I was at the Nick Clegg speech earlier today. He took aim at Labour’s pretty poor record on civil liberties, suggesting that the previous governments were more systematic and less casual than prominent ex-Ministers would have us believe. (Full text of the speech is here).
Although there were some fine words on Libel Reform and some interesting proposals on Freedom of Information, most of the discussion in the speech itself, and in questions afterwards, was on control orders and curfews. Clegg refused to outline how these might change, but did say that those who want to see them abolished completely “will be disappointed”.
There was one phrase that Clegg used which is particularly grating on the ears. This was when he said that there were people who ‘we know’ are planning atrocities, but we do not have the evidence to convict them. It stood out, because David Blunket had used precisely the same formulation during his pre-emptive retort on The Today Programme this morning, and I am sure the current and previous Home Secretaries have taken a similar line.
This line of argument sounds tough, plausible and savvy. The speaker gets to burnish his or her credentials as a realist. However, it is a stance that rests on very shaky moral ground. Control orders are a form of pre-emptive detention, and the argument which justifies them is exactly the same as those used by authoritarian governments around the world, when they detain their political opponents.
Moreover, it is a rude and obvious short-circuit of the very basic legal principles. If a Minister ‘knows’ that someone is a danger, then they should be charged and convicted. If there is not enough evidence to convict, then neither politicians, the police nor the general public get to use the word ‘know’ in their rhetoric. There simply is not the epistemological certainty for that kind of claim, especially not in the context of political arguments. A control order is an extreme form of accusation, and Deputy Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries must not be allowed to make such ‘accusations’ and leave them hanging.
As the Home Secretary conducts her review of control orders in the coming months, look out for examples of this rhetoric, “we know, but we cannot convict.” It is a half-formed argument, a question not an answer. It is a cowardly fudge for those who do not want to make the tough decision: do we let these suspects go, or do we allow phone-tapping evidence to be admissable in court? This is the issue at stake, and the phenomenon of control orders is simply a clever device for punting the decision. If Nick Clegg is really serious about restoring civil liberties to British citizens, then he and his Prime Minister need to stop using bad rhetoric, and start making tough choices.
Tag: UK (Page 15 of 21)
In the Independent, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes on the delights that post-colonials bring to the English language, and laments the decline of language and civility online:
The future looks bright then, until you notice those who use new technology without due care. Some crazed demons on Twitter believe anything goes. Written words matter and hold meanings beyond that narcissistic urge to send off instant thoughts. The Tory councillor who sent out a vile and scary message about me says it was a joke. After some thought I decided I will not press charges. My objections have been made and there is no need for more. Yet having read many blogs and tweets that followed the incident, I do wonder whether our manners and morals will survive and if English itself, the best thing about us, is now seriously endangered.
She joins Dame Helen Mirren in lamenting the decline in standards brought about by the new technologies. Andrew Marr recently made similar comments about ‘ranting’ bloggers.
I fear that such comments will become a regular punctuation in our discourse from now on. Such attitudes from the dead-tree columnists come about by a failure to understand that the new technologies like Twitter and teh blogs are not changing culture, but revealing it. Clay Shirky, in his bestseller Here Comes Everybody, likens the net to a public mall. Its a public space, but that doesn’t mean every conversation is directed at you. In a shopping centre, if you were to eavesdrop on a chat between a group of teenagers, then make comments about their awful slag, you would be regarded as, at best, a curmudgeonly pedant; or at worst, a dodgy weirdo worthy of a report to the mall security guards. Likewise with blogs and twitter, not every conversation in the public domain is intended to be a public pronouncement in the way Alibhai-Brown, Mirren and Marr traditionally understand it.
Of course, one could argue the opposite. Tweeting and blogging about a celebrity might also be likened to taking your conversation from the pub after last orders, and continuing it loudly outside the door of the house of the person you are talking about. There, the awkwardness, the social autism, is on the part of the speaker, not the listener. If (say) Yasmion Alibhai-Brown has to step over noisy yobs outside her gate, then she may well choose to call the police. Thankfully, to take the analogy to its conclusion, she has told the yobs (in this case a conservative Councillor from Birmingham) to “stop being so rude, and to bugger off”… which seems the most healthy course of action to me. Her disgust is registered without anyone’s free speech being censored. Dave Osler’s take on the case is interesting and Paul Sinha’s speaks my own mind perfectly:
If you believe that Paul Chambers is a victim of a miscarriage of justice … then you should also believe that the police have no role to play in the strange case of Alibhai Brown vs Compton.
