If you’re a member of the Labour Party in the West Midlands then you’ll already have had your ballot papers to select who is going to stand in next year’s European elections. It’s a list system and the papers are split between sitting MEP’s and others.

That means we have to decide in an order of preference who to place number one and number two of the current two sitting MEP’s Michael Cashman and Neena Gill which will determine who comes top on the final regional ballot paper.

I’ll be the first person to admit that I haven’t exactly took as much of an interest in the procedure as I have in previous years primarily due to being too busy doing other things but the ballot papers need filling in and sending off.

Yesterday I got an e-mail from Neena Gill. I’m presuming that I’ll get others from the other candidates and that the party is allowing them to send out their message to the members but I haven’t had anything from any other candidate yet. Apart from that, all I’ve had is an admittedly good quality leaflet from Michael Cashman and something today about some of the other candidates.

On the basis of the two, and bear in mind that I do take a keen interest in marketing and campaigning then I’d probably put Michael Cashman as my number one choice.

Within the context of purely their marketing approach, Cashman seems far more professional. I may still get some wonderfully professional looking piece of literature from Neena Gill but that will be too late because the ballot papers will be done tonight.

As I said, I take a keen interest in marketing, not simply just the message which is of course the most important part but style is equally important. The e-mail in question that I received was a simple plain text based e-mail which if you compare to the normal very professional looking HTML encoded e-mails that party members are used to receiving from the national party, it looked, well, just a bit crap. Incidentally the message didn’t say anything that appealed to me either and looked like it had been written as an afterthought following a night out on the lash.

One thing that did strike me though was the instruction and link at the bottom. In a vain hope that Neena might be getting down a jiggy with new technology it instructs you to go to YouTube and type ‘Neena Gill’ in the search. This of course I dutifully did and it returns only one result that is actually Neena Gill as in the MEP. Last night it had a grand total of 8 views which is now up to 50 odd so presumably a few other people have done the same.

I did watch the video. It didn’t exactly inspire me to vote for her either as the delivery was poor, wooden and still didn’t really talk about the issues that are important to me in a European context. Incidentally, here’s the video.

Me being the nosy sod that I am noticed that it had been posted by a user called ‘cafferty’ and was the sole video that he/she had posted to YouTube. Again being nosy I had a look at their profile and it reads as:

Name: caffie
Age: 21
City: Birmingham
Country: United Kingdom
Occupation: lazy-ass law student, professional slacker

Note to Neena. When embarking on an attempt at harnessing the marketing potential of the internet try to get someone who actually knows what they’re doing and not someone who lists their occupation as a ‘lazy-ass law student, professional slacker’ from Birmingham. It doesn’t quite give the right impression now does it?

Wondering then if Michael Cashman was on Youtube I dropped in a search for him. He doesn’t appear to have tried any kind of marketing approach as regards the use of new media (although he may yet e-mail all the members, who knows but it would seem a bit late to set up any kind of web based campaign) but there’s certainly nothing specific on YouTube. What there are though are a few examples posted by other people.

The first up is this one which at least to me comes across as a lot more fluid and professional a delivery on a subject that I do find important.

Incidentally, it’s been on YouTube a bit longer but has had nearly 4,000 views which isn’t exactly bad.

Yes, Cashman does have an advantage over Neena in terms of delivery on account of his previous profession before entering politics and just for you delectation here’s a snippet from his past.

Right, that seals it, anyone who goes to deck Pete in the Queen Vic gets my number one vote.

While I’m thinking of my young virile mate Paul Macmanomy I’ll just note that he has been removed from my blogroll. For no other reason than Paul appears to have gone blogging AWOL again and the URL of his site has been picked up by what appears to be one of those horrible blog advertising sites. Therefore I have no desire whatsoever to give it linkage for which I’d advise other colleagues to do likewise.

Paul, if you come back let us know and back up you go.

I’m starting to warm to David Cameron. He’s single-handedly doing more to boost the prospects of the Labour Party through his flagrant opportunism and lack of background research than any amount of work we could do on our own side.

Hat tip to Sunny over at Pickled Politics for this one as he was obviously up later last night than I was. News that Labour Councillor Gurcharan Singh is due to defect to the Tories and you can bet Davey boy has lined up a big media event to welcome him into their ranks.

Sadly though, at least for Cameron is that he may well have jumped before looking, asking some questions and doing his research on his new found recruit. Gurcharan Singh was unsuccessful in obtaining the nomination to be the Labour candidate in the by-election which begs the question of his own opportunism? Perhaps, just perhaps there’s a reason that the Labour Party didn’t select him to stand as our candidate in the Ealing Southall by-election?

I don’t normally do speculation as you know, but according to some good friends from down that neck of the woods, they’ll be very glad to get shot of him and you never know, he may just take a few others with him. Good old Davey boy, you’ve done us all a favour.

[Update] The post over at Pickled Politics seems to have disappeared for some reason. Good job I saved it just in case.

