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GWAFFTEY — is web 2.0 now just eight things?

Martin Turner — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 01:06:52 +0000

Google looks for Web 2.0

Google. Wikipedia. Amazon. Facebook. Flickr. Twitter. Ebay. YouTube. Has web 2.0 now settled down to these eight things? These aren’t necessarily the biggest sites, but they are the sites which get referred to again and again online and offline. More than ‘websites’, which is what the internet was to most people five years ago, these define what it means to be ‘online’.

According to Alexa, Google is #1, Facebook #2, YouTube #3, Wikipedia #7, Twitter #11, Amazon #15, eBay #22, and Flickr #33. But each are by far the largest in their own category. You can include Blogger (#8) and WordPress.com (#19), but most of their traffic is not people particularly going to Blogger or WordPress, but to access other people’s content which is hosted in those places. The rest of the top spots are taken by other search engines and portals — Yahoo, Windows Live, Baidu, MSN, QQ, Bing, with the first other category, Microsoft, coming in at 24, Facebook’s competitors LinkedIn and Myspace at 28 and 29. Most of the others are alternative versions of Google. BBC Online, the highest ranked news content provider, is 47.

This must be an unwelcome development for content sellers and would-be monetizers. The Times, the FT, and other pay to read or partially pay to read online papers would prefer a trend towards users paying for content on a free infrastructure. The reverse is the case: the infrastructure remains free, but more and more users are generating their own content and relying on other user-generated content for much of their input.

The dominance of the big eight is unwelcome news as well for the tens of thousands of discussion-board based communities. A number of sites I used to frequent have either closed their doors or drastically dropped their level of membership or involvement. Some very large sites have prospered. Nikonians, a site which I help to moderate, has increased its range of services, moved to a paying model after an initial free-use period, and has continued to attract new members. It now stands at around the quarter million – not remotely in the region of the big sites, but a substantial community for a specialist interest. Others have been less fortunate.

I use, and find useful, all of the sites mentioned in the title of this post. I wouldn’t want any of them to vanish. They represent radically different approaches to user-generated content, all of which I find in different ways valuable. But the gradual extinction of the specialist communities is beginning to remove the informal knowledge which was once the hallmark of the useful side of the internet. Ten years ago I might have said that you can find the answer to almost any question in the field of human knowledge on the web, but that 90% of the answers offered would be wrong. Now, I wouldn’t be so sure. When I was a more active Wikipedia editor, I spent a considerable amount of time searching the web for references. On any esoteric subject, most of the sites offering answers would be automated (and rebadged) copies of Wikipedia itself. The small expert-user communities do still exist, but they are under pressure. Internet knowledge has always been composed of three layers — authoritative, official knowledge, such as the Office of National Statistics or manufacturer websites offering software downloads, verified, referenced knowledge, such as Wikipedia, Britannica and most commercial news providers, and informal advice and opinion. If there’s an official or widely known answer, then the first two types of site are by far the best bet. But there are a huge number of questions to which there is no authoritative answer, but there are several useful ones. If you want to know how to solder one gizmo onto another otherwise incompatible gizmo, neither Wikipedia nor the manufacturer’s web are likely to tell you. But a small discussion forum led by one guy from Kansas and another from Helsinki might well already have the answer. And, if it doesn’t, you can always register and ask.

Google, of course, along with other search engines, comprehensively references these kinds of questions and answers, so, if it’s there, you will be able to find it. But the long term decline in specialist community sites means that — if not reversed — that kind of help will eventually not be available. Asking the question about the two gizmos to your FaceBook friends is unlikely to generate a useful answer. If you were to find the answer, trying to post it on Wikipedia would be unsuccessful — your addition would be swiftly deleted on the grounds that it is ‘original research’. Crowdsourcing depends not on the big, organised sites like Wikipedia, nor on the generalist social sites like Facebook, but on specialist, open sites where people gain attention based on how valuable other specialists find their contributions.

The other thing about GWAFFTEY is that they all try in some sense to regulate the internet.

