qwghlm.co.uk : because all the other domain names were taken

This is one of a pair of related posts, the other is called “Rotten from the bottom up“

I got into a political argument the other day. I don’t often do it these days, and looking back on it, I now know why – there is a poverty of ideas at the top when it comes to political debate.

I was talking to an assistant to a backbench Conservative MP who demanded to know that, as I held leftist and socialist principles, why I didn’t I always vote Labour. My answer, that I will stop voting for a party that abandons the principles I believe in, was met with accusations I was a floating voter. On hearing I used to live in Scotland, the demand changed to why I didn’t vote the ‘Scottish socialist alternative’ in the SNP; the fact I never would because I don’t believe in an independent Scotland, was met with further mocking of my flaky political worldview that was incapable of identifying with a political party and that I was incapable of influencing the process of political power.

Naïve though they were, it did betray an interesting example of how still the party political world works from an insider’s point of view. You’re poor or leftie, you must vote Labour. You’re rich or rectionary, you must vote Tory. You’re moderate on everything, vote Lib Dem. You live in Scotland, vote SNP. The prevalence of all of these stereotypes who how irredeemably tribal political parties are, and the discourse of modern politics bears this out – inevitably, come any political talking point on the television and radio, the discussion will soon become tainted with one side labelling it as “typical Labour” or “typical Tories”.

Take the recent bit of puerile and light-hearted fun, the mashups & spoofs of the new David Cameron poster on MyDavidCameron. Of course, it wasn’t long before it was picked up by left-wing bloggers and some of the spoofs were by Labour supporters, but for once the Labour party never attempted to own or control it officially. Inevitably, however, was the reframing by Conservative supporters as a Labour-backed smear, even though the site’s designer, Clifford Singer, has no political party affiliation; headlines such as “Who’s the nasty party now?” started appearing, and it provoke this hilarious, if it wasn’t be so tragic, riposte from an unnamed (as always) ‘senior Tory source‘:

“It’s typical that Labour felt they needed to airbrush our poster with this trickery. Clearly Labour spin is alive and well.”

It’s argument by numbers. It’s lazy, cynical and so typical of the day-to-day political discourse of British politics. Of course, this kind of tribalism in British politics isn’t a modern phenomenon; the adversarial nature of the House of Commons and a winner-takes-all approach to elections means it’s a practically inevitable feature, not a bug. But what has been a contemporary phenomenon is that increasingly, there is so little to split the parties, in terms of both their policies and the way they conduct themselves.

Take, for example, this gem from Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling at the last Conservative party conference (sorry for the anti-Tory bias in this post, by the way, but fuck it, there’s no better time to kick someone than when they’re on the up). News has just broken that former defence chief General Richard Dannatt has been signed up by team Cameron and promised a future ministerial role; Grayling mishears the interviewer and thinks that he has been signed up to join Gordon Brown’s cabinet and, well see for yourself:

There are three things that make this execrably awful for any intelligent observer. The first is the monotonously-delivered mix & match soundbite at the start – several easily-identifiable components assembled without thought. It starts with a fawning tribute to the military, something which is compulsory whenever discussing Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s followed by the mealy-mouthed “I hope this isn’t a gimmick”, when the truth is he’d love it more than anything else in the world to be a gimmick. Then there’s putting the boot in properly at the opposition’s tactics – Gordon Brown and his PR and the government’s suspicious motives.

The second, and arguably worse, thing is his retracting in the second half of the clip. He knew he’d been made to look like an utter tit. He knew he’d been found out. And yet he still had the barefaced cheek to say he was ‘delighted’ rather than sceptical by the appointment and he regretted that he couldn’t have given a ‘more enthusiastic’ welcome – when he had been nothing but enthusiastic to put the boot in on first mishearing the news.

Thirdly, and finally, and this is worse in a different way, is that the context behind the gaffe. It doesn’t matter which party is which. Both Brown and Cameron have made it clear they like appointing of unelected experts to their cabinets; both party machines know the value of a publicity stunt, and both parties have stock phrases for attacking each other for doing so. So no wonder Grayling thought it might have been a Labour stunt rather than a Tory one; and the same could equally happen in reverse – substitute ‘David Cameron’ in for ‘Gordon Brown’ and ‘opposition’ for ‘government’ and you have a Labour frontbencher attacking the Tories. It’s almost too easy to picture.

