Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris, with parliamentary colleagues, at an event in support of the Human Fertility and Embryology Bill, which will protect and extend the right of scientists to perform crucial stem-cell research.

More about all this at the Coalition for Choice website.

Like Sunny, I’m annoyed with the BBC too.

A woman named Suzanne Holdsworth has been released from prison, after her conviction for killing a child she was baby-sitting was deemed unsafe. Apparently, it is likely that toddler Kyle Fisher had a pre-existing disorder that could have caused his death.

All this was reported in a matter-of-fact tone on the news last night, but the editing told a different story. The shot of Mrs Holdsworth we saw as she left court was of her taking a weaselly drag on a king-sized cigarette. And the interview with her partner (who made a very salient point about how, although he was delighted, no-one should forget the dead child) was spliced with a cut-away shot of his tattoos - a bulldog, with ‘England’ emblazoned below. The grammar of the shot renders the segment a dog-whistle to the middle-classes: “Chav Scum”.

Since Mrs Holdsworth is now facing a retrial, that’s unfair on her. But it also reinforces prejudices within our society. The BBC needs to get beyond these cliches.

In a bolshy defence of Gordon Brown, David Aaronovich coins an amusing alternative to the phrase “awkward squad”:

It isn’t just the 20 licensed super rebels, specific only to Labour (the Tories don’t have this hard core of perpetually oppositional MPs who get in on the party’s coat-tails and then spend all their time trying to defeat it)

The rise of these rebels is an interesting development in British politics. The phenomenon of these rebellious MPs seems to have occurred as a side-effect of New Labour’s sizeable majority from 1997-2005: The large majorities gave the Blair Government a feeling of invincibility, which emboldened it to make unpopular policies it might not otherwise have attempted… thereby prompting rebellion. Additionally, it also meant Labour MPs could rebel on principle without bringing down the Government. However, as Aaronovich points out, this has changed in the Brown-era, and these rebels threaten to destabilise a Labour Government. People should know exactly who they are - so we can help or hinder them as we see fit.

As a lunch-time example of citizen-journalism, could we conspirators and contributors and commenters compile a list of who these Super Rebels might be? It strikes me as the sort of recieved wisdom that it would be useful to record in one place. May we have suggestions in the comments, please? I will update this post when we have a long-list. Thanks.

A couple of years ago I was part of the team that produced The Unrecognized, a film highlighting the plight of the Bedouin population of the Negev (Naqab) desert in southern Israel. Despite having lived and worked on the land since the time of the British Mandate and before, their settlements and farms are not acknowledged by the state. Despite paying taxes, the residents are denied basic services such as water and healthcare, which their Jewish neighbours in the area take for granted.

Their story has been in the news again recently, due to a recent report by Human Rights Watch that renews the criticism of Israel’s discriminatory laws.
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While waiting for the Wisconsin and Hawaii primary results to drip in, I thought I would have a look at the various presidential candidate websites:

• HillaryClinton.com
• MikeHuckabee.com
• JohnMcCain.com
• BarackObama.com

Its striking how similar they all are in layout. Indeed, the sites for Clinton, McCain and Obama are so alike I thought they might have been created using the same software, but this isn’t so. All have the candidates name and logo in the top-left corner of the site (in common with most websites these days), an e-mail sign-up form in the top-right, and a donate button right below that. All have horizontal menus, a three column layout, with a large graphic element accorss the first two columns, below the menu. While this might demonstrate to some people that the candidates are clones of one another, I’m inclined to see it as proof that all the politicians recognise the value of good design. Following a recognised and established layout allows users to navigate the site quickly and efficiently.

There is, I think, a cliche of the ‘Presidential Candidate Logo’. The surname, of course, coupled with the year digits and then some flag-like representation in red, white and blue. Joe Biden and Dennis Kucinich come close, but its Hillary Clinton who takes the prize for the most obvious logo in the field. What’s quirky about Senator Clinton is that her logo is derived from her first name.
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Its been a while since a good multicultural conundrum came along to bother us. For a while, I thought that the issue of the mosque in Oxford that wants to broadcast its call to prayer might be one such issue, but while reading a couple of articles in order to write a blog, I came across this quote from the Telegraph:

“We want to fix a loudspeaker to our minaret to broadcast our call to prayer. We would like to have three two-minute calls a day, but if that is not accepted then we would like to have it at least on Fridays.