[Update] post back up on Pickled Politics.

Hmm, well could have been worse, Alan Johnson could have won. However given a difference of 0.8% in the result it was very much a close one. Good on Jon Cruddas to come in third he wasn’t that far off in the end. Hopefully Gordon can fit him into a campaigning role for the party in the future.

I’ve not posted much for the last few days. Actually nothing as I’ve been doing a few other things so I thought I’d do a little bit of a round up of events/issues.

On Tuesday the Penguin household braved the border patrols and sneaked into the Sandwell Borough to attend the launch of the Jon Cruddas Deputy Leadership campaign. Bob Piper did a good summing up of the event and in truly photographic genius style, managed to get the backs of the whole Penguin household in the frame. I learned one thing from that; I need a hair cut.

On the serious side it was refreshing to see Cruddas talk about issues that seem to have not got the attention they deserve in recent years, primarily that of social housing. The problems have been brewing for a generation but even if the debate is finally up there where it belongs, then perhaps we can start address an issue that affects many on lower incomes.

Following on from that, and it does beg the question: “where do we get these people from”, the comments made by Margaret Hodge. Short of making a play for the Leadership of the BNP, it makes you wonder how some people get to where they are on the basis of such awful political nouse. Perhaps it’s a lack of imagination but her comments have been rightfully condemned by many as they should. If she is concerned about the gains made by the BNP in her own constituency, not helped of course by her own last rash of daft comments then she should learn at least one thing of which I would have thought someone who has got the position of being an MP should already know.

You cannot win on the basis of using the argument of the opposition. Especially when that opposition are the horrid bunch of toe-rags that the BNP are. You cannot appropriate the blame for a lack of social housing by accepting the arguments from the far-right that it’s all these naughty East Europeans invading the country. She should know, unless Barking is a very strange place indeed that migrants rarely end up in council houses. The vast majority end up in low quality private sector accommodation or the equivalent of shared dorms of workers. They’re not holed up in nice 3 and 4 bedroom council semi’s because although if they are in the UK, earning and paying tax then they should be entitled, there’s a shitload more people ahead of them on the waiting lists who’ve been there for years and short of a very exceptional circumstance, they ain’t going to be able to jump the queues.

She would have been far more productive in addressing the reasons for this lack of housing and it’s underlying causes, rather than effectively writing the BNP’s next leaflet campaign in Barking for them.

I spotted this during the week too. I just have a few thoughts on this, none of them complimentary towards Microsoft as regular readers will have probably guessed. So here’s the scenario, Microsoft want there to be a professional body for IT people in the UK because there’s too many out there doing dodgy fixes or bodged jobs on systems.

First point being that this is a bit rich given the output of Microsoft in terms of ‘good’ programming is laughable. They release software with bugs in them, highly unsecure systems and quite frankly are not the people to lecture others about high levels of competence.

Secondly, they’ve helpfully inferred that their own Microsoft accreditation programme would be very useful in assessing and registering IT ‘professionals’. Well, no it woudn’t, it would tell people that they know how to use one of a myriad of different systems available, and the poorest of those to boot. Are they seriously thinking that the UK Government would fall for what is patently an attempt to sew up the market by being supplier and effective registrar of those who work in the industry. Come on, no Government Minister is going to fall for that one. On the other hand this is IT so it’s always possible, but thankfully it appears the Government is very cool to this idea of a professional body anyway.

Thirdly, and finally, I’ll admit it, I’m a bodger. Not so much these days but in a past life of being surrounded by Microsoft’s products at work. There’s two reasons you have to bodge around with systems. It has nothing to do with your level of expertise and everything to do with Microsoft. Apart from the software they produce being unstable and a complete security nightmare at times (yes I do remember manually having to hack a rather pernicious virus of computers across the UK via remote access and manually having to do every machines registry system because none of the tools that were supposed to work did, or they allowed the machines to re-infect each other before you could isolate them) but as with everything with Microsoft, you never 100% know what you’re dealing with. I can happily mess about the registry of a system, that thing they tell you never to touch because a character in the wrong place can happily kill a machine but despite this knowledge, I still don’t know exactly how Windows works. Why? Well, because they don’t release the code, it’s all secret so at best you’re dealing with educated guesswork or previous experience. You can never know exactly what’s going on because it doesn’t get outside of a building in Redmond.

I think that’s pretty much it for the weekly review. Apart from Mrs Penguin has nicked my ‘good’ computer, I’ve spent a lot of time enjoying watching my son learn to run and I’m looking forward to my first trip to the cinema to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3 since I went to see Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith, from which you can deduce I don’t go to the cinema very often. I’ve also took advantage of the brief bit of good weather to do some of the jobs I haven’t been able to do outside or that require sunshine. Sadly this opportunity seems short-lived as it’s decidedly pissing it down again. Good night to one and all.