Back to those who feel that the Internet is generally unpleasant: We can point out thousands of counter-examples! Paul Staines, and his phalanx of Tourettes-suffering anonymous commenters, get all the attention, because the blog is the online equivalent of a tabloid, intent on winning readers in the rudest and crudest way possible. However, for every Guido Fawkes there are hundreds of more thoughful bloggers, writing for pleasure and to seek out genuine and meaningful connections online. How to pick just one? Well, as it happens, I have Federay Holmes’ blog open on my browser (because she just won a PEN competition). She writes thoughful posts about politics, literature and family life, and seems to have as much sincerity as Fawkes has cynicism.
Alternatively, read the fantastic story of How Justin Long Affably and Reasonably Ended and Internet Flame War.
Finally, I might point to the huge continent of Internet dialogue that is Facebook. As far as I can tell, the discourse on that site is entirely made up of expressions of friendship, congratulatory messagages (concerning love and friendship) and photographs of events that are themselves marking friendship, love and achievement. It can be saccharine at times, but its entire structure pretty much enforces civility and niceness. There are ways to signify ‘Friends’ and ‘Like’, but no means to do the opposite.
One perk of working for English PEN at the Free Word Centre is the annual festival, which includes the welcoming of a poet-in-residence. Last year we had Ray Antrobus and Joshua Idehen dropping the rhymes. This year Kate Fox has been reciting poems to us at our desks. Under the alternym Kate Fox News, she quickly writes and publishes poems about current affairs, such as the Pope’s visit and the party conferences.
Kate recited for us an experimental poem she wrote yesterday entitled “Nick Clegg’s Conference Speech Remixed“. She has spliced some of Clegg’s soundbites together with realtime Twitter commentary.
Just imagine how different our country will be.
Not exactly a vision thing
Stick with us
It wasn’t a bad speech
Stick with us
Looks all so sincere
Stick with us
We’re stuck with U
I like this format. For one, it includes a random, crowd-sourced element. It is surprising how often the act of yeilding some control of your content to The Cloud or The Rabble yeilds something true and pleasing – Cybraphon and FOUND are the arch mongers of this type of art. I also like the juxtaposition of the primary source material – the speech – with the commentary. A poem that could not have been created before social media tools became ubiquitous.
On Twitter, I have been discussing the use of mental health terms in political speech with the journalist Beatrice Bray. In recent weeks, Guardian cartoonists Martin Rowson and Steve Bell have both used the term ‘psychotic’ to describe political figures in negative terms. Beatrice says this is wrong and that is marginalises people who are actually clinically diagnosed with psychosis.
On the one hand, I think this is a case of ‘useful’ political correctness. First, I’ve said before that a respect for names and labels, of people, groups or cities, is one of my tenets of useful and persusive speech. Free speech campaigners always reserve the right to offend… but when we do, we are usually referring to the right to offend the people we are talking about! What Beatrice is complaining of in this case, is that other people – those with an actual mental illness – are the ones being hurt in the cross-fire. And I have sympathy with her contention that the ‘hurt’ caused is a very real social marginalisation, rather than just ‘hurt feelings’.
On the other hand, I cannot shake a feeling at the back of my mind, a sense that Rowson and Bell and others who use mental health terminology, are in fact using the words as metaphors.
Often, the term employed as a metaphor is not always used properly. ‘Spastic‘ was often used to convey mental deficiencies when in fact it refers medically to a motor/physical illness; and schizophrenia means delusional and disorganised, not split-personality.
However, I think Rowson and Bell are at least getting their metaphors straight. They seek to describe the Conservatives’ policies as being dangerously out-of-touch with reality. They reach into our vocabularies for a word that describes such trait… and often, the word ‘psychotic’ fits the bill. We all know that David Cameron does not actually have a clinical mental illness… but the term seems the perfect metaphor for his political tactics (as least to a liberal lefty).
So, while many will consider the word extreme, they nevertheless know that it is an accurate metaphor for the concepts under discussion. Does that necessarily translate into harm against people with a clinical psychosis? Thoughts and opinions welcomed.