This comes at an odd time in politics, as the economy begins to recover from the most destructive bubble and bust of modern times. Often, one of the the legacies of economic and political crises is that new political lines and ideologies form; yet in the uneasy atmosphere after the crash, there has been no hardening of political divisions or clear water put between parties. If anything they have become closer; the coming election will be fought largely by politicians all promising the same thing – Cameron’s original pre-mockery poster promise has little difference to what the other parties are offering – public services good, public debt bad. During the MP’s expenses scandal, politicians of all colours were the subject of public scorn and rage – “they are all the same” was the common refrain.

The post-Thatcher economic model that has dominated the 1990s and 2000s relied on creating growth from ever-increasing levels of debt – either borrowings to be spent on consumer goods, or heavily leveraging that debt to buy businesses and homes – often to be paid for not by the future income from those investments, but on the capital gains from their putative rise in value. It didn’t just keep the banks in gravy and swell the Treasury’s coffers with tax receipts in the 1990s and 2000s, it was also what millions of Britons did to get rich as well; often the same middle-income swing voter Britons that political parties need to appeal to, and it is exactly this tame and materialistic worldview was what David Cameron was aiming for when he gave this speech a fortnight ago:

A fair society is one where everyone who works hard and plays by the rules has a chance to fulfil their dreams whether that’s owning a bigger house, taking a holiday abroad, buying a new car or starting a small business.

Actually, I lied. He didn’t say that. Gordon Brown said it. But it doesn’t really matter who did – that’s the point. With no ideological or visionary differences within mainstream British politics, and with traditional political grassroots seemingly abandoned for millionaire’s favours, what we’re left with is politicians competing for the right to manage the country and at best tinker with an economic model that almost destroyed itself. The differences are tokenistic at best (viz. the Lib Dems’ laughably populist and unworkable mansion tax) and leave a vacuum where other questions are unanswered. Is this really the best we can do? Are the ideals of the politicians’ middle-class managerialist culture all that we have left to aspire to?

Of course the politicians we elect should be reasonably competent at running things (although the onus should really be much more on the civil servants that execute their policy on a day-to-day basis, and the politicians’ skills in delegating). The problem is when management becomes not just one quality in a government, but championed as the sole quality for our politicians. We end up confusing good management with good governance, which in turns lead to a political class over-managing, convinced that their desired outcome is possible; if you could just get the system right, everybody will fall in line just right (vis. George Osborne’s love affair with behavioural economics). Those that get forgotten in all this are the actual people who you’re elected to serve – they will end being nothing more than datapoints, catalogued, indexed, surveilled and treated as statistics and targets to be logged in league tables, often at great cost and with little success (take the ongoing ID card and NHS IT system debacles).

The systems that the post-Thatcher consensus created have broken badly. So far in Britain there is little political will to reform them, or many of the other aspects of our society that need fixing or preparation for change ahead – I’ve talked about the economy but it could equally be global warming, energy security, an ageing population, the digital revolution, the rise of rival developing economies. Qualities such as creativity, bluntness, open-mindedness, humility and independence have largely become absent from politicians (of course, there are of course honourable exceptions, but none of them sit on the front benches) and they are essential for the challenges that lie ahead.

But let’s not blame it on them. We get the politicians we deserve, we elected the ones who conformed to the post-Thatcher consensus that was good while it lasted and we ignored the hidden pitfalls. Now those pitfalls are apparent, it’s time to start reconsidering the whole deal.

I am quoted in this weekend’s Financial Times, in Tim Bradshaw‘s article about Facebook’s new privacy settings [registration may be required]:

Chris Applegate [...] was dismayed to discover that applications installed by his friends could see his data unless he chose to opt out, an option not given in Facebook’s latest reminder. “I’ve always kept a tight rein on the apps I install. But it only takes one friend to install a malicious app and . . . my information is compromised,” he said. “There is a great potential for leakage.”

Tim & I had quite a long chat and obviously he couldn’t include it all, so here’s a bit more information about the situation. It all came about from a chat on Twitter I had with Kathryn Corrick; a few days ago I had seen a popup dialog on Facebook asking me to update my privacy settings; I could keep the old ones or (as suggested) I could make more of my Facebook details public.