Google regulates by allowing things which are more popularly linked to rise to the top (and advertisers, of course).
Wikipedia regulates by a fierce editorial community that rapidly deletes anything smacking of original research
Amazon’s user generated content is regulated by votes which push some reviews to the top of the pile and others to the bottom
FaceBook regulates by being a walled garden where you let the people in you like, and leave the others out
Flickr has both voting and popularity systems
Twitter lets anyone follow anyone, but drastically regulates the length of contributions
eBay is strongly self regulating with Feedback used to establish the credibility of sellers and of buyers
YouTube ranks by popularity, among other things

All this is good and fine — I can’t argue with the voting system on Amazon.co.uk, as I’m one of its main beneficiaries. Whenever FaceBook is criticised, it is most likely to be from the people who think it should do more to preserve privacy. eBay’s feedback system is necessary if people are to trust buyers and sellers whom they’ve never met. And so on.

However, none of these encourage the more nuanced growth of wisdom that we used to see a lot on small forums. Personalities would establish themselves, for better or for worse. Others would weigh the contributions. Sometimes opinions would change over time. It was possible to rebuild reputation, and posters would also stand up to bullies, eventually. Those who were particularly helpful often got invited to become moderators. Discussion forums could also set their own rules, and so would emerge as places of knock-about banter, such as DPReview‘s forums, or the much warmer, value-based forums on Nikonians, the site I mentioned earlier.

Specialist discussion forums have also been highly useful on divisive topics. Any book on Amazon which broaches the subject of the existence of God, for example, will have a slew of five star reviews praising it, and a slew of one star reviews denouncing it. The more popular reviews will also have a long string of comments for an against. This may be all very well for deliberately controversial books such as the God Delusion, but reviews in comparatively innocuous aspects of faith or non-faith tend to get spammed by opponents. One review I wrote, of the Anchor Bible Dictionary, a largely liberal-critical work, attracted the comment: “God is not Great” by Christopher Hitchens is both cheaper and the theology is much sounder.” I think we can be fairly confident that the author of the comment, one Jack L. Gordon, had not bothered to actually find a copy of the dictionary, but this is all par for the course on Amazon reviews. For gentle souls who want to discuss whether Scripture Union study notes are better than BRF’s, a safe space where they can talk about it without someone muscling in with “how can you talk about this, when you haven’t yet proved there is a god!” is infinitely preferable.

Small discussion forums are not dead, nor are they nearing extinction. Those that don’t have a particular resident community, like a football club, or particular product tie-in have probably got a life-cycle anyway. But the regulated, walled-garden internet is growing in strength daily. Given that most people really only visit half a dozen sites on a regular basis, a very high proportion of new internet users will not be investing much of their time outside of the big eight.

And that, surely, is a pity. The huge promise of Web 2.0 was that it would make the internet much more owned by its users. Perhaps it has done so. But it has not necessarily made more of those users into unique, useful content creators.

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No attic — no cash; house-prices rise

Martin Turner — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:39:59 +0000

In mid-2009 house prices were 8.4% lower than today

We bought our first house in 1996, a snip at £53,000. It was very nearly our undoing: nine months later Gordon Brown came to the Exchequer, abolished MIRAS, abolished married person’s allowance, and suddenly our joint income was not enough to pay the mortgage. But 1996 was at the bottom of the previous house price dip. Friends who had bought a couple of years earlier were in far more serious difficulties, whereas friends who wanted to buy a couple of years later found they simply couldn’t.

If you are the owner of a home which is in good condition and does not suddenly turn out to be on a flood plain, subject to subsidence, or on the route of the new high speed rail link, and you have got past the initial pain of mortgage repayments, then you can probably look forward to your property steadily accruing in value until the point at which you retire, when you can either downshift to a property further from commuter land (if you commute), or enjoy the ownership of your Englishman’s-castle at your leisure.

On the other hand, if you are not the owner of a home, either because you were never in a position to purchase one, or because one of a series of economic downturns put you out of the property ladder, then the gap between what home-owners can expect and what you can expect will grow steadily wider each year.

You’ll also find yourself increasingly culturally isolated by the ever growing number of TV broadcasts about doing up your house, buying and selling your house, or simply swapping your house (and possibly family) with some other home owners.

Britain is fairly unique in Europe in this regard. In most of mainland Europe, people rent. Even those who own property rent the property they live in, and rent out the property they own.

The house price rise announced today — 10 points above the index compared to 17 points below it last year — is good news for everyone with money in property, but bad news for everyone hoping to buy. But even the rejoicing from home owners is a sign of how fickle we are: the credit-crunch, lest we forget, was fuelled by people taking out mortgages which they could not afford to pay, and then defaulting on them. A proportion of these were in the buy-to-let market, but the largest group was people who were buying because it seemed the most prudent decision.

