Political Penguin

I’ve had a rather stressful week which has meant I’ve hardly got round to reading anything remotely blog related until Friday morning but as I was going out I didn’t have any time to comment so I’ll simply be making up the numbers so to speak in putting my two-pennies-worth on the whole.

It’s good to see that despite there being many different, often opposing views from bloggers that make up online discourse that most have rallied round to support Tim over at Bloggerheads on this one.

Sadly two of my daily (excepting this week of course) reads, Tim and Bob’s are off the air because of the action of this Mr Usmanov geezer.

On the matter itself I can only really think of three perspectives.

It is sad to see that in 21st Century Britain, that it’s money that talks. The ability to pay for the services of a top lawyers firm speaks more and holds more sway than what should be the essence of democracy, that of free speech.

The second is that when Gordon Brown became Premier, it was quite clear that work on constitutional issues would become an issue that is worked on. He has already muted the idea of a British Bill of Rights and ironically, such an example as this exposes the weaknesses in our current arrangement. Perhaps, just perhaps this having happened now, highlighting the inequities of our present law regarding free speech that it may stir up enough support to bring about some real change.

Finally and this is probably the most ironic part of the whole affair. Mr Usmanov has sought to use his vast wealth to gag someone through legal means in an attempt to prevent the expression of views questioning his past. In thus doing he has not only failed because he doesn’t understand the medium nor the culture of those who partake in blogging, he’s confirmed that yes, he is indeed a complete and utter arsehole of the highest order and pretty much has shot himself in the foot by his actions. The muppet, and it’s obviously not only me who thinks that way. (List via Chicken Yoghurt)

Curious Hamster, Pickled Politics, Harry’s Place, Tim Worstall, Dizzy, Iain Dale, Ten Percent, Blairwatch, Davide Simonetti, Earthquake Cove, Turbulent Cleric (who suggests dropping a line to the FA about Mr Usmanov), Mike Power, Jailhouse Lawyer, Suesam, Devil’s Kitchen, The Cartoonist, Falco, Casualty Monitor, Forever Expat, Arseblog, Drink-soaked Trots (and another), Pitch Invasion, Wonko’s World, Roll A Monkey, Caroline Hunt, Westminster Wisdom, Chris K, Anorak, Mediawatchwatch, Norfolk Blogger, Chris Paul, Indymedia (with a list of Craig Murray’s articles that are currently unavailable), Obsolete, Tom Watson, Cynical Chatter, Reactionary Snob, Mr Eugenides, Matthew Sinclair, The Select Society, Liberal England, Davblog, Peter Gasston Pitch Perfect, Adelaide Green Porridge Cafe, Lunartalks, Tygerland, The Crossed Pond, Our Kingdom, Big Daddy Merk, Daily Mail Watch, Graeme’s, Random Thoughts, Nosemonkey, Matt Wardman, Politics in the Zeros, Love and Garbage, The Huntsman, Conservative Party Reptile, Ellee Seymour, Sabretache, Not A Sheep, Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion, The People’s Republic Of Newport, Life, the Universe & Everything, Arsenal Transfer Rumour Mill, The Green Ribbon, Blood & Treasure, The Last Ditch, Areopagitica, Football in Finland, An Englishman’s Castle, Freeborn John, Eursoc, The Back Four, Rebellion Suck!, Ministry of Truth, ModernityBlog, Beau Bo D’Or, Scots and Independent, The Splund, Bill Cameron, Podnosh
, Dodgeblogium, Moving Target, Serious Golmal, Goonerholic, The Spine, Zero Point Nine, Lenin’s Tomb, The Durruti Column, The Bristol Blogger, ArseNews, David Lindsay, Quaequam Blog!, On A Quiet Day…, Kathz’s Blog, England Expects, Theo Spark, Duncan Borrowman, Senn’s Blog, Katykins, Jewcy, Kevin Maguire, Stumbling and Mumbling, Famous for 15 megapixels, Ordovicius, Tom Morris, AOL Fanhouse, Doctor Vee, The Curmudgeonly, The Poor Mouth, 1820, Hangbitch, Crooked Timber, ArseNole, Identity Unknown, Liberty Alone, Amused Cynicism, Clairwil, The Lone Voice, Tampon Teabag, Unoriginalname38, Special/Blown It, The Remittance Man, 18 Doughty Street

I’ve been away for the last fortnight on holiday. Although not guaranteed, it was highly likely that we would be out of net connectivity at least for part or the whole time. This in the end turned out to be the whole fortnight so although I haven’t had oodles of time to pen thoughtful pieces for publication, I did have the odd half hour here or there to sit down with the knackered old laptop and write a few articles.