I’ve taken care to keep much of the private data on my Facebook account properly private; my public profile is quite limited and only friends can see anything I want to keep personal. Seeing no reason to change this, I kept the settings as they were and left it that. But then a few days later, in our conversation Kathryn warned that there were new privacy settings added in, so I checked it out. And lo and behold, there’s a section I hadn’t seen before, in the “Applications and websites” section, called “What your friends can share about you through applications and websites”:

I am nearly certain this page did not exist before (this comment on Mashable remarking on its newness seems to agree). I try out a lot of Facebook apps and then ditch them, so I periodically check my settings to make sure they’re not still enjoying privileges on my data (Facebook apps retain permission to access your data even after they are uninstalled, presumably in case you want to install them again). I don’t recall seeing it then, and I definitely was not asked about these new privacy settings in the migration process, during which I just asked to stick to my old settings – as this how-to or indeed Facebook’s own tutorial video bear out.

Allowing my friends to look at my status updates & interests via the web or mobile interface is fine by me – else Facebook is pretty useless to them. But allowing apps or websites they have installed or allowed to access this data is another level entirely; all it would have taken would have been one friend who is not so tech-savvy to install a malware-infected app and my data would have been at risk, regardless of how careful I am with what I install. Even more alarmingly, the default options are to be very open about this information; Facebook assumes you want to share nearly all of this data with your friends’ applications by default – as you can see above, only two of these (Family/relationship & religious/political views) are excluded from being ticked.

So my advice? Re-review your privacy settings, especially the applications and websites section; pay special attention to the applications you have installed – the ‘Learn more’ button is a misleading link which eventually leads to the page that allows you to check these; pay extra-special attention to the ‘what your friends can share about you’ page and uncheck all the boxes you are not comfortable sharing with applications your friends may install (depending on how tech-savvy your friends are and how much you trust them to not install anything malicious) – I strongly recommend doing this part especially.

To round off, it’s worth remembering that Facebook is not a charity; it is a commercial venture that has always existed to take the userdata it has acquired and sell advertising based on it, a very old-school way of making money on the web. Whereas on the other hand, for years the more enlightened have been talking of open web services and APIs and the ability to mash up data from a variety of sources, and creating value from that. In many ways the Facebook application platform is fast becoming a combination of the worst elements of these two differing attitudes – the craving to make money no matter whether it might endanger their long-term interests, and the craving to share data without any respect as to what that data is or who it is meant for. Facebook are not being evil or stupid, but they are being remarkably casual with user privacy; they ought to remember that no-one running a site that relies on the goodwill of its users can afford to take them for granted for too long before their users find somewhere else to go.

A second blog post in a week? Blimey.

The pejorative term ‘pirate’ is often used for those who infringe on copyright, and I’d assumed (for some reason) it was a modern term; maybe stemming from the pirate radio of the 60s, made popular in the Home Taping Is Killing Music era, etc. Turns out I was wrong by nearly 400 years.

In English, the word ‘pirate’ dates from at least the late 14th century, but the first recorded use of the word to mean an intellectual property infringer rather than marauding sea bandit, is by Elizabethan author Thomas Dekker; in his The Wonderful yeare (1603), among the excessively flowery prose in the introduction, he fulminates:

Banish these Word-pirates, (you sacred mistresses of learning) into the gulfe of Barbarisme: doome them euerlastingly to liue among dunces: let them not once lick their lips at the Thespian bowle, but onely be glad (and thanke Apollo for it too) if hereafter (as hitherto they haue alwayes) they may quench their poeticall thirst with small beere.

However – admittedly I’m not great on my Elizabethan English – it appears the aim of his ire are plagiarists and derivative poets, rather than people reproducing his works word-for-word; nevertheless the word gradually came to mean the latter; the OED’s first use of the word in this sense is Daniel Defoe in 1703, discussing in the introduction to an edition of The True-Born Englishman :

Had I wrote it for the Gain of the Press, I should have been concern’d at its being Printed again and again, by Pyrates, as they call them, and Paragraph-Men:

Interestingly, Defoe wasn’t that displeased; he goes on to say:

But would they but do it Justice, and print it True, according to the Copy, they are welcome to sell it for a Penny, if they please.

Ironically, use of the word ‘piracy’ to denote what we would call copyright infringement predates the first copyright law, the Statute of Anne 1709, to which we turn to now. That’s not to say, however, there were measures before that, and sometimes the context of how copyright came about gets forgotten; so it’s worth taking a look.