After all, if you are watching the house-prices rise, and yourself stuck outside the doors with no accruing investment in property, you probably have a ‘now-or-never’ feeling, provided that you believe you are able to afford the repayments. The temptation is very strong to make every sacrifice, hope for the best, and get on the housing ladder before it’s too late.

Conservative governments traditionally do what they can to assist the rise of the property market. After all, home-ownership correlates quite strongly with a gradual move towards right-of-centre politics. And it naturally accords with the Conservative notion that those who have done well should be rewarded for it, and that market forces should prevail.

But we are not in a Conservative government, but rather a coalition. Liberal Democrats long warned of the impending financial collapse. Liberal Democrats also have a commitment to a fair and equitable society — not a socialist paradise of the kind once put forward by Labour with money for all effectively for nothing, but, still, a society in which people are not held down artificially by accidents of when they were born, or where they live, or the relative wealth of their parents. Liberal Democrats accept that those who have worked hard and been successful should benefit from the fruits of their success. But we also insist that a system which keeps the poor poor, and which artificially holds down some and elevates others because of their good or bad fortune in when they chose to buy property is at best a distortion of society, and at worst completely immoral.

As the government goes into recess, MPs and policy-makers need to give thought to those who will not find cash in the attic, because they own neither attic nor front door. Measures to support home-owners are always welcomed by home-owners, but we should think very carefully before we support measures which fuel the property market and provide no entry point for those on lower incomes.

In our desire to put the recession behind us, we must not make again the mistakes which caused it. Both for the sake of our national life, and, more particularly, for the sake of those which they disadvantaged the most.

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Turkey, the BNP, David Cameron, and Human Rights

Martin Turner — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:55:12 +0000

Sacred flame at the Museum of the Armenian Genocide, Yerevan

The BNP has spoken “Turkish membership of the European Union as espoused by political traitor David Cameron will avenge the defeated centuries-old Muslim attempt to seize all of Europe and will finally extinguish western civilisation on the Continent, the British National Party has warned”, according to its website. I’m not posting a link, as I have no intention of driving traffic in that direction. If our main reason for keeping Turkey out of the EU is based on maintaining an alleged 1-0 lead in the Crusades, then we had better let them in quickly. Of course, the BNP’s grasp of history is at the best of times shaky, and in this case, entirely erroneous. Their grasp of geography is also rather flawed: allowing Turkey to join the EU has as little chance of extinguishing western civilisation as — well, any impossible thing you care to name.

Should we, then, welcome David Cameron’s Blairite move to endorse Turkish membership as a positive, anti-BNP move? Cameron’s argument was that EU without Turkey was “not stronger but weaker… not more secure but less… not richer but poorer”. All true. Turkey has a strategic position at the corner of Europe, Asia and the Middle East. As an ostensibly secular but in practical terms Islamic nation, it would move Europe from ‘Christian’ to ‘mixed’ on the extremist radar, and access to Turkey’s growing markets and manufacturing prospects would position us well economically.

But those are not the only considerations when looking at Turkey. Turkey’s record on human rights is not good, and its record on past abuses is no better. Freedom of speech is heavily curtailed, dissidents are frequently imprisoned, religious minorities are persecuted, as are ethnic minorities including Kurds and Armenians. Turkey also continues to refuse to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide of 1915-23, and to put pressure on Western nations to prevent them from acknowledging it.

All nations, of course, have both human rights abuses in their history, and in their present. Britain’s Northern Ireland record has been placed under the spotlight with the Saville report, and America’s Camp X-Ray will at some point come under a similar spotlight. Our shared record on the Atlantic slave-trade is a blight on our history. There are undoubtedly human rights abuses taking place across Europe and America right now.

All this notwithstanding, the fundamentals of preserving human rights are three-fold, and they are missing in Turkey. First, there must be a framework of human rights which extends not only to legislation or a signature on the UN Convention, but also into the practices of the police and judiciary. Second, there must be inquiry and redress where human rights have been infringed. Third, there must be acknowledgement of the past.

In all nations these three things are imperfect, but in Turkey they are seriously lacking. According to the European Court of Human Rights Annual Report 2009, Turkey topped the 2009 list of human-rights violating nations with 356 judgements against it. (This is not to ignore EU member states Romania and Poland — both in the top four violators, though considerably behind Turkey.)