With the impending resignation due today of the Leader of the Labour Party I thought it apt to pin my colours to the mast which is plainly obvious by the new little graphic I’ve added below the main site menu.

The choice for leader has always been simple for me. For more reasons than I care to mention I will be supporting Gordon Brown.

For deputy it has been a little more complicated for which I’ve deliberated over before. However I’ve decided to support Jon Cruddas because I both value Peter Hain more for the talents and abilities that he could offer as a Government Minister and that I agree with the separation of the roles of Deputy Leader of the Party and Deputy Prime Minister.

We need a Deputy who isn’t about having a Cabinet brief but about working to revitalise the party and both re-engage and motivate the grass-roots activists to work harder than ever before to ensure that everything we have achieved in Government isn’t wrecked by the election of a Tory administration. Of all the candidates who’ve declared an interest I see him as the most able and dedicated to achieve that so that’s where my vote will be going.

Quick note: Anyone wishing to use the graphic for their own site is quite welcome to it. Feel free to copy and download it or drop me a line and I can mail the original, although it’s no bigger than the one here as I designed it specifically for its current dimensions.

It’s been interesting in Walsall, and I’ll try to say a bit more about the matter than my young fresh faced and chipper mate Paul Mac.

I’ll start with a brief reflection on my own humble predictions that I made in the last post. Not far out but not spot on either which is always annoying as I’m usually quite good at this stuff. However it begs a few questions and perhaps a little more analysis of what was actually going on in specific wards.

I happily got it wrong on the positioning of the parties in Short Heath, the BNP didn’t come second as it seems for some reason their vote across the whole of the West Midlands seems to a petered out and fallen back. Hopefully this is a pattern that will continue ad perhaps the electorate have started to realise what they really are as a party.

I got the jitters on polling day about Blakenall, Darlaston South and Brownhills. Thankfully in the case Brownhills they were uncalled for and an excellent hard working local Labour Councillor was returned. Sadly in the case of Blakenall and Darlaston South those jitters turned out to be well founded.

In Blakenall we lost to the DLP (Democratic Labour Party) by 15 votes. The DLP have been targeting this ward for years. On paper Blakenall should be the safest Labour ward in the Borough, although it vies closely with a couple of other wards who should also be far safer than they actually are. All I can say is if anything it should have been last year that the DLP would have seemed likely to gain this seat, put off by a very good campaign then. Why this year? Well, I wasn’t involved in the campaign this year so I have no clue how well or badly it was run but the margin is of course very slim. I’ve been conveyed two versions of the events at the count, the first that a recount was not allowed because staff were tired and the second that the Labour candidate decided not to have a recount because he thought the staff were tired. If the former then I’m sorry, this is democracy and whether the staff are tired or not is irrelevant. If the second account is true then the Labour candidate is a complete and total tit. If it’s a case of only 15 votes then it’s a recount and tough if the staff are tired or not.

On Darlaston South which rightly did go to a recount the margin was even less at 11 votes where the Independent defeated the sitting local Councillor. It wouldn’t have been for any lack of trying on our part as the campaign there was probably the best run and organised in the Borough which the result shows given how far off the mark we were last year when the Independent was returned. This time it was his wife up and plain and simple, they won. Did they deserve it? Well no and Darlaston South is all the worse off for losing probably their most active and dedicated Councillor for someone who I’d have a good bet will do sod all for the area.

The one I missed was Pleck. This was the only loss by Labour to the Tories in Walsall and in some respects needs a little more explanation.

The Labour candidate was new in that the sitting Labour Councillor was stepping down. That sitting Labour Councillor was the Muslim Councillor who after winning in 2004 crossed the floor from the Tories. He’d got there on a communal vote as a Muslim and simply the Tories put up another Muslim and pulled in enough of that communal vote again to take the seat back. I won’t complain because we won the Palfrey Ward last year from the Tories on pretty much the same basis but from my own personal perspective, I’m not a lover of communal politics and although I could write a dissertation on the subject I’ll just note that I recognise that in so far as building strong local democracy, I believe that communal politics has the potential to do more harm than good.

So there you go, apart from that my predictions were pretty much on the money. It was particularly nice to see the LibDem Nadia Fazel get completely shafted in my own ward even if it was by a much higher margin than even I’d dare to commit to. All in all not really a lot changed in Walsall, we’re still in opposition, we stand next to no chance of winning the council back any soon and despite what a complete and utter shambles the Tories are making of the place they can sit pretty for a fair while yet.

I am thinking of another post regarding this issue, concentrating more on the broader view of strategy and interpretation of how the political dynamics are working in Walsall but I shall desist for now as I’ve been to two counts in the last 24 hours, not slept much, am overly tired to concentrate to the extent that the subject matter requires and simply can’t be bother right now, I’d rather do something not remotely linked to politics for the next few hours.

