can reach in a collaboratively-filtered reputation-managed world.

Either way, there's a significant burden of proof to justify killing the most attractive industry in the UK and depriving us of it's products.

But what if (as I strongly suspect) a large percentage of the population just want to be entertained in their living rooms. In the absence of effective collective action, this demand will suck content in from where it can get it. It will suck it in from markets that are structurally protected. The end result will be screens dominated only by quality US content and crappy US content.

I'm OK about yielding to Asia's comparative advantage in rice production. But if the sections of the population that are least interested in interactivity (and I suspect that there are social classes that are more represented in this group than others) then the consequences are quite serious, aren't they?

It will be a disaster for a sector that is comparable to financial services in it's contribution to the economy. It will choke off thousands of hidden subsidies to local arts and performance projects.

And what does ..."distort the growth of online services" mean? It seems to assume that there is such a thing as a working undistorted market in anything?

I thought we'd buried that idea finally over the last year?

Digital Britain has advocated a massive handout to hardware and connectivity suppliers in order to help them distort the market away from people who used to create valuable content and sell it, because the spending on connectivity and hardware has rocketed while revenues for creators has tumbled.

And why do people pay for connectivity, set-top boxes, flat screens and iPods? To watch things that they can get for free - that's why. Programme-makers have been subsidising Apple and Humax for years!

Hardware and connectivity levies would have provided a tiny bit of compensation for these losses - and I do mean tiny.

And another thing: The Labour Representation Committee was founded all of those years ago to ensure that time/cash rich people didn't have a monopoly on political representation.

With this fetishisation of interactivity, it looks like we're going to turn the clock back to the time when 'active citizens' - those Dickensian busybodies - are the ones who step in to speak for working people who are too busy or preoccupied to 'engage'. Public service broadcasting - and PSB journalism - has always kept these people informed and helped them to be represented.

That, and representative democracy....

It seems that all of this has to be swept aside because the lobbyists who have dominated the Digital Britain response have collectively ensured that HMG will cast all caution aside in order to subsidise a genuinely expensive unwanted 'demand' for connectivity and interactivity.

This is not just about panhandling Unions demanding that their jobs should be be preserved. It's about democracy, culture, equality and representation.

It's pretty damn fundamental.

Slavoj Žižek on the Iranian situation

I'm no specialist on the current situation in Iran, but this looks quite a convincing piece of analysis to me:

"Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of wealth in the country)."