Hear, Hear...Here, Here

A fine, impassioned tirade here from Cory Doctorow about ID cards - now being rolled out to people like him - and how Labour has killed liberty in this country:

Many of my British friends act as if I'm crazy when I say that we must defeat Labour in the next election. We're all good lefties, and a vote for the LibDems is considered tantamount to handing the country over to the Tories. But what could the Tories do that would trump what Labour has made of the country? The Labour Party has made a police state with a melting economy, a place where rampant xenophobia makes foreigners less and less welcome -- where we are made to hand over our biometrics and carry papers as we conduct our lawful business. The only mainstream party to speak out against this measure is the LibDems, and they will have my vote.

To my friends, I say this: your Labour Party has taken my biometrics and will force me to carry the papers my grandparents destroyed when they fled the Soviet Union. In living memory, my family has been chased from its home by governments whose policies and justification the Labour Party has aped. Your Labour Party has made me afraid in Britain, and has made me seriously reconsider my settlement here. I am the father of a British citizen and the husband of a British citizen. I pay my tax. I am a natural-born citizen of the Commonwealth. The Labour Party ought not to treat me -- nor any other migrant -- in a way that violates our fundamental liberties. The Labour Party is unmaking Britain, turning it into the surveillance society that Britain's foremost prophet of doom, George Orwell, warned against. Labour admits that we migrants are only the first step, and that every indignity that they visit upon us will be visited upon you, too. If you want to live and thrive in a free country, you must defend us too: we must all hang together, or we will surely hang separately.

This is an issue beyond politics: if the only way to destroy the cancer is by destroying Labour in its current form, so be it.

Proof That Authoritarianism Leads to Insanity

A government minister has spoken glowingly of the prospect of kids as young as six handing over their biometrics as she boasted that the Tories and LibDems would find it impossible to unpick the government’s ID card scheme.

Barking, totally barking.

UK Gov Short of Cash? Kill the ID Card

At a time when Labour is pledging "no tax increases", and yet is facing a bigger and bigger deficit, one easy part of the answer is clear: scrap ID cards now, and save yourself £19 billion you haven't got.

Open Source and UK Politics

The new dividing line between Labour and the Tories is less about a left-right split than about an authoritarian approach on one side and a more liberal one on the other. And Labour are on the wrong side of it. Many of their social and economic policies may have failed, but where they have succeeded is in developing a targeting, controlling, distrustful state. From the micromanagement of civil servants, teachers, doctors and the police, to ID cards, super databases and the growth of surveillance, the government's answer to too many problems has been the removal of autonomy from individuals and more oversight from Whitehall.

The Conservative analysis is that this over-controlling state is not only disastrously unpopular, it is also one of the key reasons why Labour, despite all its spending, has failed to achieve its goals. Endless supervision has been an expensive distraction, and has sapped energy and morale out of public life.

Amazing how the Conservatives are becoming the party of bottom-up openness - explicitly in the case of open source - and Labour seems determined to become its polar opposite.

Greenies Go Open

Pretty much a marriage made in heaven:

Open source software should be more widely available in order to help reduce the 'digital divide', according to Dr Caroline Lucas, Green MEP for the South East.

Dr Lucas has added her signature to a written declaration in the European Parliament - like an Early Day Motion (EDM) in the House of Commons - recognising the growing disparities in access to information and communication technologies throughout the European Union, and calling for increased use of open source technology.

She said: "The establishment of a digital divide is a new cause of social disparity which risks further excluding populations that are already vulnerable.

"New digital technologies have become an essential tool in all areas of life, including employment, education, and in personal leisure activities.

"European citizens have the right to freely access documents and information from the institutions which represent them, and it is about time that the use of open source software became more widespread.

"The European Union should take the necessary measures to help finance public research on open source software, and Parliament to switch its whole computer network to this type of technology.

Not that this is really a party issue: open source makes sense whatever your political persuasion, as David Cameron's increasing enthusiasm for it shows. Strange that only Labour doesn't get it: perhaps it's just too antithetical to its Stalinist positions on interception, internment without trial, ID cards, DNA databases et al.

You Know Open Source Has Really Arrived...

...when the two main political parties in the UK are squabbling over who is truer to the open source spirit:

David Cameron embraced Linux, open source and bottoms-up decision-making today as he detailed his vision of a Tory innovation policy in a speech at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

Cameron pledged that a Tory government would set the UK’s data free – but not in a bad way, like HMRC. Rather, he said, he wanted to ensure people could access information which allowed them to create “innovative applications that serve the public benefit”. This “information liberation” meant ensuring spending data was transparent for example, and that people could easily compare crime figures.

At the same time, he said, “We also want to see how open source methods can help overcome the massive problems in government IT programs”. Cameron said the Tories would reject Labour’s addiction to the mainframe model. Instead, he claimed, a Conservative government would follow private sector best practice and introduce open standards, “that enables IT contracts to be split up into modular components”.

...


Cameron’s pledge to open source comes just days after the minister for transformational government, Tom Watson, claimed that Labour is the party that really, you know, gets open source.

In his speech on Monday announcing the government’s Power of Information taskforce, he referred to an earlier speech where “I talked about the three rules of open source - one, nobody owns it. Two, everybody uses it. And three, anyone can improve it." He then recounted how the Tories immediately sent out an email “laying claim that in fact they are the ‘owners’ of these new ideas. I was accused of plundering policies from the Conservatives.”

Fight, fight, fight.

Warning: Common-Sense Attack!

Look out - the UK Government (or parts of it) are suffering an attack of common-sense:

President George W Bush's concept of a "war on terror" has given strength to terrorists by making them feel part of something bigger, Hilary Benn will say.

The international development secretary will tell a meeting in New York the phrase gives a shared identity to small groups with widely differing aims.

And Mr Benn, a candidate for Labour's deputy leadership, will confirm that UK officials will stop using the term.

The White House coined the phrase after the attacks of 11 September 2001.

Mr Benn will say: "In the UK, we do not use the phrase 'war on terror' because we can't win by military means alone.

It will be interesting to see what happen when Tony "Poodle" Blair finally deigns to move on.

Welcome to Topsy-Turvy Land

So let me get this straight: Labour, party of the left, seems locked in a loving embrace with that arch-capitalist, Bill Gates, while the Conservatives, party of the right, is smitten with that commie open source stuff:

The government could save more than £600 million a year if it used more open source software, the shadow chancellor has estimated.

George Osborne said the savings would cut 5% off Whitehall's annual IT bill.

He called for a more "level playing field" for all software companies, and urged "cultural change" in government.

The Politics of Blogging, the Blogging of Politics

I normally try to avoid posting about politics, since it tends to bring out the worst in bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum. But I'll make an exception for this, since I think it makes an important point about politics in the age of blogs:

Labour is a party that won and held power by mastering mainstream media, and as Mr Dale puts it "Blogs are a spin doctor's worst nightmare come true". That's bad news for the current ruling elite.

And good news for us proles.