I’m going to stick my neck out here and do a bit of election result prediction. Feel free to shoot me down should I get things spectacularly wrong but give me credit that at least I’ve got the bottle to put myself up for a potential right drumming.

Just for information I penned this article on April 28th 2007 in the early hours of the morning. I’ll be releasing it around about the close of polls on election day. There may be an hours discrepancy in terms of the time stamp as I can’t be bothered to adjust my sites times to BST but you’ll see it definitely went up before the votes were counted and feel free to save it but I promise not to try and pull a fast one by retro-editing it simply to make myself look good or get out of the shit if I get it spectacularly wrong.

So here’s how I think the make-up of Walsall will look come next Friday.

Tories 32
Labour 21
Independent 1
LibDems 6

Which is actually how it stood before the election.

In fairness it could be anything between:

Tories 34
Labour 18
Independent 2
LibDems 6

and:

Tories 30
Labour 22
Independent 1
LibDems 6

So anyway, for you delectation I give you a quick run down on what’s going to happen in Walsall. It’s by no means exhaustive and of course there’s things I know and factors at work in some cases that I have no wish to put into the public domain for use by other parties against us but just for a bit of fun and for Paul Macmanomy to take the piss out of me when I get it spectacularly wrong here we go:

Birchills Leamore: Lab Hold

This on paper should be one of the safest Labour seats in the borough yet last year the majority over the Tories got down to 80 something (can’t be bothered to look it up). The reason for this was that the Labour Councillor at the time Carol Rose defected to the Tories, strangely enough she did this a week or so after she failed to get selected to stand for Stourbridge in the 2005 General election after she was flaunting her wares as a committed Labour person so she obviously thought the Tories were a better prospect for her future. She’s standing again but against Tim Oliver the current leader of the Labour group she doesn’t stand much of a chance.

Blakenall: Lab Hold

Again another seat that should be one of Labour’s safest in the borough. Complicated by a very active Democratic Labour Party candidate but despite that Labour should hold it. If we don’t then there should be some very serious questions asked.

Bloxwich East: Tory Hold

Labour held this seat last year by seven votes if memory serves me correctly, anyway not more than ten. That was with a local candidate who’s well known. This year, not a chance of picking up this seat, Tories will walk it.

Bloxwich West: Tory Hold

Labour have an excellent local candidate here and former Councillor who works hard in the area. Despite that the Tories have a far superior organisational structure in terms of campaigning in Bloxwich which accounts for them holding five out of the six seats in a town that on paper should be completely Labour and as above, our one seat is very tenuous.

Short Heath: LibDem Hold

I’m going to really stick my neck out here and give the positions of the parties.

1.LibDem
2.BNP
3.Tory
4.Labour

I’m not going to go into the reasons but Labour will get slaughtered in this ward and the BNP will pick up a considerable amount of votes and clearly be second.

Willenhall North: LibDem Hold

Change of candidate for the LibDems here. They’ve put up the bloke who stood in Willenhall South last year who was so committed to us, so much so that he’s buggered off to a nice cushy safe LibDem seat.

Willenhall South: Lab Hold

Much to the contrary of Colin Ross and Paul Macmanomy saying this one’s too close to call I’ll go into numbers and predict at least a 200 Labour majority over the LibDems, Tories coming third and the Democratic Labour Party struggling to get over 100 votes if that. Simple analysis, Labour has the strong local candidate who lives in the ward, works very much on local issues and getting things done for people round here. The LibDems have put up that woman who used to be a member of the Labour Party, then joined Respect and has now ended up with them. Scraping the bottom of the barrel for candidates is putting it mildly.

Aldridge Central South, Aldridge North and Walsall Wood, Streetly, Rushall Shelfield and Pelsall: Tory Hold.

I’ve done these wards together because they make up the constituency of Aldridge Brownhills. It’s plain and simple, the Labour Party is next to non-existent in this bit of the world, we stand no chance of winning anything however you’ll note I left the Brownhills ward out which I’ll do next. The only ward to watch would be Rushall Shelfield, one of the BNP’s two target wards in Walsall. They’ll do well here, almost certainly come second but overturn the Tories? Almost certainly not.

Brownhills: Lab Hold

This one’s very tricky. If I was to play it safe I’d say Tory gain but I think Labour might just hold on. Electorally Brownhills is a funny ward. In the all-up election in 2004 it returned two Tories and one Labour although it was narrow between the second Labour candidate and the second Tory. Labour failed to gain it last year by a very narrow margin despite having an excellent campaign and a hard working candidate. It is also complicated by being one of the two focus wards for the BNP in Walsall that has almost turned it into a three way tie between Tory, Labour and the BNP. The BNP might pick it up but I think that the combination of a well known local Labour candidate who works hard in the ward may just see her through with those extra few ‘personal’ votes that such candidates get.

Pheasey Park Farm: Tory Hold

Nothing much to say, the Tories will win.