“In Islamic counties the call is loud so people are reminded to come to prayer. We do not need the volume to be loud, that can be adjusted because our members have a time-table for the prayers. But we want to have the call in some form because it is our tradition.”

Now this doesn’t look like a culture clash to me, so much as groups engaging in a dialogue with a local authority, just as they should in a liberal democracy.
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I note that the last seven posts on the Liberal Conspiracy have been about the US Primaries (I’ve been posting musings at my own place too). This might seem odd for a group site that is supposedly concerned with the direction of the British Liberal-Left.

But let us have no apologies. Who can blame us for lapping up anything which undermine the cynicism of politics-as-usual? In analysing yesterday’s Democrat debate, Xpostfactoid makes some interesting points about the nature of politics and campaigning:

Politics is almost literally all talk. You’ve got to be good in the cloak room, at the negotiating table, on the debate floor. What gives a politician the ultimate strength to push through change, though, is to convince the mass of voters to support his or her effort for something major like health care reform. “Don’t discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens.” That says it all. That’s a real political philosophy at its deepest. (via Andrew)

It also provokes column inches and blog posts, generating a momentum that magnifies such power. As we await the next wave of primaries, it is beginning to feel as if our American cousins are about to create a historical, political ‘moment’ that has spun out of control of the spinners. The last such ‘moment’ we had in British Politics was Mr Brown’s clammy handling of the early election decision. You will excuse me if I keep my attention fixed on New Hampshire, where altogether more inspiring events are unfolding.

The Democratic Governor of New Jersey, Jon Corzine, has just signed a bill abolishing the state’s death penalty. It is the first state to do so since the USA reintroduced capital punishment in the 1970s. (h/t Tyra).

According to my Facebook profile, I am variously an anesthetist, and aesthete, and (less frequently) a non-practicing atheist. But whatever guise I choose for myself, I tend to look upon the tribulations of Dr Williams with the detachment of an outsider. I reason that because I’m not a church-goer, the possible ’schism’ over gay clergy should not really concern me.

But now I’m wondering whether that is the correct view. Looking again at the word ‘Anglican’, it occurs to me that this particular Communion of Churches might actually be considered an exporter of British ’soft power’ and influence, much like the British Council. The Church of England is still a formal branch of our state, and Anglican Bishops sit in the House of Lords. Furthermore, it is the British Prime Minister who effectively appoints the Archbishop of Canterbury. So I would say that the Archbishop and his Church are formal (though obviously not democratic) representatives of our country.

If The Church represents us all, is is not reasonable for atheists, agnostics and secularists to poke their nose into its affairs? Traditionalists say that Britain is still essentially a Christian country built on Christian morals. If that is the case, and while Church of England retains its privileged position in our political system, then I would say that us non-believers have the right to interfere in its policies and rulings.
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At the Social Market Foundation on Wednesday, Liberal Democrat Leadership Candidate Nick Clegg began a speech by outlining the technological context of 21st Century politics. It is a good approximation of my own view. He said:

… the innovations and technological advances that are already shaping and defining the 21st century – Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube – are about something very different: they are about creating the tools that will enable people to deliver services to each other.

The old model was about constructing the institutional hardware of the paternalistic state. The new model is about developing the democratic software of the empowered society. The old model was controlled by a professional elite. The new model is operated by ordinary people.
…
This is the great paradox of our times: in our private and professional lives, we have never been more empowered.

But in our relationship with the state, we have never been so powerless. And make no mistake; it is the poorest and the most vulnerable amongst us who lose out the most.

Mr Clegg’s campaign website has the full text (in which he goes onto propose that LEAs and PCTs be directly elected), and I’ve quoted the introduction at more length at my own place, if you’re interested.

Clegg is often viewed as being on the right of his party, but this introduction looks like a left-wing analysis to me. As I tried to articulate in Graachi’s post (which discussed What Blogging Can and Can’t Achieve), the attraction of blogging and the wider digital revolution, is in its potential to redress the power imbalance, leaking power from the elites to the masses. Does Clegg’s talk of “delivering services to each other” spring from the Right’s affection for the free market and the choices of individuals, or from the Left’s long held belief that we can achieve more through collective action, than we can alone? Given the free and social nature of blogging, YouTube and the political campaigns we see online, I’m inclined towards the latter view.