We were undoubtedly hasty in welcoming Poland and Romania into the EU before their human rights stance was clarified. But Turkey is unique in having an unacknowledged genocide less than a century ago, in the number of its abuses on which the ECHR has ruled, and in its own refusal to redesign its legislature, police and judiciary to guard against future abuses and bring past perpetrators to book.

Turkey — in my view — should not be welcomed into the EU until it sorts out its human rights. But this does not mean that we should stand on the ring-side and wait to see what happens. Anti-Islamic and racist groups will certainly campaign against Turkey for their own purposes. As a nation, we and our co-leaders in Europe should be making direct offers to assist Turkey to rapidly reach the point at which we could accept it. We all stand to gain by this — for the security, wealth and strength reasons that David Cameron espouses, and more importantly because it will remove a blight from our sphere of influence.

We should not be looking for reasons to keep Turkey out, but for changes to Turkey’s system which would allow it to enter.

And as for the BNP? Pssh. Let them remain in irrelevancy with their bitter and uninformed views on virtually everything.

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After every election, the public sector is reorganised. It never seems to save any money.

Martin Turner — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:19:45 +0000

BBC News – Radical police shake-up outlined.

After every election, vast swathes of the public sector are reorganised. And yet, within four years, the opposition — whoever they are — is able to point to a litany of inefficiency, bureaucracy gone mad, pointless red tape and wasteful duplication. Today, the police are being told they will be reorganised. A couple of weeks ago it was the health service. Other public sector bodies should expect the same.

We recognise that there have to be cuts. We are carrying a public sector sized for the economy in the hey-day of Tony Blair. We clearly cannot afford to carry on doing everything that we were doing, or, at least, not to the same extent. Lest we forget, it was not the public sector that got us into the economic trouble we found ourselves in. If Blair et al had had the Vince Cable-like foresight to take steps to avoid the crisis, they could have done it by dealing with our under-regulated financial sector, not by cutting public services.

But we are where we are, and we can’t simply go back. Cuts of some kind are inevitable.

But reorganisation? I’m not so sure.

Politicians, I feel, like reorganisation for two reasons. First, it gives them a feeling of being in charge — they can make their mark on history, leaving a legacy that will endure long after they are gone. Second, it makes them feel like they are running the nation like a business. Businesses reorganise, so should government. And, since businesses are driven by a profit motive, it is self-evident that reorganisation will deliver savings to the public purse, which can either go into more public services, lower taxes, or paying off debt.

Except, except.

First, since every government reorganises, even when the party in power stays the same, no reorganisation is permanent, and therefore no one gets to leave a mark in the history books. Or, if they do leave a mark, it is in pencil, to be rubbed out by the next owner of the book and replaced with their own mark. Nothing is more transitory than public sector reorganisation.

Second, businesses rarely reorganise successfully to reduce costs. Business reorganisations are as fraught with spiralling costs and new inefficiencies as public sector ones, although the losers are conveniently forgotten about. This is to some extent inevitable: public sector organisations tend to continue whether they are successful or not, and the ones which are axed are often not the ones which were inefficient. Private sector organisations that are unprofitable go under and vanish from our memory.

Business reorganisation, when it works, is done to meet new challenges and opportunities in the market place, which, under the now (in)famous BCG matrix, helps them develop the new rising stars which become cash-cows. A proportion of reorganisations can fail, as long as the business keeps its cash cows going, and creates its next generation from somewhere. The reorganisation itself is a costly process which creates duplication. But it is often out of this duplication and time of tension that new, creative, solutions to old problems emerge.

In the public sector this dynamic is not at work. First, there is no market place. The NHS cannot suddenly come up with an idea to beat crime, and move into police work. The Fire Service cannot muscle in on Education’s territory. Public services exist because we need them to exist, not because it is profitable that they exist. If the police spend their time trying to replace the fire service, then they are not catching criminals. Second, there is no profit. Any public sector organisation which underspends its budget faces having that budget subsequently reduced. It can reinvest its money in better services, but it cannot use that reinvestment to give bonuses to its staff — encouraging more efficient working — nor to develop new products for its future diversification.