Bentley Darlaston North: Lab Hold

A presumed safe Labour seat and with the candidate who both works and campaigns hard in the area there shouldn’t be a problem in winning it.

Darlaston South: Lab Hold

Another ward with a hard working Labour Councillor up for re-election. Probably has the best run campaign of any in the borough. There’s a threat from an Independent, the wife of the current Independent councillor for the ward who won last year for very special reasons but against the Labour candidate combined with her formidable campaigning approach (at least compared to the rest of the Labour campaign in Walsall) this should hopefully be a Labour Hold.

Paddock: Tory Hold

Not much to say. The Tories will hold it.

Palfrey: Tory Hold

Another funny ward. A lot of Muslim community politics goes down in this neck of the woods. Last year it was a Labour gain and potentially could be a gain this year but I doubt it.

Pleck: Labour Hold

Again a bit funny due to some Muslim politics which saw a Muslim Tory elected in the all-up election of 2005 who then defected to Labour and decided not to stand this year so it’s a fresh Labour candidate but someone who’s known very well locally and works hard so he’ll probably get through.

St. Matthews: Tory Hold

I’m biased on this one as the candidate is the one who stood last year in Brownhills. He’s an excellent campaigner and was prior to the 2005 all-up election, the Councillor for this ward. Following the boundary changes this ward changed considerably. To the cries of gerrymandering and such, a large area with a good thousand or so Tory voters got shifted into this ward and effectively wiped Labour out. Is it possible to regain the ward? Sadly probably not and the Labour Group would be all the worse for the lack of the presence of it’s candidate in this ward sitting on the benches.

So there you go. My prediction for Walsall despite all the bad press, investigations, auditors reports (nicely delayed until after the elections), referrals to the Crown Prosecution Service, the background of what amounts to a completely crap Tory run council and I doubt they’ll be any change whatsoever and if anything maybe a Tory gain of one or two.

feel free to take the piss out of me if I get it completely wrong though.

[Update] As it’s polling day I’m going to stick pretty much with the predictions above but with some rather dodgy feelings regarding the Blakenall, Brownhills and Darlaston South wards.

It’s been a strange week in comparison to normal. My enforced housebound status due to having my toenail removed on Monday has meant I haven’t got out. This has meant I’ve completed lots of jobs (mainly techie) that I’ve been meaning to do for a while and I’ve completely exhausted every one of my RSS feeds in terms of my media consumption.

Every blog I read has been read, every media feed I have has been read, I’ve polished off Zelda the Twilight Princess and gone back through it to find all the hidden stuff, built my Lego Star Destroyer and have found myself at a loose end.

This led me to hunt out some new stuff to consume. I rarely get round to reading the online sections of newspapers, save for the dear old Express and Swastiki for pure frustration at how bad journalism can get but I found myself at the Guardian’s comment is free section. More precisely at this article by Polly Toynbee.

Haven’t read anything by her for years, which may sound odd being a leftie politico type but it’s true. However it made me remember that I’d been planning to write a piece about the impact of consumer society values on expectations of public services. I wasn’t planning on concentrating on the health service in particular but it is a very good example.

I’m not going to reiterate what Polly Toynbee has written, just read her article to get the jist but what struck me most was the comments to her article. I managed to get about half way through before I gave up in despair at the number of people slagging off the NHS, moaning about how much taxes they pay for it or doing down what we have in the UK and comparing it to other countries that have ‘better’ health services.

So I thought I’d share a bit of my own personal experience of the NHS.

I don’t use the health service much, I’ve only ever had one procedure done and short of a few trips to the GP for a bit of professional opinion and the odd bottle of jollop that’s about it. The only procedure I’ve had is the one that took place on Monday to remove my ingrowing big toenail. I visited my GP about five weeks ago because it was painful, he diagnosed it, referred me for the operation that should have been in about four to six weeks so five weeks is pretty much on the money and I had it done. I went back today as the operations are carried out at my local clinic in the town, a walk of about 200 yards to have my dressing changed and that was it. I don’t know how much this procedure cost the NHS nor the cumulative cost of my few visits to the GP over the years but I’d hazard a guess hardly anything compared to the proportion of the taxes that I’ve paid into the system to pay for its running.

The strange thing about this, at least if you are to believe some of the comments on Toynbee’s article is that I’m quite happy about this situation. I am quite happy to pay taxes to run a service that I do not wish to use. I’m happy because I’m not able to predict and control everything in my life. I do not know that one day one the arseholes who speed past my house isn’t going to knock me over and I end up in A&E with the requirement for a lot of treatment. I don’t know if I may suffer from an illness like cancer or suddenly have a heart attack but I do know that I quite like the idea that if I do, then I don’t have to worry too much about it because I won’t have to suddenly fork over thousands of pounds to cover the cost or find out suddenly there’s a clause in my health insurance that “doesn’t cover that condition or illness”. Such as I don’t mind that from my own perspective up till now I’ve paid thousands into the system for other people’s care and treatment, because come the day I may need treatment for something serious, those very same people may be the ones paying in to cover for my treatment. Personally however, I’d be quite happy to pay into the system for the whole of my working life and never have to have had another procedure done other than the one I’ve just had.