For those opposed to the ID card scheme, it is easy to see the silver lining to the recent news that the taxman has lost 25 million records in the post. While the disappearance of these CDs causes grave concern for the people who’s data has gone missing, the incompetence does undermine the case for ID Cards: “We cannot afford a similar error on the national ID database,” (the argument goes) “… so, lets scrap the scheme”. Tactically, yes, I think it is an argument we in the anti-ID card lobby should be making loudly… but let us never forget that the administration of the system is a practical reason to oppose the scheme, and not a moral or ideological reason.

Even if (in some thought experiment world, some Cloud Number 10) the government could 100% guarantee the security of the data, I would still be opposed to the scheme, because the political relationship between citizen and state does not change when the State buys a better computer system. Nor, for that matter, would it change if the cost of the scheme were to rise or fall. Brighton blogger Neil Harding recently changed his mind on ID cards, based on these practical reasons. While his interlocutors crowed at his volte-face, it seemed an empty victory to me. The moral argument was sidelined.

This matters, because arguments for ID cards seem to be made up exclusively of practical reasons. Advocates in Government and the security services play down the costs, and instead cite ‘convenience’ and ‘efficiency’. The moral aspect to their argument – that the cards will offer a measure of safety from terror and crime – is unproven and untested, and has the unmistakeable allure of the post hoc about it.

Meanwhile, here in the anti-camp, the opposite is true. The moral resistance to any change in the relationship between individual and state is conceptually prior to, and transcends, the concern over costs or data-security. If we successfully communicate this to our fellow citizens, we shall win the debate. Are you reading, op-ed writers?

Cue the analogies.

The NO2ID campaign is calling in the PledgeBank pledges:

The Identity Cards Act 2006 is now law, and - despite growing opposition, significant delays and rising costs - the new Prime Minister shows no sign of calling a halt to the National Identity Scheme. In 2008, the government intends to pilot fingerprinting and to issue the first ‘biometric residence visas’ to non-EU foreign nationals as a precursor to registering British Citizens.

The legal powers to do these all these things will shortly begin to be applied. Now is the time to call in the legal defence fund part of the pledge.

So, that’s £10 from everyone, please. It should add up to about £110,000 in the campaign coffers.
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Paul’s post from late last week, along with the comments below it, note that Sir Ian Blair has come in for most criticism because of the misinformation surrounding the De Menezes shooting, rather than the shooting itself.

This prompts some more thoughts about the nature of political debate: Have you noticed how a Cover-Up is always worse than a Cock-Up?
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I have heard it twice in seven days. Twice, at two very interesting events, run by two very respectable think-tanks: Its those dreaded Daily Mail readers who are to blame.

In both cases, that journal was being used as a convenient short-hand - to signify something right-wing, reactionary, and irrational. The implication is that there are all these subscribers out there who are somehow intractable. A block of voters who can be persuaded of nothing.

There was an interesting article in the Sunday Times a few weeks ago, comparing David Cameron to Hilary Clinton. Both politicians, said Andrew Sullivan, are “scared of what they believe”. They are under the impression that the rest of their country does not share their politics. And so they triangulate and obfuscate.

I think a similar fear is being expressed when the left-winger cites the problem of the Daily Mail. But while both Clinton and Cameron’s fears may actually be justified, I think the lefty’s worries are pretty groundless. First, I think popular culture is against the Mail: Think of the ridicule piled upon it on by those TV panel shows, or in the blogosphere. Second, the idea that any section of the population is a single-minded Mobb, is as false as it is patronising.

Worse, though, is that it is defeatest. Assume that Daily Mail readers are a lost cause, and your own campaign becomes a lost cause too. We need to be more confident in the power of our own arguments, and make better arguments too. Not even the government is doing that at the moment. The Daily Mail does not represent the bulk of British opinion: It represents what a small number of editors think British opinion should be.

So, by all means let us continue fisk and critique articles in the Mail, but let’s have a moratorium on the clichés of the dreaded ‘Daily Mail Readership’. If you want to invoke a bogey-man, well, there’s always The Daily Express Readership instead. They’re still fair game.