Yesterday, I went to the launch of the Orange’s Digital Election Analysis, a report by Demos Associate Anthony Painter. A key, yet slightly depressing, conclusion was that funding matters. The Conservatives were able to run a ‘retail’ campaign (a point agreed by Rishi Saha, their head of digital communications) whereas Labour had to plump for a more modest approach, using existing social networking tools to get people speaking and get feet on the pavement. Meanwhile, the Lib Dems were unable to capture the wave of enthusiasm that the #LeadersDebates gnerated, because they simply did not have the digital infrastructure in place… again, due to lack of funding.
Another insight from Saha was how important Web 1.0 technologies still are. The Tories have a 500,000 strong mailing list, which dwarves the readership of most national newspapers, and it generated several hundred thousand pounds worth of donations in only a few targeted mailouts. Lynn Featherstone, whose website was declared the best of the MPs campaigning websites, agreed – she has spent a great deal of time building up a thick and detailed e-mailing list that helped her increase her majority on 2005.
As the report acknowledges, there was a huge expectation that digital technology would transform the 2010 election. The fact that old media stole the (specifically the TV debates) was therefore a little disappointing. I think the lesson here is that social media and online engagement is something of a slow burner. The high watermark for this sort of thing, the Obama ’08 campaign, was two whole years in the making! With such long lead times, comprehensive sites like Fight the Smears and remarkably sophisticated yet unofficial campaign videos (my favourites were Vote for Hope and Les Misbarak) could be launched, tested and tweaked. A four week campaign doesn’t allow for similar innovation.
A lack of money can also be alleviated by a surfeit of time. Thousands of large and successful internet communities and pressure-groups have arisen online in the past decade, which at first glance might contradict Painter’s suggestion that the Money Matters. However, all these shoestring projects took months, if not years to grow. MP’s like Featherstone who want to exploit new technologies need to put months, if not years into the project. Launching a Twitter feed three weeks before election day means you can never build relationships, or gain a reputation as a trusted source of information, in time for that to pay dividends.
Digital Government
I am reading James Harkin’s Cyburbia at the moment. The book charts how computers and networks change the way we think and interact, and how they have inspired new forms of cyber-realist art like Memento, Crash, 21 Gramms and Sweet Fanny Adams in Eden. The new conversations that politicians are having with their constituents might be the analogous development in the world of politics. However, these developments, which the Orange report chronicles, concern politicians, in particular politicans as representatives. This is different from government and legislation, which still seems rooted in an earlier age. Nick Clegg, during his leadership campaign, made this point in a speech to the SMF:
For young people don’t any longer just aspire to be in control of their lives. They expect it. They’re not waiting to be given the power to decide things for themselves. They’ve already got it. they’re already using it.
And choice isn’t something they hope for. It is something they are conditioned to – something they exercise instinctively, unconsciously, every hour of every day of the year.
Yet – and here’s the crucial point for the political community – this increasingly affluent, well educated, self confident cohort are still treated as supplicants when they knock on the government’s door.
The MySociety projects (like TheyWorkForYou, WhatDoTheyKnow and FixMyStreet) are changing this, but it ios noteworthy that these are not government innovations. Direct.gov makes an attempt, but this is largely about administration of existing services, rather than introducing a different relationship between the government and the governed. I have previously sketched how this relationship might look, the beginnings of a cyber-realist politics – rather than hold central records of all our comings-and-goings, the process might be entirely reversed, with each citizen granting access to our records (NHS, benefits, tax, MOT, &ct) to civil servants, should we want to take advantage of a government service. My own ideas probably need a little refinement, but it would be interesting to know whether similar approaches are being seriously considered outside of the groovy think-tanks like Demos.
Additionally, the formal lawmaking process seems rooted in the nineteenth century. Debates are cut-short or undermined by pathetic time allocations and the whipping process, and the actual legislation produced by parliament is all but inpentrable to the layman. A cyber-leglislative approach, on the other hand, might see each clause and sub-clause given its own hyperlinked web-page. Debates could be exposed via webcams and interactive archives, rather than being buried in Hansard, which even in its online incarnation is still clunky metaphor for the printed and bound document, rather than a living, interactive resource we can all access and understand.
The Orange Digital Election Analysis shows that the task of persuading MPs to modernise is already well underway. Now for the Lords, the civil servants, and the bewigged, stockinged clerks in the Palace of Westminster.