The practice of copying others’ works was rare – although not non-existent – before the invention of the printing press; the natural constraints of writing and scribing out whole texts made it impossible to mass-produce copies; a rare and incredibly early example of accused copying comes from the 560s, with King Dermot of Ireland mediating a dispute between Fennian of Moville and St. Columba – the former accusing the latter of copying out one of his Psalters (the king ruled in favour of Fennian). But then this was not just historical accident – by making reading & writing the preserve of the clerical class, and making it a deliberately laborious process (think of all that gorgeous blackletter), the Church could control production and distribution of knowledge much more strictly. With no mass readership and no profit motive, unauthorised copying was not a concern; preventing ‘piracy’ wasn’t even a side-benefit, as it did not figure on their radar.

The advent of the printing press certainly meant there were more cases of infringement (an early case cited is that of Wynken de Worde, whose work was copied without authorisation in 1533). Printing patents were an early attempt to regulate the industry, allowing an individual a right to publish works – either a specific work, or more importantly, all of those within a certain subject, often in perpetuity. This was the first attempt to regulate copying – as much out of rewarding favourites and acolytes as to protect markets. But patents had their flaws – by creating a monopoly on subjects they priced many works out of the market, encouraging unauthorised books. And they were only additive – the right had to be granted, so new patents had to be issued for new fields of study; and they did nothing on preventing seditious or undesirable material.

The Stationers’ Company, the guild of printers, opposed the patent system, with its restrictions on general publishing being an extreme barrier to trade. Additionally, with the country increasingly in religious turmoil, clamping down on rebellion and sedition was essntial. With this in mind, in 1557 Queen Mary I granted the Stationers Company an exclusive licence to print and publish, with a register of all published books. Rather than grant additional rights to individuals on an ad hoc basis, this formalised a system covering all publication; monopolies on particular subjects were eschewed in favour of rights linked to individual works, and the rights were entirely the publisher’s – it did not matter if the author was living, or long dead (so it covered ancient works as well as contemporary). You could not publish without being a member of the Company, and members were restricted on what could be published enforced by the notorious Star Chamber. As William Patry details:

After the chartering of the Stationers Company, Star Chamber decrees regulating printing were issued in 1566, 1586 (a particularly important one, drafted by Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift), 1623, and 1637. This final decree represented an impressive codification of all the Star Chamber’s printing ordinances. Consisting of 33 clauses, the topics covered in the 1637 decree included prohibitions on the printing of books and pamphlets not licensed by or entered upon the register books of the Stationers Company, and a requirement that licensees ensure that the books they printed did not contain material contrary to the Christian faith and doctrine, or to the discipline of the Church or State. Perhaps this last requirement explains the expansion of the Star Chamber’s authority to include ballads, charts, and portraiture, in addition to books.

Regulations and censorship by Church and State continued up until the turn of the 18th century, although clandestine and illegal publishing still flourished underground. Gradually, the hold of the Stationers Company ebbed away; the Star Chamber was abolished in 1640. The rise of the Enlightenment in the late 17th century brought with it the concepts of enduring literature, personal liberty and individual genius, as did the influence of philosophers such as Locke and authors such as Milton, and growing resentment about the monopoly held by the Stationers. Censorship and control of every book published in England was no longer Parliament’s priority, and in 1694 the Stationers’ monopoly was not renewed.

The Stationers were not, as you can imagine, very happy. For over 100 years they had enjoyed a collective monopoly, which itself had been a way for them to break individual’s monopolies, with the support of an oppressive government anxious to maintain order. With the old political conflicts crumbling away, the main reason for their continued monopoly was economic; however they failed to convince Parliament of the need to secure perpetual publishers’ rights, with a series of proposed bills in the early 1700s that never made it. As a dissenting notes from eleven members of the House of Lords put it, they opposed such bills:

…because it subjects all learning and true information to the arbitrary will and pleasure of a mercenary, and perhaps ignorant, licenser; destroys the property of authors in their copies; and sets up many monopolies.

Facing losing everything, the publishers changed tack; previously having emphasised the hurt to their own industry (and those that depended on it), they started to side with the author and the damage to their livelihood, as well as the negative impact on learning and education in the country. The focus shifted from protecting a valuable industry to safeguarding the nation’s intellect. When, finally, the Statute of Anne was passed in 1710, giving a limited, not perpetual, copyright term to authors, not publishers, it was tellingly entitled: “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned” [emphasis mine].