Perhaps there is a case for a matrix working, self-diversifying set of public sector organisations without portfolio. A sort of generalised charity or trust, which moves to find holes in the public sector market place and fill them. Perhaps not — it would be another reorganisation.

We now face a very real possibility of the entire savings from the cuts being ploughed back into the costs of reorganisation, or, worse, real cuts which are not 25% but 50% in order to pay for the reorganisations. But our problem was not that the public sector was incorrectly organised, but because it was more than we could currently afford.

If we must cut, let us cut. But no more of this rearrangement of the pieces into another, no-more-efficient, and no-more-permanent solution which will be in turn abolished by the subsequent administration.

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Does the BBC really need cutting down to size?

Martin Turner — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:09:35 +0000

The BBC has launched its news app for iPhone and iPad in the UK

BBC News – BBC News iPhone and iPad app launches in the UK.

The BBC’s News app for the iPhone was launched on Friday, after much delay caused by objections from the Newspaper Publishers Association (NPA). The NPA claimed it would “damage the nascent market” for apps by offering a free news product.

This is an argument we have heard again and again since the rise of digital technology. By going digital, the BBC is threatening the livelihoods of decent commercial newspapers.

But wait. The BBC is not starting a newspaper. It is not doing anything which directly competes with traditional paper sales of the Times, Telegraph, Express, and other papers that criticise it so frequently. Back in the day, the only news organs with half-way decent websites were the Guardian, which continues to do very well with its free site, and the BBC. Before the days of Web 2.0, the broadcast style of websites was far more akin to the BBC’s traditional offerings than it was to any newspaper. And the BBC has always made its news content free — that’s part of its charter.

If the BBC had attempted to use its brand dominance to compete with the Times, Telegraph etc in their own markets, then there would have been real cause for concern. But — for the web at least, and it has already been forced to rein in its web plans — the BBC entered a market largely empty of newspapers, which were busy trying to work out how to monetize their investment before taking the plunge and going online.

The app world is no different. There are already hundreds of news aggregating apps, as well as many websites available on iOS, Apple’s collective name for its iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad ecosystem, which provide free news content. In fact, the real reason why the BBC felt obliged to release a news app was because Apple stubbornly (or correctly, depending on which side of the fence you are on) refuses to implement Flash, which is the proprietary standard which, for some reason, the BBC has chosen to adopt on its main site. Text news without Flash is not a problem, but the BBC is increasingly streaming video on its site, and for that it needs either Flash or an alternative.

So what the BBC is doing is releasing an app which enables it to stream its main means of communication — video — to audiences who would be otherwise excluded. As it happens, there isn’t much to watch yet on the BBC News app, but that will undoubtedly come.

The delay while the issue was examined was just one more in a long line of tactics employed by the print barons. Seriously, they don’t like the BBC. Ostensibly, they don’t like it because it’s the public sector muscling in on what they see as a private sector domain. But, underlying this, the BBC cannot be bought, it cannot give its allegiance to a political party, and it resolutely and determinedly offers unbiased news throughout the electoral cycle, not just during the pre-election ‘Purdah’ period when all media organs have to be on their guard.

The Conservatives have already announced their intention to reduce the license fee. Why this is, is unclear. The license fee doesn’t come out of general taxation, and it isn’t a burden on the treasury. We will not be improving the national debt by reducing it. And they’re only considering reducing it by a few pounds. Not a great deal of help to a hard-pressed viewer, but a huge blow to the BBC’s budget.

It’s understood that we are no longer happy about paying enormous salaries to BBC stars, but that isn’t the issue the press barons lobby about. They want to reduce the overall scope of public, free to air broadcasting.

The underlying problem with all of this is simple: the BBC is one of our national gems, a world ikon, an incredibly punchy bit of kit in presenting British attitudes and opinions to the wider world, and therefore an essential enabler in international influence and diplomacy. Increasing the reach of the BBC increases the ability of British business to sell overseas, of British diplomats to negotiate, and, when it comes to it, of British troops to win over hearts and minds when the fighting is done. Reducing it will not improve things for us.

Newspapers often confuse the Freedom of the Press with their own right to exist. Certainly local papers play an irreplaceable role in local community life and local politics. But do we really need the Telegraph and The Times? The Sun and The Star? The Sunday Mirror and The News of the World? The Daily Mail and The Daily Express? I am not suggesting that any of these papers should be closed down. But, equally, I am not suggesting that we should hamstring the BBC in order to protect them. The consequence of the internet age may very well be that the Telegraph and the Times merge, that the Express and the Mail become the Express And Mail, and that the Star and Sun come to terms with each other. The marketplace is very crowded, and fewer people are buying newspapers.

