Dissident

VoteMatch - help in decising who to vote for in the European Elections

With the current events in Westminster, you could be forgiven for not realising we are just a couple of weeks from an election.  On Thursday 4 June, voters in Britain will have a chance to elect their representatives in the European Parliament for the next five years.

Today I came across Vote Match

This tool is incredibly simple: give your opinion on thirty statements, mark which ones you consider to be particularly important or unimportant, and the website calculates where you stand in relation to the parties standing for election in your region based on their own responses to the same statements.  It's totally transparent - the website doesn't just give you a match, it explains how the calculation was made.

No doubt you are planning to cast your vote on 4th June and if like me you are somewhat unsure about which party stands for what what in these elections it might just help you make up your mind.

Have a go now. And please forward it on to all your friends and family to help them make up their minds as well.  They've tried to make this as easy for you as possible with the help of Twitter and Facebook.

On the “party choice” question at the end I suggest that you select all by skipping the page.  It means that you can compare your thoughts with all parties.  You can skip the details section at the end too.

I am reliably informed that a number of people have been very surprised by the results. For myself it helped me confirm that the party I was going to vote for, purely instinctively, does in fact have the best match to my answers to the policy questions put forward.

UK Undermines Core Western Values

The following was article was picked up recently from Wikileaks. Possibly over-dramatic in a couple of places, but nevertheless indicative of a worrying trend.

British courts continue to disgrace Enlightenment values.

This month saw a secret UK court hearing, with secret participants, produce a secret order to secretly gag the population, the terms of which are secret and the revelation of which is punishable by
upto 15 years of imprisonment. How many of these orders exist is unknowable--we glimpse at the severity of the problem only when the orders are violated.

Secret gag actions are usually associated with the likes of Saudi-Arabia, China or North Korea. Closed-door justice for the wealthy emasculates the UK population and grants succor to repressive
regimes across the globe who can look to the UK for validation.

It is time these orders were treated with the contempt they deserve.

Wikileaks previously released the gag order for the Northern Rock bank collapse, now we release the secret gag order made by High Court Justice Tugendhat on Dec 15, 2008, aimed at covering up an
email leak from the British establishment. The secret order was first targeted at UK newspapers, but our copy was destined for the UK Parliamentary blogger 'Guido Fawkes', editor of 'order-order.com'.
The summary states:

       1. The identities of the Applicants/Claimants must remain confidential.
       2. The fact of the existence of the Orders must remain confidential.
       3. The terms of the Orders must remain confidential.

The order concerns emails from Zac Goldsmith, a noted 2005 Conservative party recruit, and social climber sibling Jemima Khan. Both are heirs to the late billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith. Needless to say there are no teachers, small business owners or technicians being granted secret media gag orders in the UK.

The order states that anyone who knows of the order must obey it, so plaintiff lawyers Carter Ruck have served the order on media outlets across the British Isles.

Britain is an increasingly dangerous Western disgrace, but you won't hear about it in the British press. The examples needed to elucidate just how the country is failing can not be mentioned, accelerating
its decline.

In the last five years Britain has become the the world's largest arms exporter, the preferred home of Russian and middle-eastern oligarchs, the world center for "libel tourism" and, as far as we can tell, the Western capital of secret gag orders.

Only a week ago, on December 17, the High Court of London gave the go ahead for a libel tourism action against the New York Times.

The same day the Hon. Denis MacShane (Labour) with two MPs from other parties, told Westminster that UK courts had become a "Soviet-style organ of censorship".

The UK has recently introduced a national Internet censorship scheme, a national ID card and is about to spend 12 billion pounds pushing the British population's web-searches, emails, sms messages and
telephone callings records through a central database run by its spy agency, GCHQ.

This month also saw British police go into Parliament, without a warrant, and rifle through the files of a senior member of the opposition, the Hon. Damian Green MP, who was alleged to have leaked
trivial details about immigration policy to the press.

What's left? The Gulag?

The Ten Commandments of Blogging

I picked this item up from The Times newspaper yesterday. Church leaders have drawn up a new set of Ten Commandments aimed at delivering “God bloggers” from the temptations of the blogosphere.