The first fully-fledged modern copyright law in the world, it was the result not just of its time but the culmination of a series of legal measures that had their roots in another era entirely; in that time the economics, politics and philosophy of English society had shifted enormously; the bill both reflected that change but had its roots in a tradition of monopoly and entitlement stretching back centuries.

Postscript: Comparisons of the Stationers’ attempts to reframe the debate from their economic position to the wellbeing of the national culture, to those of the record companies using the state of music as a rhetorical position to defend their economic interests, are left as an exercise for the reader.

Sources William Patry’s Copyright Law and Practice was excellent stuff, as is An Historical Sketch of the Law of Copyright by John James Lowndes, as well as Monopoly Defeating Mechanisms: Will they Function in The Digital World? by Hasina Haque, all proved invaluable.

Shhh, no-one mention this is the first post here in six months…

The proposed Digital Economy Bill has, perhaps unsurprisingly, garnered a lot of attention in the blogosphere and occasionally beyond.

It had all started so differently; Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report was by no means perfect, but the discussion was broad – on universal broadband provision, opening up the wireless spectrum and looking at reforming traditional media, as well as the inevitable protections against copyright infringement.

Digital Britain’s proposals were criticised at the time, but nevertheless there were careful safeguards – the burden of proof was on rights holders, repeated infringers’ identities could only be disclosed by court order, and the final resort – after all other avenues had been explored – would be capping of bandwidth. Disliked as this aspect of Digital Britain was, it was at least balanced within a wider context: just thirty-one pages (pp 105-135) of the two hundred or so of the report were devoted to ‘Protecting and Rewarding Creativity’, as the euphemism went, and even then, some of that was on reforming fair use and reviving orphan works, rather than punishing infringers.

And there were concessions to hear the public’s point of view, with the public consultations; the Digital Britain Unconferences even got a fuller mention in the final report, with praise for “what is possible for Digital Britain when these tools are combined with channelling existing loosely connected networks and motivations.” Digital Britain at least appreciated the potential of the digital economy, rather than treating it as a threat.

And then… Lord Carter quit on the eve of the report, Lord Mandelson swooped in and all that hard work was for naught. A quick chat with David Geffen and Lucien Grainge, and the Digital Economy Bill put before the houses of Parliament is distinctly heavy on suspected infringement and light on all the other bits in the report. It is not so much one to boost the digital economy, but to protect what is left of the analogue one.

Measures include the threat of cutting off a user’s connection without due process, just on the copyright holders’ say-so, with secondary legislation allowing for “pirate finders” and forcing ISPs to snoop on traffic. This may breach European law, as Glyn Moody notes, and given the government is also committed to providing more public services online, this contradictory policy only works to effectively deprive people of access to public services without a fair hearing.

There is plenty of very good writing on the matter – two pieces by Charlie Stross, as well as Cory Doctorow and Don Tapscott, coiner of the phrase “digital economy”. And it is not just the usual suspects – this Guardian leader captures the point succinctly.

You can sign the petition, join the Open Rights Group and lobby your MP. All of these I urge you to do.

But that is not the sole point of this blog post. The fight over the Digital Economy Bill and “digital Britain” is part of a much, much, larger battle over the control of information, one that goes far beyond copyright infringement. The demands of the bill – registering copyright holders, forcing ISPs to log traffic, registering people blocked from online access – will all require enormous infrastructures and data gathering capability. Just like ID cards, or the proposed communications register, or the national DNA database.

All of these vast, vast systems are backed a political system utterly infatuated with acquiring and controlling information, in the confused and vain hope that merely by collecting it, it becomes knowledge or wisdom. So much information is gathered that the authorities have become notoriously irresponsible with it – remember, even two years on, those lost child benefit discs still haven’t turned up.

This is not to say that the governments is an evil Big Brother (never confuse bumbling desparation with malice), and it is definitely not the sole player in this game. Just look at how Google and Facebook both strive to control as much data as possible to further their business ends, while in other corner, crumbling news media empires are resorting to proposing redefining copyright in an attempt to maintain control over the information so valuable to their business and venal law firms fail in their attempts to superinjunct just about everyone.