But they are not failing to buy them because of the BBC. They’ve been able to watch TV for years, giving them for free (after you’ve paid the license fee) right now news which the papers would not give you till the next day. The public evidently wants the BBC’s service, and even the free to read websites don’t compete with it in terms of numbers of hits. This is not just because the BBC can source news quickly. It is because the BBC consistently sources news accurately. Annual surveys show that we naturally trust the BBC, whereas we tend not to trust the papers. Why? Because we know that the papers are severely biased, and for anything where balance is important, the BBC always comes out on top.

If papers want to compete with the BBC rather than just each other, they need to compete on integrity. But if they were to cease to publish salacious gossip — another corollary of confusing Public Interest with ‘Anything the public finds interesting’ — they would probably find their existing markets drying up.

The quandary is not ‘how should commercial news organisations compete with the public sector?’, but rather ‘how do you compete for the mind of the reader in a world of multiple free sources of information? As FlipBoard for the iPad has already shown us, if people don’t get their news from a BBC app, they are more likely to get it free from Twitter, Facebook, or any one of a thousand other sources.

Newspapers must evolve by changing their model, not by breaking the BBC’s.

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Toxic dumping banged to rights

Martin Turner — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 16:38:06 +0000

The case alleging that British/Dutch/Swiss firm Trafigura dumped its toxic waste in Ivory Coast, overloading capital Abidjan’s health system and injuring thousands of people, reads like something from a John Le Carré novel. Yesterday, a Dutch court found the multinational guilty of illegally exporting toxic waste from Amsterdam and concealing the nature of the cargo. Trafigura continues to deny wrongdoing and claims that the ruling is “incorrect”.

The fine amounts to €1 million, substantially more than it would have cost to have the waste dealt with correctly at the time, and it’s the first time Trafigura has faced criminal charges since the scandal struck in 2006.

This judgement is a genuine blow for justice. But it begs the question: how much more of this is going on?

Over the last thirty years we have seen (quite rightly) the growth of the FairTrade movement, aimed at giving growers and producers a price which reflects the value of their goods, rather than their weak negotiating position. But there is no FairTrade on waste. As EU laws (again, rightly) tighten up on disposal of waste on this continent, there are surely many more companies than Trafigura who eye the rubbish dumps of Africa or even Latin America as convenient places to leave their pollution, far from Western courts or the eyes of Western journalists.

Indeed, it was down to Greenpeace to bring the case, although Trafigura has paid out £104 million to the government of Ivory Coast and £32 million to individuals.

What is especially alarming in all of this is that an Ivory Coast court found two non-Trafigura employees guilty in 2008, sentencing one to 20 years in jail and the other to five years. I am not questioning their guilt — but two non-European nationals have borne the personal criminal liability with jail sentences for a crime for which they were by no means the main beneficiaries.

Here in the West, we bemoan the fact that while we put minor drug-traffickers away, we allow the big bosses to get off scot-free. The fact that no Trafigura employees are facing personal criminal convictions shows that, from the point of view of Africa, Western multi-nationals can behave exactly like those drug-traffickers.

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“Stupid” goes to ethics committee

Martin Turner — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 07:07:04 +0000

Lib Dem Cardiff Councillor John Dixon must have been surprised to be called to book over declaring that Scientology was “stupid”. The fact that he did it on Twitter was probably enough to raise this to a national news story. But it is disturbing that a councillor can face censure for a remark like this.

What Dixon actually tweeted was: “I didn’t know the Scientologists had a church on Tottenham Court Road. Just hurried past in case the stupid rubs off.”

Harmless, one would think, albeit not especially amusing. But this kind of thing is really very mild compared to the polemic which has done Richard Dawkins very nicely in his books, and far less hurtful than the daily knockabout on the subject of religion that takes place on countless websites across the net.

Lest we forget, Scientology is not an officially recognised religion in the UK. But even if it were, most faith groups take a certain amount of ribald criticism within their stride. Dixon was not putting up satirical cartoons of the Prophet, nor was he running an ad campaign mocking the crucifixion. Sacred symbols were not being abused, sacred texts were not being criticised: no deities, real or imagined, were hurt during the making of his tweet.

