Bristol pub landlord changes sign in carpark to “Porking Yard”. Local mosque that’s next door complains. Somerset & Avon Police get Magistrates to slap an ASBO on him. Pub landlord responds, in that hilarious way that only us Brits can do, by setting up a jolly ASBO burger van.

Ugh, I don’t know who to hate more in this sorry episode. The guy who put the sign up, for being an extremely unfunny twat? Those who complained for not having the strength to just ignore him (signs with the word ‘Pork’ on them should be pretty low on the British Muslim community’s list of problems, tbh)? The police, who were happy to waste time to apply for the ASBO rather than, I dunno, trying to catch people who actually commit crimes?

Why is life so complicated now? Before it was easy to pick sides, who was wrong and who was right; who had done bad and who hadn’t. Now we get situations where it’s just the loathsome characters battling it out - e.g. Saddam v. The Sun v. George Bush, or George Galloway v. Sen. Robert Bennett. Are there any good guys left? At all?

So, I’ve been not blogging this week, mainly due to work (one tedious essay completed, another one due, also a dissertation presentation - I am really regretting taking the Management of Technology course I did last week), another essay returned with a not-so-good mark, random fits of depression, fubarred sleep patterns, people happily fucking about with my schedule as they please, and other such unwholesome delights. Sorry.

Anyway, I’m not one to get too down, and if Arsenal win the cup final against “them” tomorrow I could be a good deal happier (as will Wil Wheaton, possibly). We’re wearing red for the match (Man U fans protesting against Glazer’s takeover will be wearing black as a protest, forgetting that as that’s the colour of United’s away strip, so will everybody else), which apparently makes you more likely to win (as Brazil and Real Madrid will testify). CSKA Moscow hopefully started a trend for teams in red this week.

It’s not been all doom and gloom of late. Last night, after failing spectacularly to arrange a trip to see Star Wars III (though after seeing this I probably wouldn’t be able to take it seriously), I instead watched the highly delightful In The Thick Of It on the BBC, the sort-of “Yes, Minister” for the 21st century (”Yes, Spin Doctor”?). Although the tyrannical foul-mouthed “PM’s enforcer” in the programme is just a little too familiar and one-dimensional, the programme itself is still quite nicely worked. While it relies on the wobbly, faux fly-on-the-wall camera technique of “The Office”, it isn’t anywhere near as cringe-inducing (for example, the made-up-on-the-spot abomination of the press conference Chris Langham’s character fields, the centrepiece of the first episode’s plot, is not even screened, merely talked about). Instead the action concentrates on the characters struggling with each other’s ineptitude (the bit where they come up with a policy of compulsory plastic bag ownership while brainstorming for ideas is particularly hilarious), rather than making fools of themselves. All in all it’s quite pleasing. Just a pity it’s only on BBC4 and not available to everyone on BBC2. Maybe it’ll repeat at some godforsaken time of the day.

For days now I’ve been trying to work out how to make spaghetti carbonara, like you get it in the restaurant - i.e. a thick, delicious, creamy sauce of egg, cream and parmesan, coating lovely nice bacon and spaghetti. Mmm. Sounds simple - and the recipes out there don’t sound that hard. And I pride myself on being a reasonably decent cook.

But after my sixth attempt at it tonight, it has once again ended up being quite runny and horrible, and after eating it I felt slightly queasy at the thought I might be eating raw egg. Actually that might be the thought that I might not be as good a cook as I thought. Either way, I don’t seem to be very good at making what is quite a simple dish. I’ve tried warming the cream/egg mixture before I pour it into the pan (made no difference), varying the egg/cream ratio (which just turned it into scrambled eggs), whipping the cream beforehand (that just went horribly wrong) - no success. So…has anyone out there got a foolproof way of cooking it? Please? Before I go mad?

Trivia: It’s called Spaghetti Carbonara, literally “Spaghetti in the Manner of the Coal Miner” as according to local folklore, it was a favourite of Italian coal miners

IPPR policy wonk Ben Rogers writes in The Guardian today advocating compulsory voting in the UK, as an antidote to low turnout. However, compulsory voting is an even dumber idea than postal voting (although compulsory postal voting would be even dumber, I suppose). Rogers dresses it up as a way of guaranteeing the hard-won right to vote, and empowering the lower classes. These are both spectacularly wrong.

First, we have a right to vote. But like all rights, whether we can exercise them is up to us. We have a right to free speech, but we are not compelled to air our views. Similarly, many have died for our right to vote - but they also died for our right not to vote. Stripping the opportunity for refusal to vote isn’t empowering those who don’t vote, but infantilising them.