And caught between all of them is the ordinary user – often the kind of person who’ll freely download music and movies yet complain simultaneously about the greed of the record companies; moan about our privacy being taken away from us while we Tweet every last moment of our existence; form online mobs proclaiming hate against a hatemonger; rally blog campaigns but then don’t do very much ourselves about it. We’re a funny lot, when it comes down to it.

And connecting us and them all is this big thing called the Internet. All technologies have their politics but the Internet’s are curiously contradictory; open standards and licences with their roots in counterculture, libertarianism and communitarianism abound, yet if it weren’t for the governmental, academic and corporate worlds backing and building the infrastructure, it would never have taken root in the first place.

Perhaps then it is not surprising that as the digital age has entered its adolescence, we ourselves find ourselves in conflicting times. The traditional information economy has been pulled down yet we haven’t yet worked out what to replace it with. The libertarian view is that information would set us all free; the authoritarian view is that perfect information would lead to perfect governance, but instead we have neither – we’re mired in confusion, ignorance and conflict. We’re only just realising the power in the tools we possess, but everywhere we look we see people, governments and corporations become increasingly insecure. We’re losing sense of what the web should be for, and are taking it out on each other instead.

I hope I’m not taking too much of a bellicose line here; I don’t like using conflict as a metaphor and I’m not a bloodthirsty cheerleader for all this. But there is something dark about the state of cyberspace which the rosier pictures painted in the likes of Here Comes Everybody or Groundswell (fine books they may be) do not convey. If Mandelson’s bill goes through, or if all our emails are snooped on, or if net neutrality is abolished, then it will not just be another step to destroying the open, collaborative nature of the net that has created so much already, but will only deepen the divisions and destroy all hope for a peaceful, mature and secure adulthood for the digital era.

Postscript: As far as I know yet, no-one has written that lengthily on this – the best I’ve seen being Tim O’Reilly’s “The War for the Web“. But that is just a here and now, when what is as interesting is the why; what were the social and political forces that not just shaped the net but modern politics and business, that explains why netheads tend to be libertarian (in some respects), or why governments think they need all this information. Which is a shame – there are a wealth of interesting stories on the forces that shaped these technologies and systems, some of which I used in my Master’s dissertation on the sociology of open source communities, long ago. I have no idea if there is enough for a book, or at least coherent long narrative, but I will start cobbling some blog posts together to see where it takes me.

It’s that time of year again… this weekend it was Liberty‘s annual general meeting and annual conference in London.

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the conference on the Saturday, with speakers such as Jack Straw, Doreen Lawrence and Tony Benn – although Jason of Cosmodaddy did, and liveblogged it. But I did go along to the AGM on Friday night instead of enjoying the pub like normal. I Tweeted some of it but here’s a fuller recap of events and my thoughts.

I’m sad to say that like last year’s AGM, a lot of the proceedings were shambolic. Louise Christian, the Chair of Liberty, may be an excellent human rights lawyer but in my view she made a terrible chair of the AGM. Votes to approve the auditors and a nomination to the appeals board were conducted without a call for votes against or abstentions – a numerous show of hands for the motion was taken as unanimity. The results of the elections to Liberty’s council were announced simply by announcing the names of the winners, with no record of the count. When challenged on this, Louise said it was to avoid ‘embarrassment’ to those who got a low number of votes (can you imagine if we did the same for MPs?). There were numerous protests from the floor on the way the AGM was conducted, but time and time again the chair attempted to close the discussion and ‘move on’, even though dissenters still had hands raised and wanted to speak. One member spoke of how it resembled ‘railroading’ and I’m inclined to agree.

Had this been in any other democratically run organisation, I’m sure Liberty’s leadership would have condemned it as opaque and anti-democratic. Given the recent furore surrounding MP’s expenses and lack of transparency, a human rights organisation such as Liberty must have an exemplar level of transparency and proper conduct throughout – not just the minimum, but the very highest standard must be adhered to. And this was sadly lacking from the chair. On one motion (on presumed consent for organ donation) after the vote had been taken, she voiced her personal approval that the motion had been turned down – in my view, conduct not befitting the chair, who should remain neutral both during and after such debates. The fact that the AGM was squeezed into two and a half hours (last year, it was held on a Saturday so we had most of a day to deliberate) so that delegates could enjoy drinks at the end, meant that the chair continually sought to expedite the meeting so we could meet the 9pm deadline. It gave it a rushed feel, as if we were just going through the motions.