There were also numerous comments about waiting times for procedures and of course of a negative nature so I thought I’d add a few examples. I waiting five weeks to have a minor bit of surgery done relating to a condition that caused me minor discomfort but nothing agonising. I’m reminded back to about 16 years ago when a relative of mine had the same condition. He waited over six months for his operation and apparently that was a reasonable time to expect to wait in those days to have an ingrowing toenail removed. I think I quite like the way things are now because despite my condition being a minor discomfort for the period of five weeks, I don’t think I would have fancied it for six months, not even taking into account how the condition can get progressively more painful the longer it is left.

Second example. My mother had a problem with her ear a few months back. She went to the GP who referred her to a specialist at New Cross hospital in Wolverhampton which took about a fortnight. He saw her and asked her if she’d like to come back the following day to have the procedure done. Not sure about how other people might see that, but having the procedure done the next day seems rather a good service by my standards.

I’ll touch on a bit of comparative health provision which always comes up in these arguments usually about why our health service isn’t ‘as good’ as for example the French, German or Nordic ones. I won’t go into the old debate of comparing it to the US system of individual health insurance as it’s been done to death apart from noting that purely from an administrative cost analysis our system wins hands down in terms of efficiency. It’s simple, one form to fill in, if you’re registered as living at an address in the UK you can get an NHS number and that’s about it. You don’t have to pay for treatment at the point of need and whether you’re taken sick in Wolverhampton, Edinburgh or Machynlleth you can get treatment at the nearest hospital without any hassle. I use that example deliberately as you will see in a minute.

Now I will admit to not knowing much about the French health service apart from it’s based on a combined system of people paying for it through taxation and private health insurance. Germany is pretty much the same which I do know a bit more about for obvious reasons. Is it better? Well yes if your measurement of comparison is in terms of the potential wait you may have for things to get done. Perhaps this is part of the national psyche of the Germans? They don’t tend to like to wait for things, something very evident in Mrs Penguin and with their combined state funded and private health insurance system they get a faster service than we do. Of course they pay for it, not only through higher taxes but also having to afford private health policies on top and we are back to the old adage of getting what you pay for. Whatever rubbish is spouted by the right of British politics we have it fairly good in the UK in terms of taxation, both personal and business. What we have is a health service that is effectively done on the cheap because of the conditions under which it is expected to run. Despite its detractors it’s a pretty damn efficient organisation, of course more could be done but given how we pay comparably less for our health service than our near neighbours on the continent we get a pretty good deal.

Moving on to the Nordic model of which I know more about, in particular of the Finnish system having lived there. Theirs is in essence more comparable to ours in that it’s a directly funded for by the tax-payer system unless things have radically changed since I last lived there.

However here’s why I used the example of our own where it doesn’t matter if you’re in Wolverhampton, Edinburgh or Machynlleth when you need treatment. Much as the Finnish health system could be considered better than our own, less waiting times, better facilities etc etc, it’s not a ‘national’ health service. It’s funding comes through local taxation which on one hand is good in terms of being able to tailor treatments to more specific local areas but if for example you live and pay taxes in Tampere and just happen to be visiting Helsinki when your appendix starts to burst and there have been some examples of this. The doctors in Helsinki have been known to ship the patient 120 miles north back to Tampere so that they pick up the cost.

Personally if I happen to be in Sheffield and my appendix starts to burst I’d quite like to be taken to the local hospital and it done as quickly as possible there than be shipped back to Wolverhampton and that of course raises the issue of what is the overriding priority? As much as the Nordic system is very good, it doesn’t preclude the possibility of costs and funding overruling clinical patient care. I’ll just add that there’s actually another type of health service structure in Finland that I haven’t mentioned, that for students which is completely different and funded through membership of the local student union which is compulsory and has to be paid for. I won’t go into too much detail but over there students unions are very much a part of the social welfare structure as opposed to the organisers of piss-ups at universities over here. (that is a deliberately flippant remark for humorous value, yes I know they do some very important student welfare stuff here too before someone complains but in comparison it is nothing to the extent that they do in Finland)

What’s the conclusion? Well much as we would all want our treatment done the next day, it’s quite clear that in Britain people are not willing to fork over the extra money in taxation to pay for it. We have a pretty good and efficient health service that operates on significantly less money than those in France, Germany and the Nordic countries so we can’t really complain that much. We are spending more on the NHS now than we were under the Tories and the improvements in service and significantly lower waiting times are there to see but for some reason people seem not to understand this expecting everything to be done yesterday and of course not willing to cough up the extra cash to achieve this aim. Something for nothing I think that is called and it’s a very childish perspective to take which perhaps is a sad reflection on the society in which we live.