Proponents of compulsory voting say that this right not to exercise a vote is safeguarded by a “none of the above” (NotA) box; this is misleading, as NotA is not a valid option in an election. If the majority of people in a constituency put a cross by it, does it mean that constituency wouldn’t return an MP? Of course not. Thus, NotA is an automatically inferior option to the others on the list, as if cannot ‘win’. The preference not to vote is the result of a totally free and private decision between equals. Compulsory voting upsets that free choice - the option of NotA is not an equal compared to the others. With the voter inside the polling station, with a piece of paper and pencil in front of them, it is implicitly compelling people to choose one of the candidates; as an indifferent or ignorant voter is less well-informed, the system is forcing people who previously stayed out of the decision into making poor, ill-informed decisions.

This puts the polls even more at the mercy of short-term, populist, rant-now-think-later policies than it currently is. Perhaps it’s more than coincidence that the Tories’ election supremo, Lynton Crosby, earned his stripes succeeding with such tactics in his native Australia, one of the few countries to employ compulsory voting.

Low turnout is, as many of us agree, a bad thing in a democracy. A government that comes to power on the back of fewer votes than those who stayed away is hardly going to be fully representative of even the majority, let alone all, of the people. But forcing people to vote only attacks the symptoms, rather than the cause; a compulsion to vote is not suddenly going to engage people in politics. A more representative voting system, an end to cynical politics, and a media that informs rather than whip up hysteria, would perhaps go a long way to encouraging more people, not just to vote but to participate again in politics. But this drive must always be mindful of the fact that some people, no matter how much you try, will not want to join in, and that they have every right to do so.

A busy week, mainly fuelled by coffee and loathing for the world, as I did the final module of my MSc, on the Management of Technology. A quick aside for all of you who don’t know how my Science & Technology Studies degree works - the previous 5 modules take place over the course of a term and consist of weekly lectures, seminars and prescribed readings; this sixth module is a one-week intensive course at the Management School.

Now, I would love to have told you that all the prejudices about management that the likes of Dilbert have instilled in me over the years were swept away… but it left me drained and jaded, such that only long walks in Holyrood Park and cooking a ginormous curry have managed to return me to some sort of inspired state.

For a course all about technology (which, like many of the key concepts in the course, like ‘user’ and ‘innovation’ was poorly defined) it didn’t really engage in how technology or technological development comes about. It generally took a sort of fatalist line that all technological development is inevitable (or at least not very controllable) and we’re there to maybe nudge it here and there and get by the best we can; coming off the back of the age of Microsoft’s monopoly and the dot-com boom, this is an easy mindset to fall into; with the ever-growing open source movement, the reclaiming of the word ‘hacking’ (in its original sense) and the new wave of innovative, user-driven companies that co-operate with the non-commercial sphere (Google, Flickr etc.), a vision that says communities and people can very much take control of technologies, is starting to emerge, but has been missed here.

Anyway, this slavery to the idea of technology may have just be a theoretical bias to the course, if it wasn’t so horrifically demonstrated by the omipresence of one thing, one technology that proves the evil of banality: PowerPoint.

We were obliged throughout the week to come up with presentation after presentation. Unfortunately, coupled with that came a total and utter de-skilling in the art of conveying information. What gets me most about PowerPoint is not just how the layouts severely constrain how much information can be conveyed, nor how everything must now be laid out in bullet lists (or else). The feature that is most evil is the one that, rather than display a slide’s bullets all in one go, makes them appear one-by-one (the more literate, or illiterate, depending how you look at it, creator can make them fade in, whoosh in from the side, etc.). The result is the speaker is reduced to little more than reading through each bullet in turn off the screen (”Let’s see, what do we have next… [click] …oh yes, capital costs, which, as the slide says…”), the staccato pace of the slide preventing any other form of speech. Rather than being able to create a coherent narrative that is summed up by the bullet points, the bullet points become the narrative; the speaker is tne one doing the summing-up. And though it’s bad when your classmates do it, when the lecturer is doing it as well, then it’s really worrying.

Toyota (apparently) have a company motto, which goes roughly like: “we design our factories so our workers use the machine, not vice versa” - something I learned during this very course, ironically enough. PowerPoint does the exact opposite of this; the slides dictate the speaker, and as they are designed on a computer screen, in a purely textual discourse with no audience rather than a verbal one with many people, the awful result is banal and crappy presentations.