1. You shall not put your blog before your integrity
2. You shall not make an idol of your blog
3. You shall not misuse your anonymity to sin
4. Remember the Sabbath by taking one day off a week
5. Honour your fellow bloggers above yourselves and do not give undue significance to their mistakes
6. You shall not murder someone else’s honour, reputation or feelings
7. You shall not use the web to commit adultery in your mind
8. You shall not steal another person’s content
9. You shall not give false testimony against your fellow blogger
10. You shall not covet your neighbour’s blog ranking. Be content with your own content.

I seem to have already broken one commandment, since I’m updating my blog on a Sunday. I wonder how many can say they haven’t broken number 10?

Civil Servant 'crap speak'

I was at a Policy and Performance event earlier this month, where one of the issues raised in my sub-group was the difficulty councils had in communicating with their citizens. This couldn't be better demonstrated by this snippet from a recent Public Sector Forums Newslletter.    

This comes courtesy of the West Midlands Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership (RIEP), in a report of a recent workshop designed to see how it could best use £1.3m of funding being set aside to improve leadership and management skills in councils.

"Participants acknowledged that 'understanding the sectoral context' was a pre-requisite and that the full range of both personal and organisational capacities were required to underpin any focus and emphasis attached to a leadership intervention. ...[T]here are two themes that represent priorities for Local Authorities at the present time:
[1] Enabling and supporting community leadership through improved partnership and locality working to ensure the delivery of improved community outcomes.
Working for and with communities in order to understand and meet community needs, through effective community consultation; understanding, prioritizing, influencing and delivering improved quality of life indicators, and recognizing and working with the interdependencies required in place shaping.  Encouraging trust by engaging with and enabling service priorities to be shaped by all sections of the community.  Leading beyond the authority through effective partnership working; influencing others and building trust; understanding and mainstreaming integrated public services; levering in additional resources through partnerships, and performance managing partnerships which deliver improved community outcomes."

Or, effectively, in other words: "We need to make sure we involve the right people."

Apparently, this has been submitted to the Plain English Campaign Golden Bull(shit) Awards. I think it stands a very good chance of winning!

Mark Prisk talks about the issues of running a small business in Briatin today

As a small business owner myself, struggling under the ever increasing burden of government regulations and stultifying tax, I had a vested interest in the eCademy networking event that took place on Tuesday 15th July, where Mark Prisk MP was guest speaker.

Mark Prisk  is MP for Hertford & Stortford, Shadow Minister, Enterprise, Deregulation & Competition and Shadow Minister for Cornwall  He presented on "Running a Business in Britain Today".

As a former businessman, Mark has a wide interest in all entrepreneurial activity. He is the vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary groups on Small Business and on Freelancers, the treasurer of the all-party group on Entrepreneurship, and a trustee of the Industry Parliamentary Trust

I captured the full presentation on video (24 mins) - well worth looking at if you have the time - a mix of amusing anecdotes, worrying statistics, and maybe hope for the future. Some key points I noted:

• There are currently 3000 business support schemes in operation, managed by 2000 different public bodies at a total cost to the taxpayer (i.e. you and me) of £2.6 billion (yes...billion!)
• A recent survey revealed that 75% of these schemes have no ideas whether their money is being spent effectively - i.e. there is no measure of success.
• Only half of one percent of business owners of these schemes were satisfied with their service.
• Government does not recognise the existence of home businesses or SME's with less than 50 employees - except of course when recovering business taxes - i.e. they are simply not on the radar.

So, if these statistics are not sufficient to warrant reform of the system, I don't know what is!

See also the Doug Richard's report (he of Dragon's Den fame) on the proposals to overhaul the Government's business support system, which it describes as "complex" and "out of control".

If you want to know more about the Conservative's ideas on small business reform, check out the website. There's also a link to a nationwide survey which Mark Prisk is coordinating to see how a Conservative Government could best help SME’s. Regardless of your political persuasion, if you are a small business owner, you may as well have your say.

 

Enterprises urged to pay staff to use their own kit

According to analyst group Gartner, enterprises could make significant savings by paying staff to use their own laptops. The report suggested that a monthly payment of £47 per employee would be cost effective and attractive to staff. Gartner said that schemes that encourage staff to use their own laptops would reduce maintenance and support costs and improve productivity.

"The costs go down for the enterprise if the notebook is provided by the employee because the employee takes more responsibility fixing the computer I their own time"

the Gartner analyst is reported as saying.