Disappointing. But enough of that – there was still plenty of interesting debate from the floor and ordinary membership. Seven motions were presented in total and there was plenty of debate about them – particularly two issues of controversy. One was to what degree people should be denied employment or union membership on their political beliefs or associations they join, and the other was on whether Liberty should endorse ‘presumed consent’ for organ donation.

The first is a tricky issue to pick apart – BNP members are forbidden from becoming police or civil servants, and I’d imagine most well-thinking people would support it. But then again, the same line of reasoning was used by anti-union employers discriminating against left-wing union workers. Some good points were raised in the meeting – someone pointed out how it’s easy to defend trade unionists but much harder to stomach defending fascists, even if the rights they enjoy are universal. The original motion did allow for people to be denied employment in “exceptional” circumstances. I would argue that being an instrument of the state’s power means you have to be bound by tighter rules than a normal employer would; with the police’s commitment to racial equality enshrined in law, and how being a racist means you cannot possibly abide by it, I’d see that as an exceptional circumstance enough to deny a BNP member a job as a police officer. But it has to be done on a case-by-case basis, and the burden of proof has to be on the employer, not the employee.

The motion in the end didn’t pass – an amended version by a trade union delegate did; although I agreed with the sentiment, I thought it was wider-ranging and had much less bite than the original, moving the focus onto unions’ right to bar members because of their beliefs rather than questioning the actions of employers. But the debate was interesting, informed and above all passionate without getting ill-tempered, a much more sober and level affair than the usual emotive bullshit in politics.

The other motion of interest was that of whether presumed consent can be taken for organ donation. There are all kinds of conflicting rights here – the right to life and the right to dignity for the recipients, coupled with the putative donor’s right to one’s own body and religious beliefs. Even with a guarantee of opt-out if you did not want to, and opt-out for the relatives of the deceased wasn’t enough. There are some interesting philosophical dilemmas here – as rights are described as human rights, when you die and cease to be a human, what rights does your corpse inherit? Isn’t ‘presumed consent’ a contradiction in terms? As donated organs are a gift, does turning them into a compulsion destroy the gift value? Should we even care if it means more people will live?

Me? I was in a minority that did endorse presumed consent; growing up with my mother working as a nurse for kidney patients on dialysis showed me how horrible a life without working vital organs could be, and their right to life and dignity comes should be given priority over our sensitivities about corpses; I feel that by having an opt-out system for organ donation we reduce the demand for black market organs and help strengthen the rights of the living forced to donate. But I was strongly moved by some of the arguments made (particularly on the rights to the body in reference to slavery, and torture) and it was a difficult decision to stick by and made me question myself.

Being given crises of conscience may seem an odd reason to be a proud member of Liberty, but I am. And even though all of us have common cause and beliefs there was still healthy levels of debate and dissent within the membership – as well there should be for any organisation in a democracy. Even if the chair of the meeting didn’t seem to concerned about due process or dissent, the membership did, and I was proud to be among them.

A quick break from usual service on this blog (i.e. silence) for this quick message. Today the UK goes to the polls in local and European elections. If you have a vote today, please use it. Not least to deny extremists like the BNP, but because the vote is the cornerstone of our democracy and it’s up to us to show politicians the strength of it. Given the recent scandals and the jaded, cynical, state of politics you might be discouraged from participating – but it’s exactly because the political system is so fucked up now that those in power need reminding the power of the vote. And any change or reform of our politics can only be given strength and legitimacy if we show that people still care about how this country is run.

So go out and vote. Haven’t got your polling card with you, or it got lost in the post? Doesn’t matter – as long as you’re on the electoral roll you can just turn up at the polling station and vote by giving your name & address. Don’t know where the polling station is? Your local council’s website should have a list – check out Directgov’s directory of councils to find yours. Not sure who to vote for? Nosemonkey has an excellent roundup of resources to make sure your vote is informed, including Votematch and EUProfiler (I thought the former was better, for what it’s worth), the list of individual party manifestos and the manifestos of the party groupings within the European Parliament.

That’s it. No excuses now. Go out and vote. And get your mum to go and vote as well while you’re at it. Thanks.