If he is indeed censured for this (though, if they have any sense, the ethics committee will recognise this as a legitimate comment and let it go, before they themselves become a laughing stock) then we have gone far too far down a path of political correctness over freedom of speech. Was John Dixon inciting religious hatred? Hardly, since Scientology is not officially a recognised religion under UK law. But even if it were, would he be inciting it? I doubt that the term would constitute incitement.

During the General Election, the leader of Stratford on Avon’s ruling Conservative group labelled me and my views ‘stupid’ four times in less than thirty seconds, live on BBC Radio. I thought it was a bit rude. But why, as a recognised British citizen, should I enjoy less protection than an imported American organisation which is not even recognised for what it claims to be?

In a world where our every off-hand comment is now tabulated and Googled, we need to come to a new understanding of what is acceptable and what is not. There has to be an understanding that there is a hierarchy of off-handedness. A statement published in a book for which money is paid is of a different level from a remark in live interview broadcast on local radio, and this is again different from a brief Tweet or a FaceBook one-liner.

Dixon would not have faced this kind of censure if he had written an opinion piece in a published newspaper attacking Scientology.

He should not face it for a Tweet.

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What happens next?

Martin Turner — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:14:07 +0000

Martin Turner, Nick Lane and supporters launch the General Election campaign in Stratford on Avon

The election is done, the coalition — for better or for worse — is bedding in. Nobody got exactly what they wanted, but what they are getting is a lot better than it might otherwise have been. The economy is in growth, the markets are beginning to stabilise.

Many people have been asking me about my future as a candidate, so let me explain exactly what the process is within the Liberal Democrats. I remain the candidate for Stratford on Avon until the end of December. On the first of January 2011, all Lib Dem parliamentary candidates cease to be candidates. There will then be a period of about two years in which key seats advertise for candidates, and select on the basis of applicants. Seats which are held by sitting MPs don’t go through this process, but all other seats, no matter how established the candidate, do this. All local members are entitled to vote, and, in most cases, a two week selection campaign is concluded with a hustings.

In the mean time, we are continuing to enjoy living here in Marlcliff, and I continue to be involved in district affairs, such as the Fire Service, noise abatement, and the local Lib Dems.

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In the nation’s interests

Martin Turner — Wed, 12 May 2010 07:41:37 +0000

I have received howls of protest over the last few days from Lib Dem members, people who voted Lib Dem but usually vote Labour, and people who have never voted Lib Dem and never intend to. Some have demanded that Nick Clegg immediately fall into line behind Cameron and stop negotiating for ‘party advantage’. Some have insisted that for Clegg to co-ally would be a betrayal of all that is most sacred. Some have told me that talking to Labour was equivalent to state treachery, and Clegg can never be trusted again. By email, phone, Facebook, txt, tweet and even visits to my door, and, bizarrest of all, an email sent from Australia by someone I had never heard of directed to all Lib Dem candidates who contested the election, it’s been made clear to me that whatever Nick Clegg did, not everyone would be happy.

I have to confess I’ve struggled to get quite as emotionally caught up in this as some people. Those of us who stand for parliament do so with an underlying notion of public service. Of course we want our party to win. And there is always personal ambition: we want to be in there, making the decisions, with our fingers on the turning of the world. But nobody would go through the five weeks of gruelling punishment, preceded by four years of selection and campaigning, preceded in turn by how ever many years of becoming involved and going through a candidate approval process, unless there was more than simply the desire for our team to win.

Nick Clegg was always honour-bound to make his decision in the nation’s best interests. Anything less would have simply ruled him unfit to be a party leader.

The only question was: what decision would be in the nation’s best interests?

I will put my cards on the table: after last year’s expenses debacle, and this year’s scandal over the Ashcroft million, electoral reform seems to me to be one of the nation’s most important and pressing concerns. The result of the General Election — no clear majority in parliament, nothing like a majority in the popular vote (Tories polled only 12% more than Lib Dems, lest we forget, but gained more than five times as many seats) — demonstrates very clearly that the public are not satisfied.

But, although pressing, electoral reform is not the most pressing concern. I do not accept the view of the scaremongerers that Britain is about to go the way of Greece. David Cameron has already had to eat his words that a hung parliament would spell economic disaster. But it is true that the economy is right at the top of the list of things that need to be fixed now, and fixed right.