These articles have now been published in roughly the chronological order that they were written in and as noted in each article, I have changed the timestamp to reflect when it was written. As the pieces are not of a particularly time related importance I’m sure no one will have a problem with that and I’m being completely honest about the fact and not in anyway trying to alter timestamps to pretend that I’ve got a scoop ten minutes before Sky or the Beeb as I’m sure no political blogger would ever stoop so low as to do that.

Some of the articles relate to things I’d meant to write about before I left but didn’t get round to and given that I’ve had no net access and will probably be too lazy when I get back, there won’t be any hyperlinks to various references like usual. This has been very interesting given that I would normally be quite fastidious about references but for these articles from the last two weeks.

Couldn’t resist using that title as time seems to have slipped by so fast that a week has passed (almost) since I last posted something.

There is of course a very good excuse for my dereliction of duty where my blog is concerned, I’ve been horribly busy so I thought it best to do a bit of a round-up of things.

Last Friday I did a radio show o Wolverhampton Community Radio. It was the first in a series run by Matthew Revell who also appears to be very busy as he hasn’t blogged in nearly a week either but I can understand with all the radio show thing. Matthew’s a Tory but he doesn’t seem that bad apart from a strange propensity to get digs in about the BBC whenever he can. I have no idea why but we’ll see if anything drops into Friday night’s show. (Only kidding to Matthew).

The show went well apart from a few hiccups and lost bits and bobs but hey, it was the first ever show so you’re always going to expect a few of those. Turned out quite well humoured and certainly none of the yar-boo discourse that one gets at PMQ’s. Personally I like quite in-depth discussion but we managed to get round a fair number of issues in the hour we had and apart from having to get rather cosy with Paul Uppal due to there only being one microphone working at the start I quite enjoyed it.

On to why I haven’t been blogging ala Saturday onwards. Well, it’s the weather. I think it’s fair to say that this Summer, whatever one might call it has been abysmal. I am trying to remember a period of three days going by without it raining but simply can’t for the last few months and not even contemplating that any break in the rain has been sunny.

This has posed a real problem for me as I’ve had a number of jobs/projects lined up for this year of which only one has been completed (painting the door to the passageway). Renovating the windows hasn’t been completed, digging that big hole in the back garden hasn’t been completed, painting the house hasn’t been completed or any of the other stuff that requires a good few days of sunshine for things to dry out.

So without hesitation I’ve been taking advantage of the almost uninterrupted sun since Saturday (yes, it did rain a little early Sunday morning) but apart from that I’ve actually managed to at least start on a few things with the hope it stays dry or at least dryer for a while so I can complete them. I have no illusions that all the jobs I’d planned will be completed this year because they won’t, save for a very late ‘Summer’ extending into October but you never know.

I’m going to go off on a few little tangents so bear with me.

David Cameron. I’m not going to say anything about the problems he’s been having lately, there’s enough coverage of that and I don’t have anything insightful to add to the discourse but what has happened to tabloid headline writers these days? Come on, “It never rains but it pours for Cameron” was just begging to be pulled out but nope, didn’t spot it anywhere. (happy to be proven wrong).

Does anyone know where I can get a downpipe diverter? There’s plenty online but I’d like to have a look at one first. For information, these are connectors that can be fitted to a downpipe that can divert rainfall away to a separate source. I’ve also noticed that most seem to divert to a pipe about the same diameter as a hosepipe and I wanted one a bit more substantial but might have to compromise if I can’t find one.