This touched a sensitive nerve for me, given my own experience as a consultant. More often than not I'm compelled to use the ‘corporately approved' hardware and software build for PC and laptops when I'm working at a client's site, which usually means - at best - IE6 with no plug-ins, 3 versions back of Flash player and an obscure version of PDF reader. The only plus point is that Vista is not yet widely deployed. The transition from my personal laptop configuration to these corporate versions is like stepping back to medieval times (though in reality it's probably no more 5 - 10 years). No more one-click access via my Firefox plug-in to my del.icio.us account for tagging useful web pages; no more one-click social bookmarking to Digg or Stumble; no more one-click saves to Google Notebook.

I get the impression that any whiff of user productivity is sniffed out by these ICT departments and vigorously stamped out, as a recent experience would seem to reinforce. A short time ago I managed to install the Google toolbar on my corporate PC. All was well for a couple of weeks, and then I got one or two obscure messages from the virus checking software. I made the mistake of calling the IT support desk, who soon sussed that I had installed the toolbar (shock, horror), and wanted to arrange an appointment for a techy to visit my desk and remove it. Needless to say I haven't returned these calls, and have so far managed to dodge the IT security police. In the meantime, I can save a few seconds each time I want to do a Google search by using the toolbar. But then again, a few seconds saved for each search mounts up to a few minutes each day and maybe even a few hours each month. Multiply this across several hundred employees and you begin to wonder if the inmates are running the asylum!

Perhaps one day (but unfortunately not in my life time), these ICT departments will begin to understand the business needs of the enterprise and provide the services that will contribute towards the business and user productivity. Devolving ownership and responsibility to users for their own PCs and laptops is probably a step too far for most enterprises, but I remain hopeful that it will happen one day. On that note I will hastily finish - I think I see an IT person approaching looking for a rogue laptop!

Browsing the web cost billions in lost productivity

I worry that some people believe this sort of rubbish. According to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) the average UK worker spends ninety minutes a week misusing corporate internet connections.

The CBI said that workers are spending roughly an hour and a half out of their week visiting web sites that have no relation to their work whatsoever. Cumulatively, it said, this costs UK businesses some £10.6bn in lost productivity over the course of a year.

The CBI polled some 503 businesses, who it said employed nearly one million workers between them. Two thirds of those who took part admitted that they think that their staff use work time – ie, not lunch, or formal breaks, to look at non-work sites. It identified social networking, web-based email and shopping and holiday sites as the biggest draws. Overall, they estimate the annual cost, per employee to be the region of £1000. According to the report, this costs UK businesses £10.6 billion (yes billion) a year in lost productivity.

Firstly of all, do they really expect us to believe that if there was a complete embargo on 'non work related websites' that we'd be saving the economy getting on for £11 billion? This assumes that these employees wouldn't be doing other 'wasteful' things with their time if they weren't surfing the web - like reading a newspaper or doing su-doku, or otherwise expanding their knowledge.

Secondly, they seem to have concluded that any serendipitous use of the internet is wasted time. What about all that information that has been both consciously and sub-consciously absorbed during this browsing experience? I wonder if they've quantified the times when some apparently useless nugget of information has been stored in the sub-concious and then used at some later date to contribute to the well being of the person (e.g. some health information), or maybe even applied to the workplace in a way that has improved productivity?

I'm saddened that a respected industry body such as the CBI should publish such report like this that draws some very debatable conclusions on a potentially flawed hypothesis that serendipitous use of the web is bad for business. Maybe they'd have us bring the workhouse back?

I just hope that managers will not use this report as further ammunition to restrict workers from using the web for anything other than browsing their own company's web site.  Let's not apply 19th century working practices to 21st century workers!

The meaning of life, the universe and everything

You may recall that the answer to the question “What is the meaning of life, the Universe and everything?” was  “42”, according to the Deep Thought Computer in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

The problem for Arther Dent and Ford Prefect was that in order to understand the answer, they first had to find out what the ‘Ultimate Question’ was.

Well, now we know. It’s clearly “how many days we should be allowed to hold a suspected terrorist without charge.”  How, this will affect the meaning of life, the universe and everything is no entirely clear, except if we were to presume that the outcome of today’s vote in Parliament resulted in defeat for the Government and the realisation that the game is up for Gordon.  Will this herald a new dawn, or will the earth cease to exist tomorrow? This is indeed a worrying time for us all!

Equality and diversity - regulating the regulators

I wonder what it is about Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPBs), Non-Government Organisations (NGO's) and other Quangos that somehow feel compelled to monitor and report on socio-demographic data that is not part of their brief?

