I put up my conference motion on investigatory powers on the Policy Forum site about 18 months ago. It’s still relevant, you can still vote it up if you agree with it, It was also designed to fit in under 251 words so it misses some issues; it could well be augmented with additional policy goals. …
Sickness, Redundancy and Labour’s Policy
The new leadership have kicked off another policy consultation managed by the National Policy Forum; there are fears that this is an attempt to sideline Conference 19’s key decisions, but they have not yet deleted my previous contributions, so maybe not. I have just posted as follows,
Statutory Sick Pay and Redundancy Payment compensation, currently paid by Employers have been shown by the CV 19 pandemic to be inadequate, they are too low and through bogus contractor schemes easy to avoid.
These social security systems must be improved and underwritten i.e. paid by the Government, funded, if necessary, by the Employer’s NI payments.
The party has published a number of consultation documents, one of which relates to the Work, Pensions and Equalities Commission, called Rebuilding a just social security system; people with more expertise than me, might like to have a look and make submissions on subjects such as, funding, in which the issue of universality and means testing is included, sanctions, benefit deductions, in-work poverty, job seeking support and equalities enforcement. It’s at times like this the movement will miss Tony Reay. …
but with a whimper
Momentum now allegedly has a political election for its NCG; I not so sure of the relevance or the politics. Forward Momentum aka Fix Momentum main promise is to ‘democratise’ Momentum in the name of the members but more realistically in the name of disenfranchised Momentum local groups and have now developed a policy manifesto in some obscure manner and allowed themselves to be founded with a purge authored by the same people that founded LAW in the same way and in doing so split the campaign against the witch hunt, a trick they followed up with by behaving in a similar sectarian, party-building fashion so that the LRC walked away from the Labour Left Alliance.
Momentum Renewal are an articulation by the rump of the office, post Parker and Lansman, with their London Stalinist & trade union, mainly Unite, bureaucrats’ support, often the same people, together with their careerist MP hangers on. They also claim their priority is to have a single left slate for the next set of elections so let’s hope they have learnt from the mistakes & arrogance made by Momentum over the last 12 months in sending negotiators without a mandate , a starting position demanding everything, and a hit list of other left wingers. They claim to want an outward looking focus for Momentum, rooting it in community campaigns, the cynical would say it’s a diversion, asking people not to get active in Labour Party caucusing, and leave it to their betters.
The truth neither side get is that Labour’s Left is not Momentum and that Corbyn’s coalition is broken.
Too many have been taught that the victory of ideas is measured by the size of your majority on committees – it ain’t so! Ideas need resonance in the movement and the population.
We can now clearly see that Momentum’s brand is weaker than Corbyn’s which is why so many people joined it and others lied in claiming they supported him. The behaviour of parts of Momentum in the tolerance of bullying and slander is disgusting and matched or encouraged by some so-called supporters of Jeremy outside Momentum and some of their opponents in the PLP. So much for a “Kinder, Gentler Politics!”.
I will also mention that the value of the database is much less than once it was. They have not kept it up to date, people move politically and geographically, and it was built to support and inform people about Jeremy’s leadership campaigns. Many people signed up to it for that purpose, and never conceded concepts of leadership to its NCG, Officers Committee or even its Chairman (sic). (I’d best check, I’ve not heard from them for a couple of months, wonder if I have been purged; I stopped giving them money over a year ago after the office rigged the 2nd Lewisham Momentum AGM in a row.) …
E2E & Zoom
The Zoom CEO stated at an Analysts Conference that they planned to introduce End to End Encryption (E2E) for their paying customers. At the moment, zoom does not do E2E encryption, they are encrypted between the user device and Zoom’s servers, but zoom’s servers can be tapped. This means that GCHQ can’t see what’s happening, but the NSA & FBI can. (This assumes that GCHQ can’t break properly configured TLS.) In the end, doing zoom rather than skype or google hangouts, if you believe them to be more secure, is like going to a meeting and trying to spot the special branch cop, preferably before you’ve fucked them. The rest of this blog discusses the issues of the device security, technical complexity, and the problem of user identity. See below/overleaf … …
Black Lives Matter
George Floyd, a black man, was killed by a Minnesota policeman while using clearly unnecessary force in trying to detain him. This started initially a US wide protest movement which has spread throughout the world. There was a demonstration in London earlier this week and many Labour local councils lit their buildings with purple lights to show their solidarity with Floyd and the world’s black population. The act of police brutality, repeated in many US cities and states coming during the pandemic which is hitting ethnic minority communities the worst has led to a massive uprisings, and demonstrations. Below/overleaf are tweets from Damien Egan, Mayor of Lewisham and David Lammy MP who spoke on Newsnight bringing it home to the UK. …
Down the plug’ole
I had a look at the 2020 Leadership election and the 2016 results. There was a 4% drop, about 20,000 less, in people voting in 2020, from 2016 and yet, Rebecca Long Bailey, the standard bearer of the Left, got just short of 178,000 less votes than Corbyn. In a static electorate, the Left went backwards, by a lot!
This does not auger well for the next set of NEC elections. The rump left, which includes Momentum must begin to talk and listen to those who changed their minds and build unity within the Party around Starmer’s 10 pledges. …
Art, AI and my memories
While transferring stuff from my old computer, I cam across deepart.io again. I made a couple of pictures from my collection. Here they are, from my collection, one from Alresford station, one from Berlin.
and the Karl Max forum, Alexanderplatz in Berlin
…
Can’t make it up
A note on LinkedIn on why managements need IT usage policies to prove their compliance and to act legally and fairly towards their employees. I suggest that ISO27001 is useful as a technical standard and COBIT as an organisational one.
This was written in the light of a couple of cases I had to deal with as an accompanying rep. or as an advisor.
You can’t claim that users are not performing if you can’t prove the IT systems work as documented. You can’t pursue a conduct disciplinary against people operating a policy. You can’t fulfil FOI or SAR requests if the data retention policy is suspect. You can’t be sure that corruption has not occurred if there is inadequate segregation of duties.
Having policy will help the organisation answer the following questions. Is our software supported? Why and how was that data deleted? What should be logged? Who has permission to read, amend and run these programs and/or this data? Are our vendors signed up to our IT security goals? Why do you not know this?
This is all defined in these standards, and the GDPR makes certification to good practice evidence of good will. ISO27001 and COBIT are the big boys in town to prove technical and organisational protection.
You can’t make it up anymore. …
Anti-semitism, what the Party has done?
While considering my response to the leaking of the General Secretary's investigation into the activities of its senior management and its compliance department in conducting invesigations into complaints about anti-semitic behaviour I had cause to consider the Party's reaction to these complaints. It would be hard to say that collectivley it had ignored them although reasons for the delay in asking Conference to change the rules should be determined. Harassed by the press, Labour’s membership and NEC have rightly fought to ensure there is no place for antisemitism in the Party, they have launched two enquiries, issued two or three codes of conduct, and changed the disciplinary rules three times. This blog article was originally part of another, but the article became too long, the remainder of this article (overleaf/below) looks at the enquiries and rule changes undertaken to fight anti-semitism within itself and concludes the thought that I wonder where the original good will & unity of purpose went.
Some IT technology & economics history
I have finally installed a version of CA-Superproject under W98/Virtualbox and the experience reminded me of a couple of things, about the software, about its final custodian, Computer Associates (CA) and also some critical software project management issues. I have written a more formal note on Linkedin and this is my mirror/pointer to that; the rest of this article précises that article. For more, see overleaf/below. … …