[note] I’d originally titled this article “In pursuit of happiness” and intended to go on to other areas but I’ve decided to keep it more focused on health issues. I’ll do the more general theme another time.

I did mention as I got caught up in all this Tory attack nonsense that I was planning on writing an article that was critical of my own side. It’s a bit long-winded and requires some explanation, particularly that of a techie nature but bear with me there’s some interesting and important points to be made.

The genesis of this topic started when I received an e-mail encouraging me to sign a petition on No.10’s website. I don’t sign petitions as a rule and in all fairness this particular petition was poorly worded. However the good intention was there, it was something dear to my heart and I thought very valid to be raised.

Basically it was to encourage the Government to use Linux operating systems in Departments and the public sector in general.

Here’s why it wasn’t a particularly well phrased petition. It pretty much only mentioned Linux which to be fair is only one part of a wider use of Open Source Software (OSS) and I would agree that if the objective is to encourage the use of OSS in the public sector then there are far better places to start than simply trying to adopt Linux as an operating system.

Anyway as I’ve never signed one of these Downing Street petitions before I wasn’t aware that they send out responses but I was interested by the one that I got. Here it is:

“Government policy on Open Source Software (OSS) is available in the document “Open Source Software, Use within UK Government, Version 2.0, 28 October 2004″. This is available from www.govtalk.gov.uk. The policy is set out on page 4 of the document. In particular the Government will:

The UK Government champions open standards and interoperability through the e-government interoperability framework (e-gif). This framework is available from the ‘govtalk’ web site. The ability to substitute one component for another removes the dependency on a single supplier and encourages competition - an essential for Transformational Government. Many authors of software embrace open standards and interoperability but do not wish to make their source code freely available; they should not be penalised.”

Me being the curious Penguin that I am decided to read through all the various documentation referred to and a few others as well.

Now on to a side issue where this becomes less an administrative issue and more a political issue.

The other day I was browsing through my site stats and picked up a referral from Technorati which looked interesting. Can’t remember what it was but I came up on the same page as Guido AKA Paul Delaire Staines.

As I don’t read his site I wouldn’t normally have picked up on it but had a little look. It was an interesting piece about George Osbourne talking up the benefits of OSS and to go with it Guido provided nice little graphical representations implying that the Labour Party was in some way in league with the evil empire of Microsoft compared of course to the open and wonderfully modern and forward thinking Tories.

Another side issue. I wanted to link to that post so dropped back the Paul Delaire Staine’s site tonight but couldn’t find it. There’s a simple reason. His site is complete and utter shite from a design/functional perspective. No category listings that aren’t present in posts on the front page, no hierarchical archives section to search by date and I didn’t spot a search function either. Purely from the perspective of a techie who designs websites with functionality as the core objective, I would be ashamed to put such a shoddy pisspoor site on the net but hey ho, back to the issue.

So Paul Delaire Staines did a piece talking up the Tories and doing down Labour, no surprise there then. However and this is why the ’sort of…’ bit appears in the title of this post. I’d originally planned on giving my own side a bit of a drumming on this issue but it’s a bit more complicated than a straight fight against the evil empire of Microsoft, not that I would expect such a complex issue to be handled on Paul Delaire Staines site, he does afterall appeal to the Janet and John end of the political spectrum.

I’ve touched on a lot of the various issues before in this post so please refer to it if there’s any concepts you’re not familiar with.

Let’s run with the Tories good on OSS and Labour bad and we’ll split this into two categories. Use by the parties and use in Government when in power.

Use in Government first, that’s the easiest. Now OSS has been around for many years but it’s only been the last 5 or so years that it’s been hitting the mainstream for regular users. Prior to this any use of OSS has been determined by the techie bods behind the scenes and uses have been more concentrated on various server structures, e-mail systems etc, not your average desktop application that people actually use from day to day. Now because of this it’s hard to criticise the Tories for not implementing it when they were in power.

However, this was the period when a lot of the civil service used a particular Word Processor called WordPerfect which was systematically replaced by the Microsoft Office package throughout virtually every level of government departments so with all due respect to Paul Delaire Staines on this one, it’s a bit rich to accuse Labour as being under the power of the evil Microsoft when it’s those same Tories who he’s now espousing as the radical proponents of OSS who stuck the shit in the public sector to start with when there were perfectly acceptable and as most techies would probably agree, a far superior product being used to start with although it too was not OSS.

Labour have been in power for almost a decade and in fairness have done very little to either alter the situation as regards implementation of OSS solutions or promote it. However in October 2004 at least the Government published a paper on it’s use which is far more than the Tories ever did. Has anything been done about it, well I haven’t spotted anything particular from national level but there is some shift in local services. The most interesting is implementations in schools which as far as I can tell is being driven less from actual policy by individual local authorities and more from simple practical cost/benefit perspectives of individual schools where the onus on the change often comes down to the particular techie in question who’s been tasked with the implementation of IT systems.