I’ve been working on a lot of techie relating things as well in the evenings when I’m not in the garden. I mentioned before that the old Laptop PIII, 128Mb RAM was struggling with Windows and I wanted to put Linux on it. More specifically Xubuntu which is a stripped down version of Ubuntu running the X desktop for lets say, more senior citizen computers. I could never get it to boot with the disc which annoyed me considerably. However on a whim I installed DSL (Damn Small Linux) which I’ve known about for ages but never seemed to get round to experimenting with. It is great for older machines. After I’d installed the system, as opposed to running it from a LiveCD it was faster than the other two, considerably better spec computers in the house. A bit fiddly at times to get things working but on the whole a nice distribution in particular the ability to put it on a USB memory stick and with newer machines being able to boot from USB, giving you the possibility of carrying around your whole operating system on a keyring.

I did however feel like having one last go at Xubuntu and for some strange reason, since I stripped Windows XP off the machine it booted fine and installed with no problems at all so the little lappy now has Xubuntu on, which keeps Mrs Penguin happy as it’s easier to use than DSL.

I think that pretty much brings things up-to-date. Obviously the Summer recess period has struck, politics in general has shifted to downtime and I’ll probably be doing likewise so unless something really interesting pops up between now and September I’ll probably be doing a few more personal/light-hearted postings.

Last week I broke this story. It was nice that within the space of two an a half hours it was the breaking news on the BBC Newsnight programme, gave me a little bit of warm self contented feeling inside.

It is however curious when one considers the interaction between the mainstream media and those of us in the blogging world. I can’t claim to have read every paper or followed every broadcast but as far as I can tell, the only mainstream media organisation that actually attributed the story to me was the New Statesman.

I’ll admit to not being regular reader of that publication but fair enough to them that their online edition posted a link, for which my referral states have been going quite mad for the last 48 hours or so. Easily outranking any other referrer including Google searches which almost always dominates (usually with some strange search terms I might add) but it’s been nice to have been acknowledged so a hat tip goes out to the New Statesman tonight.

It all started rather innocently. Tom Watson puts up a post with the simple question of who’s Tony Lit? Iain Dale jumps up and down like a big girls blouse with accusations that Tom has broken election law when he clearly hasn’t. It falls to Unity over at MoT to point this out to the overly dim-witted Dale.
Well, it’s all over to the Mirror now.

Just to let you know as the whole Deputy Leadership is over, that’s led to the removal of the polls and the lovely little picture of Gordon and Jon in the left-hand sidebar. Things are looking blank, me thinks I should come up with something to occupy this space. Perhaps a poll about my favourite politician David Cameron would go down well? Ah, I can see the potental options already.

Working on something, back soon.

I know I’m probably going to prick up the ears of some of my regular readers with the title of this post but please bear with me.

Here’s how the argument is going at the moment at least as far as one can judge from the mainstream media. He should go because he’s one of the lads, he shouldn’t be treated specially just because he’s a prince or he shouldn’t go because he’d be a target for insurgents and if they are aware he is there, blowing his head off might be a bit of a big prize for some groups. Equally this has been dismissed today by the army as being irrelevant because they won’t know where he is, and that is where I have a problem.

I fully accept the argument that he should be treated much as any other soldier. My own personal beliefs are that just because he’s a prince he is nothing special, no different from anyone else, no more important than the son or daughter of any other parent who might be sent off to fight in a foreign land. If you join the army it’s a distinct possibility that one day you’ll be sent somewhere dangerous and may well be killed. If you can’t accept that then you shouldn’t join up.

However, much as that may be my view that he is intrinsically nothing special, I fully accept that he’d be a nice little target for insurgents out to make a ‘big’ kill simply because of who he is. I accept that if he were to go then his whereabouts would not be readily available but this in part exacerbates the problem.

Here’s the scenario. Insurgents will be aware that Prince Harry will be knocking about somewhere in Iraq. There’s no way the army are going to put him somewhere he might actually get popped off, after all, they don’t want a dead prince on their hands (very bad PR and a major bottom-kicking from them up on high) so he’ll be holed up somewhere pretty cushy (from a security perspective), save for a few nice photo sessions of him walking around with the lads on patrol to keep the punters back home happy.

