I’m pleased to announce that I’ve written a chapter for Fair and Free: Labour, Liberty and Human Rights, the latest policy pamphlet from the Fabian Society.
Naturally, my section is on freedom of expression and privacy. The hope is always that Fabian pamphlets present ideas that the Labour Party could implement, if elected. I recommend that the next Labour Government should: reform the deeply illiberal Investigatory Powers Act; introduce a public interest defence to Offical Secrets laws; and abandon Home Office attempts to shut down non-violent radical speech. I also recommend that Labour tie any post-Brexit trade deals to respect for human rights. Doing business with rights abusing regimes ultimately makes us all less safe. Continue reading
Tag: Media (Page 6 of 36)
Hideous news from Las Vegas. It’s the deadliest mass shooting in the history of the United States.
Reading the coverage and the commentary, I’m reminded of the song ‘Nothing Ever Happens‘ by the Scottish band Del Amitri.
The song is 28 years old now. Some of the lyrics I find too simplistic, like a sixth former berating the world (“Ignorant people sleep in their beds, like the doped white mice in the college lab”). But in other ways it feels contemporary:
Nothing ever happens / Nothing happens at all / The needle returns to the start of the song and we all sing along like before
Discussing the Royals, Hate Speech and Free Speech on the BBC London Drive Time Show with Eddie Nestor
This blog is useful for many things: a jotter where I can experiment with half formed ideas; an outlet to vent my frustration at some form of shoddy public thinking; to impart advice or recommendations; or simply a place to marvel at the wonderful things that humanity or nature has created.
Today, however, it serves the useful purpose of providing l’espirit d’escalier—an opportunity to add to a conversation, after it has concluded!
The new Labour MP for Kensington & Chelsea is Emma Dent Coad, and she has caused controversy at the Labour Party conference by being rude about the royal family. Some of the things she said about Prince Harry have turned out to be false, but she also made some pertinent points about how they spend taxpayers money. This has prompted a conversation about the limits of civil and respectable speech, and echoes some of the discussion in the USA right now, about whether athletes who #TakeAKnee during the national anthem are showing this respect, and if so, to whom.
All this is ripe for discussion on a call-in radio show. Eddie Nestor was leading the debate on his BBC drive time show yesterday, and I went on air to make an uncompromising case for free speech. You can listen to the entire show again on the BBC iPlayer, either on the web or on the app, for the next thirty days. You can also listen to my contribution on SoundCloud, or via the player below. Continue reading
Jodie Whittaker has been cast as the next star of Doctor Who—the first woman to play the rôle. There has been much discussion about the significance of this: Of the slow but noticeable trend towards more female characters leading major science fiction and fantasy stories; and about the backlash from those men who oppose this trend in general, and the casting of a female Doctor in particular. Continue reading
A simple twitter bot made by Russel Neiss does one thing: convert each of President Donald Trump’s tweets into the format of an official presidential statement. Here’s one where which confirms that his Executive Orders are indeed intended to be a ‘Travel Ban’ (which is odd because his own Justice Department are currently embroiled in a court case arguing that they are not).
https://twitter.com/RealPressSecBot/status/871674468896194560
This speaks to last week’s post about content shorn of attribution. How information is presented is crucial to how the message is interpreted. And tweaking the way in which something is presented might actually reveal an hypocrisy or two. Continue reading