Threatened with becoming one of the zombies myself, I had to come up with some sort of plan. What follows is how I tried to wriggle free, and hopefully may come in handy for anyone else who dislikes using PowerPoint: you can dictate the technology and make it work for you, rather than vice versa. Here’s how: Make as few slides as you can, and then ignore them as much as possible. Don’t have a copy of the slides to hand when speaking (make a separate set of notes instead), stand well in front of the screen when talking, and only look back when you’re really lost for words. Not all bullets are equal, nor are all slides, so don’t feel obliged to cover each one the same (or at all, for that matter). Above all, remember that “effective use of PowerPoint” is an oxymoron. PowerPoint is the backup, the reinforcing mechanism, the provider of background - it should never actively take a role; the most effective tools you possess are your own words.

Ooh, that sounded nicely management and wanky, that last sentence, didn’t it? Speaking of which - here is a genuine diagram that was presented to us in one of the lectures. I think someone was having a laugh.

Dear Manchester United fans,

Re: “Man U Not for Sale”

I’m awfully, awfully sorry to point this out - but in fact your club is very much for sale. Has been since 1991, when your club floated on the Stock Exchange. That means anyone can buy shares in your beloved United if they offer the right price, and if somone can afford to buy enough shares to fully takeover the club, well then tough. That’s just how the system works. While your new-found stance against the nebulous forces of capitalism might just evoke some sympathy from this jaded football fan, you were curiously silent when the club’s venture into the stock market gave it the money to invest in a rebuilt stadium, buy better players and make a lucrative move into Far Eastern markets, all of which have contributed to healthy multi-million pound profits year-in year-out and made you the richest club in the world. Funny, that.

Wow. Since last Thursday’s record-breaking Labour minority, there has been a lot written about reforming our electoral system and adopting proportional representation.

I’m not going to waste bytes and repeat the views above, but instead propose some ideas as to future action, so that we can move just beyond talking and good intentions (eek, that sounds unintentionally Judean People’s Front…). Here’s some ideas, tossed into the air at random by yours truly, as to what the pro-PR movement could do…

Decide on a system to adopt
There are plenty of PR systems out there, and despite my attempts at amateur psephology I won’t pretend to know the outright best one. Make Votes Count propose the AV+ system heavily favour the AV+ system (or one that meets similar criteria) - while not being purely proportional it helps retain a geographical link between local voters and their MP (itself debatable in the modern era, and the likes of Shaun Woodward being parachuted into safe Labour seats). I personally prefer AV+, I’m sure others would disagree. It would be better for the pro-PR movement to adopt a single united front on which option to go for - and it would be deeply ironic if people felt unable to support AV+ on the grounds of it being “second best” to STV. A partially proportional system may not be a total success but it would still mark a massive leap forward for British democracy.

Be more informative
MVC have some geodata stuff - type in your postcode and you get your constituency and the 2001 election results for it. But we need more than this (and not just an update with 2005 results). There needs to be analysis - people need to be told how their vote compares, how much it influences the makeup of Parliament compared to the national average, and to the most extreme cases like Crawley*. For marginal seats, you could be told how little influence you have if you favour a party other than the two competing. I won’t offer how these metrics are to be worked out (I’m looking at you, Lightfoot) but it should be able to work out some agreeable formula. Possibly, non-numerical indicators could be added - how much media coverage their area got in the 2005 election, whether it got party leaders or senior ministers to visit, etc.

Be creative
Ads, simple Flash games, virals - they will all help. Being funny and catchy is to be expected out of any campaign. My own idea was a “Don’t you hate someone else making decisions for you?” campaign: e.g. an advert picturing an office fridge with a note saying “I’ve replaced the jammy dodgers with plain digestives - Brian” stuck to it. I dunno. It’s probably crap. But it’s a stab in the right direction. Enrolling a decent photoshopper/designer with political inclinations (not sure whether Tim Ireland’s recent antics make him a candidate, but there must be others) would be good.

Realise from the start that this fight will not be won on the web, let alone the blogosphere
While the web is a great place for like-minded reformists to congregate, comment on each others’ blogs, exchange mails on a list and make Flash animations, and will attract some supporters, for a groundswell of popular support to come about, we will need to go beyond. Getting out on the streets like MVC have is a good idea. MySociety’s excellent projects could be a real boon here - using WriteToThem to contact MPs (once Parliament has reconvened) and to make sure they keep it in mind, and Pledgebank to arrange local on-the-street campaigning and leafletting.

Right, that’s all I can think of for the moment, but I’m sure there’s more. Anyone?