A coalition with Labour was always a long-shot, and Clegg was right to honour his election pledge and talk first to the party with the most votes. But he was also right to at least attempt a deal with Labour. This was not treachery, as some of the Tory press and some of my own correspondents have suggested, but a necessary and entirely honourable step: Clegg was duty bound to explore both feasible possibilities as he decided for the United Kingdom who should be the next prime minister.

For the record, I think it would have been possible to do it. (I do not say that it would have necessarily been the best thing, but I do say that it would have been possible). Those who argued that this was undemocratic forget the very shaky ground on which they stand: Labour and the Lib Dems between them gained more than 50% of the popular vote, although, because of our misrepresentative system, this was not quite 50% of the seats in parliament. Labour certainly seemed ready to promise a much swifter, much surer route to electoral reform. And Gordon Brown nobly was willing to accept Nick Clegg’s other election promise — that, whatever happened, Brown would not continue as Prime Minister.

But it was Labour MPs themselves who made it quite clear that they had no real interest in staying in government. From the point that (then, still) government ministers went on the record in public stating this, the chances of a deal with Labour were over.

Many Lib Dem voters find the coalition with the Conservatives distasteful. I personally remained on good terms with all the candidates in the Stratford election, except for the BNP who never attended any of the debates and with whom I never spoke. But there have been instances where Tory attacks were brutal and unfounded. And we have endured the jeers and scorn of the Tory press barons for more than a generation.

It is certainly true that very few will have voted Lib Dem with the aim of putting David Cameron in government.

But Nick Clegg still had to put the nation’s interest ahead of his own. The choice between a Conservative minority government which would be almost certain to fall in recriminations within six months, in which time it would have made little real progress in tackling the economic crisis, and none at all in electoral reform, or a true Lib Dem Con coalition, was one that simply could not be made in any other way from the way it has been made.

The solution is not perfect. David Cameron could have divested himself of the lacklustre George Osborne. If having Vince Cable as chancellor was too much to swallow (though it would have pleased the nation, and the markets), Ken Clarke was waiting in the wings, the only member of Cameron’s team who had ever served in a senior role in a government. There could have been (and should have) a commitment to a referendum on true electoral reform, not merely the disproportional Alternative Vote (AV) system. If the Conservatives believe that the public has no appetite for electoral reform, then they should have agreed to a referendum on the real issue. If they were willing to accept a grudging compromise and no more, they should have offered a simple bill on AV as Labour did, and left it at that. The nation is to be put to the trouble and expense of a referendum without being allowed to vote on the real topic of discussion.

Nonetheless, the prospect of an autumn election has receded to the horizon. Cameron’s lightweight team will be strongly bolstered by 5 Lib Dem cabinet ministers, and a total of 20 Lib Dems across his ministries.

Lib Dem fortunes at the next election will almost certainly suffer, and there will equally certainly be a spate of recriminations and even member-resignations. And this is the true mark of Nick Clegg’s leadership: at personal cost, he has put the interests of the nation first.

End is begin

Martin Turner — Sat, 08 May 2010 11:06:07 +0000

Apologies if you are looking for the earlier version of this article — there was a server glitch and we had to roll back to an earlier version.

In Stratford on Avon the Lib Dem vote rose by 1.7% — higher than the national rise of 1%. Two weeks ago, our poll figures were putting us in contention to win this seat, but the change in the national mood — largely fuelled by the ‘only Cameron can get Brown out’ message pedalled by national newspapers, and now shown to be vacuous — meant that we got none of the 16% boost that we were looking at.

My congratulations to Nadhim Zahawi, who fought a good campaign.

To the 29% of the electorate here who voted for me: Thank you. We have not won this time, but that does not mean we will not win next time. Thank you for the confidence you placed in me. As I promised in my campaign literature, I will continue to live here and work here, and continue to press for all the issues which were so important during the campaign.

We may well see another General Election in the next six months… so don’t settle back down to ‘business as usual’.

For now, we wait the outcome of the discussions between leaders. All must surely recognised that for the Lib Dems nationally to gain 1% and yet lose 5 seats, and to get almost 1/4 of the votes and substantially less than 10% of the seats, demonstrates clearly that our election system is now desperately in need of reform.

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