The irony of this is that implementation in the public sector isn’t coming from top-down diktat but more from grassroots practical implementation on a local level to deal with the specific challenges and needs of the services in question.

The problem with implementation in the public sector is twofold. Firstly, large organisations invariably tend towards slow change over time, radical overhauls, particularly IT systems in the public sector tend not to be a good thing. People are happy with what they’ve been using for years, were trained on and have a suspicion of using new systems. Secondly what exactly are we talking about when we refer to using OSS in the public sector?

It’s not about sticking Linux on every desktop in every government department and local authority. There are a plethora of OSS applications out there that happily sit on Windows operating systems and I would be more inclined to agree that change there is where it is needed.

There’s only a few applications required for use in most aspects of the public sector, an office suite, e-mail client and web browser, not really that hard. Of these well the web browser isn’t of great significance from a cost perspective because it comes bundled with the operating system. However e-mail client and office suites are. A simple switch to openoffice.org and say Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client would save millions and unlike many switches of software, retraining costs are negligible. To be honest if any member of staff in the public sector can’t work out how to use openoffice.org after having used Microsoft Office then they have serious problems. The functionality, layout, style of the two applications are near on identical. Same is true for Thunderbird compared to Microsoft Outlook, looks a bit different but how hard is it to send an e-mail?

So there you go, a bit of criticism of the Labour Government for not pushing implementation where it could easily be done, but equally the Tories are to blame for many of the problems in the first place and I haven’t spotted a single Tory controlled local authority in the country about to embark down the road to IT enlightenment so we’ll put the George Osbourne thing down to a crap publicity stunt.

On to the parties actual usage then. After all if you’re going to espouse the use of OSS then one would assume you use it yourself. It’s a bit like telling people not to fly and then taking short haul trips that could easily be done by road. Or banging on about energy saving while burning shitloads of halogen bulb spots in your kitchen, that sort of thing.

Now one thing that came out of that Webcameron thing last week was a few hits from Tory Party HQ and please note, I’m going to say something complimentary about the Tories here. They use Firefox, an OSS web browser. Actually, all I know is that maybe one person in Tory HQ uses it but at least that’s one so for the record they get a tick box of approval on that one. Not sure what Labour or the LibDems use so can’t really offer an opinion there. Equally when it comes to operating systems and e-mail clients I really don’t know either but I’m going to hazard a guess they all use Windows with the odd Mac lying around for specific graphical and publishing work.

Here’s where we can get a picture of things though. Websites. Now I have no time to check out every single MP’s/Cllr’s/MEP’s website but from a bit of sampling here’s my conclusions. As regards elected members higher than Councillors I didn’t find a single one from the Tories or LibDems using an open source web system. I could be wrong, I’ll be happy to accept examples but from my mouch around the net I didn’t pick up on any. I found a fair few being used by Labour members, mainly it has to be said Wordpress blogs although Harriet Harman has a Typo 3 front end with a Wordpress blog tagged on to the back. When we get down to the Councillor level there’s a lot more Tories using open source stuff, again mainly Wordpress but I didn’t spot a LibDem as they seem to often use some strange system that I’m assuming the party nationally set up for them.

On to the three main parties home websites. LibDems, looks like a bespoke system as does the Tories. Now of course I can only surmise from my own knowledge of scripting by looking at their source code but one usually finds that if a generator of some sort has been used it appears in the code. If however they have used OSS solutions or the companies they’ve employed to do their sites for them have and deliberately omitted it then that’s a big no no in the techiquette book. Labour on the other hand use a system called Typo 3 which is OSS, it clearly states it in the source code of the site and although I’m personally of the opinion that if you use OSS web solutions then you should also put it somewhere on your site, I won’t be too critical as it’s not a set requirement.

So there you go, Labour not so bad after all when it comes to the old OSS. I will qualify my statements above by saying that I used sample to derive these conclusions. I could quite easily have picked the wrong sites out and I’m happy to receive corrections or pointers in the direction of examples. I’m also really interested as I get a fair few hits from those working in the public sector of what you’re using at work. I’d like to do a bit more on this if I get enough responses to derive some serious data from so here’s what I would like to know. Here’s a few likely examples but please add others:
What operating system you’re using? Windows, Mac OS, Linux
What office package do you use? Microsoft, openoffice.org, Corel, Lotus
What web browser do you use? Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Netscape
What e-mail client do you use? Outlook, Thunderbird, Lotus

Feel free to post in the comments section although I know that people from political parties or the public sector might not wish to be identified then feel free to use the contact section and mail me. On this occasion all messages will be treated in strictest confidence and I won’t reveal anyone’s identity. If you could give indications like which party, which governmental department/local authority then that would help immensely. This for me isn’t really a party political issue, it’s more a personal campaign for better use of software in the public sector so I shan’t be using any of the data to have a pop at any party.