I encountered this first hand when I was contracted by LSC and DIUS last year to set up the Information Authority. This afforded me some brief (albeit heady) power over the Individual Learning Record (ILR), which is the process by which schools, colleges, universities and employers working in the further education (FE) sector report on courses they're running, the trainees on the courses and the training outcomes. I am reminded of one particular request from the LSC to modify the ILR for 2008/9 to start collecting information from the FE sector about age, ethnicity and sexual orientation of trainees. When probed about why they wanted this information, it was "to ensure compliance with equality and diversity legislation". Fortunately I was in a position at the time to reject this request, mainly on the grounds that the LSC had no statutory right to monitor and report on this data. They were there as a funding body - full stop! It's the duty of the schools and colleges etc. to comply with the legislation, not for some other self-appointing authority to report and regulate.

I was therefore mildly alarmed when I heard that the IDeA wanted to start collecting data on ‘equality and diversity' of users of the Community of Practice platform. I understand this only extends to age and ethnicity of users, which is not quite as pervasive as the LSC example. The main concern here though is opaqueness of purpose, i.e. what the data is needed for and what would happen to it once it became available to other organizations working in the local government sector. I've so far managed to head off a proposal whereby this data would be compulsorily provided as part of the CoP platform registration process, but I don't think the requirement has quite gone away.

It may be that the motives are entirely innocent, but I don't understand why there is this perceived need to categorise and label people when there is no distinction made as to who and how they use the CoP platform. It's the same interface, the same applications, the same support procedures etc. I remain suspicious of any organization that wants to start putting people into pigeon holes, particularly when this is done under the banner of ‘equality'. After all, isn't this an oxymoron?

Tax Bill up 50% under Labour

Juts picked this snippet up from the Tax Payer's Alliance latest report. Even when inflation is taken into account Britain’s tax burden has soared by over 50% in the last ten years under the Labour government, the report claims.

In its report, the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA), a lobbyist for fairer taxes, said a combination of up-front and stealth levies has led to a total tax bill of £517billion a year.

In other words, a single British household has seen their annual tax bill rise, helped by fiscal drag, to an extraordinary £20, 700.

“Shamefully,” a significant part of the tax rise has been in the form of ‘stealth’ taxes, the report says, pointing to the 10p sting in last year’s so-called “tax-cutting” budget.

Alongside stealth taxes, there have been “sly increases” in the shape of fiscal drag – the failure to adjust tax thresholds in line with earnings and asset prices.

Over the last decade, the TPA said Labour has hiked taxes in this way by £14 billion a year, partly explaining the group’s view that taxpayers have been ‘ripped off.’

Wallets have been hit even harder because taxpayers have been made to pay additional fees or charges for what used to be ‘free’ or virtually free public services.

For example, the Driver Vehicle Licensing Agency now takes £300 million per annum from the sale of driving licences, while its business in personalised number plates brings in another £100 million per annum.

Passport charges are another good earner, the report said pointing out that in 1997 a passport cost £18, but last year the cost soared to £72, a quadrupling in price.

These charges now cost taxpayers nearly £500 million per annum, and the TPA said it fears further costs could be on the way given the  increasing expense of ID cards.  (If  this  touches a nerve -  might be worth checking out No2ID - I'm already signed up!)

But it is the NHS and local authorities which have proved the biggest money-grabbers, the report says.

Its authors said school dinners charges have risen 50% in ten years, parking charges and fines have risen to over £1 billion and hospital car parks raise over £100m in England alone.

Mike Denham, a former economist at the Treasury who authored the report, reflected that “the government has used every trick in the book to drive up the tax burden.”

“Ordinary families are paying a heavy price,” he said. “People are increasingly beset by record levels of taxation and growing service charges, but there has been no improvement in services in return.
“We find ourselves paying more and more for less and less. With rocky economic times ahead, this rate of taxation simply cannot be sustained.”

Matthew Elliott, the TPA's chief executive, believes the British public are being “ripped off in the most shameful way.”

“The cloak and dagger methods the Government is using the squeeze money out of hard working people are deplorable,” he said.

“With fewer police stations, limited GPs’ hours, libraries closing, rarer bin collections and a host of other cuts we are getting less for our money than ever before.

"People are facing higher fuel bills, more expensive food and much bigger mortgage bills – and on top of all that they are being stealth taxed and charged more than ever before. This con has got to stop.”

Here here I say! Roll on 2010 (or preferably sooner!)