I made a submission on rejoining the EU to Labour's NPF. This article documents both how to, and my words of the submission.
To see what I've said and/or download the text, use the "Read More" button. ...
Second thoughts on the Euro-summit
It is my view that Starmer wants a Swiss style deal with the European Union. The reason I consider the summit to be a draw, albeit a score draw, is that neither of the end goals of rejoining nor staying out with a Swiss style agreement are closed off. But also, neither is the end result of the EU saying we’re too busy to spend this time “dot & comma-ing” with you.
There is no inexorability in rejoining from that agreement as I believe is implied by John Palmer’s Chartist piece. Perhaps, John believes that Trump will drive even Starmer away from NATO but I believe they will try very hard not to make the choice. In fact, I believe the proposal for a defence/security agreement is deliberately made to allow trade-offs against the single market acquis and to try to exclude security which includes border control co-operation from the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the EU Court of Justice’s jurisdiction.
I also believe much of Labour’s defence positioning is designed for internal party combat and learnt from simplistic board games.
However, ihis article, entitled “EU officially retires its ‘no cherry-picking’ Brexit line” may show that the new Commission (and maybe even the Council), are happier with a deal with opt-outs; even then, I am not sure I’d want to start from the withdrawal agreement.
I believe that those of us who believe that it’s a better world with a democratic EU still need to seek to influence the Labour Party and Government.
Image Credit: from flickr, Keir Starmer’s feed, CC 2024 BY-NC-ND …
Brexit, reset or stall?
Last week, the UK and the EU met at the most senior levels in what the labour government has described as a reset of EU relations. As usual, the conclusions are best documented on the EU website where they published a joint communique. Certainly the results of the negotiations have changed few minds. While I consider that the best result would be if both sides walked out thinking they’d won, my feeling is that this was a draw, although no major breakthroughs occurred and a huge opportunity wasted, primarily due to the lack of vision and ambition on the part of the Labour government. The rest of the article can be read over leaf ...
On Cloud operating systems and security of supply
I wrote a little note on Cloud Operating Systems on Linkedin, provoked by an article, entitled “International Civil Society’s Tech Stack is in Extreme Danger” and published in “The Dissident”, this blog, is a fairly faithful reprint. The authors articulate the threat to civil society that the US corporate monopoly and Trump’s aggressive and unaccountable sanctions capability poses to progressives around the world. Trump has instructed the US cloud providers to sanction the International Criminal Court. The Dissident’s article asks how long it’ll be before progressive NGO’s are similarly targeted and whether US Banks and payment processors will similarly be mandated, as the US has done before.
It’s another example where the USA’s erratic and selfish political agenda must lead once friendly foreign governments to consider their “security of supply”. Most of the code required to run a cloud is open source, at the moment, and I would recommend that the British and EU governments ensure they can sustain access to this code as well as other critical open-source resources such as Office productivity and email products. We should also be looking at distributive governance models like mastodon and diaspora.
Fortunately, the EU has a massive, distributed computing capability and while the basic architecture of supercomputers and Internet platforms differs, they are in fact exceedingly similar. It’s also fortunate for the UK, while Rachel Reeves cancelled Sunak’s supercomputing projects, that the previous Tory government agreed to rejoin the EU’s supercomputing consortium.
Escaping from the US monopoly control requires will and knowledge and I am unsure that it exists within the UK’s political leadership, equally I’m unsure that it exists within the leadership of the EU member states. I should also add, it’s not really about the hardware, nor the land and electricity. …
AI ethics and accountability
I attended a lecture on AI Ethics and blogged on Linkedin and mirrored it on Medium, I catalogue the issues as presented by Dr Hung and used Google to see if there were any obvious gaps.
I look at Garbage In, Garbage Out problem, repeat the calls for transparency, I repeat my arguments about authority vs popularity and the role of the GDPR, and I look at copyright and the four [software] freedoms. …
Disappointing and Dangerous
The Election results on May 1st is disappointing for progressives in this country and dangerous. Reform won a by-election in one of labour’s safest seats, won two Mayoralties and took control of ten councils, two from Labour (Kent & Durham).
Labour’s response has been stupid, by suggesting we should have campaigned harder, or disgusting, as in we need to be harsher in “Stopping the Boats”. Copying reform empowers them, Labour must stop it!
Furthermore, it is little noticed that in Lambeth, the Greens, in a council by-election, won a ward from Labour. This is proof at the polls that there is clearly a constituency to the left of the Labour Party as it stands today.
It is little understood inside Labour that the “hero voter” strategy failed; few Tories came to Labour in 2024 with many voting either Reform or staying at home. In his article, “How Labour could beat Reform”, Phil Burton Cartledge, quotes the study, ‘Getting to Know Reform Curious Labour voters‘ which shows that Labour needs to ensure it does not lose its progressive base who seem more ready to vote for another party then Reform voters do to vote for Labour. As is the case for the Tories, the votes aren’t there on the right to make the difference.
The reasons for dissatisfaction withy Labour are clear, possibly best or at least succinctly summed up by John McTiernan on twitter, and in this thread. Labour is no longer trusted with the welfare state or public services. It needs to re-establish that trust by keeping its implicit as well as explicit promises.
After posting my thoughts, I was pointed at “Entering Faragia” by David Aaronovitch and have corrected my stats. He also points out that Liberal Democrats beat both Labour and the Tories which is further evidence that Labour faces an electoral threat other than Reform UK and the Tories. You might like to read the article as he examines the likely built in delivery failure of Reform’s promises, particularity a DOGE in every county, and questions the calibre of many of Reform’s candidates. He offers Labour three responses, which he describes as panics, firstly to steal Reform’s clothes, secondly, to forget the long term and thirdly to return to Corbynism, which I feel he summarises and characterises unfairly if only by omission. Aaronovitch feels these are all deadends but I would offer a fourth, a return to Starmer’s 10 promises made to the party while campaigning for leader. …