* Before the election, when Cheadle was the most marginal seat with just 33 votes in it, I had the idea of setting up a rude publicity-stunt pro-PR site called FuckYouCheadle.com, as an attempt to highlight why a voter in Cheadle has up to hundreds of times the influence of a voter in the likes of Liverpool or Tyneside on the outcome of their seat. This was, on reflection, not my best ever idea; but I still think being eye-catching (but not being offensive) is still a must.

Update: Regrettably, I won’t be able to make it to the Call this democracy? meeting in London held by MVC and the Electoral Reform Society tomorrow… could anyone who is going bring up ideas like this?

The District Line is a sprawling, slow giant of a railway line and one of the oldest parts of the London Underground. It snakes from Richmond and Wimbledon in the west to Upminister in the east. By a neat geographical coincidence, it forms an axis, the diametric poles of which demonstrate one of New Labour’s biggest failures.

An eastbound train bound for Upminster, after leaving the high-rise, high-money density of the City passes through Stepney, Bow, West Ham, East Ham, Barking and Dagenham, on its way to London’s periphery. As we all know, the new MP for the first two of those stops, RESPECT’s George Galloway won Thursday’s election with 35.9% of the vote (interestingly, Galloway would have come a very poor second had not there been big swings from Conservative and Lib Dem voters). Moving east, in West Ham and East Ham, RESPECT both won around 20% of the vote. RESPECT, for all its claims of inclusion, is an extremist party, an uneasy combination of Trots and conservative Islamists, borne out of the alliance between the Muslim Association of Britain and the Socialist Workers Party in opposition to the Iraq war. In order to please their new-found comrades, the old socialists have had to forget old-fashioned leftish principles like women’s and gay rights.

As your District Line train trundles from zone 3 to 4, and you’re wondering why you didn’t just get the British Rail all the way, you’ll pass through first Barking, then Dagenham. In Barking, the BNP got 16.9% of the vote, and only lost second place to the Tories by 47 votes. In Dagenham, things are a little better, the BNP only got 9.3% of the vote, but this is still a relatively large rise from the 5% they got in 2001. The BNP, as you should all know by now, are little more than a bunch of violent thugs and criminals dressed in suits; their campaigns in Barking and Dagenham were based on what geeks call FUD, and what the rest of us call lies and hatred (example here).

Yesterday I said RESPECT were a minor concern, trumped up both by the extreme left as proof of a new political movement, and the pro-war left in an attempt to deflect criticism of the Blair government’s mistakes in Iraq. But I’ve changed my mind - I was wrong in trying to justify their marginality by looking at them in a national context. Just like the BNP, RESPECT are an extremist threat, if only in the poorest and most marginalised areas of the country. The two halves of the eastern branch of the District Line are the opposing ends of the axis: a mainly Muslim vote, angry at Blair’s foreign policy and Islamophobia in Britain at one end, and a white working-class vote, angry at what they see as jobs and tax revenue being taken away by newcomers, at the other.

What I’m saying is nothing new, what is new is that for the first time, both sides are wising up and using the ballot box as a way of expressing their discontent in large numbers. This has woken up some in the Labour government to the dangers. Margaret Hodge, Labour MP for Barking, writing in today’s Observer bemoans the local poverty, and the government’s complacency in acting to alleviate it, for the rise in the BNP’s share of the vote. But she utterly fails to concede, that as the local MP, it has been her job to represent her constituents’ needs, and that she has failed utterly to do so, even more so considering as a Minister of State, she must have had some clout.

The BNP and RESPECT both deliberately target and exploit communities wracked by poverty (there were very few RESPECT or BNP candidates in middle-class or wealthy areas, and those that did stand received far fewer votes) and other deep and divisive social problems, problems that the Labour government of the past eight years has failed to alleviate in any great way. It’s easy for Blairites to paint the likes of RESPECT as misguided hardliners and friends of the fascists (this may well be true, but it is irrelevant). It is not only middle-class bruschetta-munchers who have turned on the party, and to paint the electoral rebellion against Labour as such is utterly ignorant. Labour has failed and alienated the poorest and most vulnerable people in the country, and the vacuum it has left behind has been filled. The electoral success of RESPECT and the BNP are the natural consequences of Labour ignoring the very people it is supposed to serve and protect. Though this may be restricted to a few socially deprived areas of the country, to ignore it and write it off as a minor aberration would be a betrayal of the Labour Party’s founding principles.

I am off for an intense one-week course at the university Management School this week - so I don’t expect to have much time to contribute to the blog or respond to comments. If I do get time I will try and write some more…