However his presence there may and I say may because it’s not guaranteed but a fair bet, that this will make British troops as a whole a more plush target, just on the off-chance that one of them might be a prince. Obviously we cannot say for sure, only an increase in body bags returning home would give us a definite answer to the question but if it means that we do not increase the risks of more of our lads coming home in body bags for what amounts to a nice bit of PR for the prince, the royal family and the army then I’m quite happy with that.

Was interested to read this over at Bob’s site. I’m not sure if it’s me but there seems to be a bit of a theme going among the right-wing elements of the blogosphere to try and attack Gordon Brown which raises an issue or two.

Firstly though, this whole website being registered presumably for the purposes of a Gordon Brown leadership campaign and a few interesting issues that it raises in itself. Now I was a bit bored myself the one night about a month ago and went fishing for Gordon Brown leadership sites and came up with the one that Dizzy has identified. Personally I thought nothing of it as there was no content present so didn’t feel inclined as to mention it. What’s also out there are various other URL’s registered along a similar Brown leadership theme by other parties which could be anything from ready to go spoof sites to simply some cyber-squatters trying to pull a fast one and make a bit of money by holding on to the domains, probably the latter and they’ve almost certainly wasted their time and money.

However this does raise an interesting point about how new-media sits with existing legislation regarding any kind of political campaigning and as much as some might want to try and use this as a way to attack Brown, at best we are all just victims of the vagueness of the existing legal framework.

Considering a normal election campaign using more traditional methods of leaflets and posters on lampposts it’s not that hard. Leaflet goes off to printers, they print it, they bill you, you declare the cost in the election expenses. Posters, well the same for the printing but the cost of the boards have to be declared or if reused a value has to be put on them and declared.

There is however a problem with this that directly relates to the issue raised in this case. In the case of leaflets, those delivered after the date the election has been called have to be included on the expenses. These leaflets may have been prepared weeks before but they still have to go down. In the case of posters the same is usually true that they’ve been pasted up weeks in advance to the actually date of the election campaign. However where as the cost of preparing boards and the value of them should be declared as do leaflets prepared in advance but delivered within the timeframe of the election campaign proper, leaflet delivered before do not and do not have to carry the full election legal imprint.

We do have a rather poor legal framework when it comes to declaring expenses and indeed donations be they in hard cash or in kind. I’m reminded back to the 1997 General Election where the Tories used a local firm in Wolverhampton who’s owners were supporters to get their staff during work hours to sit and fold all their leaflets, something that certain members of the staff refused to do. Was it ever declared as a contribution in kind? I highly doubt it and in all fairness I wouldn’t care if it was or not. It’s almost impossible to track and record every bit of contribution in political activity. Do we declare all the hours campaigners put in delivering leaflets, or in my case designing the sodding things and contributing my own labour in printing them? No because it’s just not possible.

So really it has to be said, and the criticism isn’t directed at Dizzy here, he’s just reporting something of no particular interest or relevance. The criticism comes for Iain Dale for trying to jump on something and promptly falling off. As much as it would be facile to claim that my work in preparing leaflets for a candidate should be included on their election expenses, then if someone has been working on a website for Gordon in anticipation of his leadership campaign then the argument is equally as facile.

I’ll leave on this note. There seems to be a lot of Tories trying to get at Gordon Brown. I’m perplexed as to the reason why. Surely they want him to be the next leader of the Labour Party, parading opinion polls that show their baby faced leader as being streets ahead against him. Or, perhaps maybe they realise that while David Cameron may be enjoying his time courting the media when it has turned against the present Prime Minister, that when it comes down to the real gritty politics of policy and delivery, that their leader is a lightweight, disingenuous coward who already buckled at facing Gordon across the despatch box in the past and if his resorting to trying to compare the present Chancellor to Stalin is truly the best he can come up with then he’s sadly lacking.

Yes, I know it’s late but just wanted to post it. Contains lots of swearing so not for the children.