On Jeremy Corbyn’s whip, which Starmer has withdrawn, somehow, certainly in breach of the standing orders of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Momentum have drafted a letter to Starmer, Angela Rayner and the CLP Reps calling for the whip to be restored which you can send too. I have sent it although I amended the letter to make it clear that I believe it, and the original suspension to be in breach of the party’s rules, in breach of the EHRC recommendations and in breach human rights law, and the whip withdrawl is an act of double jeopardy. I also pointed out that in my experience, some of his supporters are now leaving as they consider the act unfair and unreasonable.
I consider it to be at least one of capricious, perverse, irrational and/or arbitrary. …
I have now finished reading the EHRC Report into Anti-semitism in the Labour Party, and while doing this, Corbyn has been suspended, reinstated and then had the whip withdrawn, by it seems a small coterie of staff, in the Leader’s Office and General Secretary’s office, specifically the Leader and GS themselves. In looking at my blog article to remind me what I said, and what remains unsaid, I came across this quote, which is a recommendation; some work to do, I think.
Acknowledge, through its leadership, the effect that political interference has had on the handling of antisemitism complaints, and implement clear rules and guidance that prohibit and sanction political interference in the complaints process.
This is not just about politics; bullying is endemic in London and was the single most common grievance I pursued as a Union rep until the post furlough redundancies. I hope the Civil Service unions take this up. …
I am brought to consider Article 11, of the ECHR and "Freedom of Association". I am concerned about the over-regulation of political parties because the second thing totalitarian governements do is register, regulate and then ban opposition political parties. Here as ever are my notes.
I wrote and posted a piece on Technical Debt on my linkedin blog. Its post comment, based on the concluding paragraph says, “I look at “Technical Debt” in the context of IT budget planning and suggest that it is not such a useful concept. Using standard risk management analysis is a more effective means of planning a maintenance budget which should consist of funding for both error & risk remediation. Depreciation is a better financial model for the problem.”
There must be much written about the nature of depreciation from physical wear and tear, to the need and cost to replace due to increasing failure; perhaps I should look for some reading on how this applies to information systems. I question if software is an asset in terms of accounting theory, I suppose so because it has value in more than one accounting period, but can it be realised? I also question the value of placing a cash value on software in use, identifying its cost to acquire is potentially simple, its residual value is much harder and synchronising this change to a single corporate depreciation rule can be difficult.
Some things I considered writing about include the number of times while trying to clean up or rationalise corporate IT estates to be told that, “you’re not touching that!”. We used to joke that they’d lost the system which pays the board’s bonuses, but these systems were almost always obsolete and acted as a technology sink keep product in the portfolio that should have been abandoned. Recently I came across the phrase, fictional capital, these systems had an unknown value and the decision to leave them alone seemed based on a pessimistic and fictional view of their value. I sometimes suggested turning them off to see who squealed but this advice was never accepted.
Also it needs to be considered that the maintenance budget is a function of the size of the information systems portfolio and much of it is a fixed cost. If you don’t spend the money the systems stop and they do not vary with output. …
I am considering getting involved in a so-called debate about Lavery, Tricket and Smith’s recent revision of their No Holding Back report, which has been seized with alacrity by the usual suspects, possibly unfairly; it seems more nuanced than its authors and fans suggest but I may not be reading it sufficiently well. I am reminded of the Data Praxis report, Tory Landslide, Progressives Split, which shows how it might have been worse and blames our FPTP electoral system. I precis them by saying,
“Labour lost because, Leavers in Labour seats, switched to the Tories, but more Labour Remainers from 2017 switched; Corbyn (& the manifesto) were now unpopular and thus too many Tory Remainers stayed with the Tories.
Dave Levy
We should also note that Lavery, Tricket and Smith do not mention Scotland; it’s not their expertise but there’s no answer without the Scots.
While looking at what to say, and for help in understanding the problem, I was concerned to be truthful at the state of the red wall parties’ health, but it seems hard to get the local contact rates, which will all be poor nor to get the member/voter ratio. I looked at Labour Together’s report, again to see if they said anything useful about local Party organisation/structure and campaigning. This is difficult to be honest about because of the back office chicanery in Labour HQ on 2017 & 2019 and the myths and maybe truths about how Momentum’s volunteer organisation saved us in 2017 get in the way. They i.e. Labour Together don’t say anything useful or concrete about CLP organisation. We should also note that the Democracy Review did nothing to improve local campaigning effectiveness either. Perhaps we should be listening to Crispin Flintoff on his campaign to fund CLPs properly.
About the Labour Together report, I found this, at Immigration News, which pulls no punches. I say, using their words,
[the] New Labour Together Report investigates Labour’s 2019 Election Defeat with crushing honesty – but glosses over senior saboteurs behind the Labour Leaks dossier. A 150-page report published this week by research group Labour Together serves up some stone-cold truths and analysis in what may have led to Labour’s downfall in the 2019 General Election. “
I have made a sankey chart from this, it would seem that this chart is for England & Wales only, but for other source notes, you’ll need to check out the original article.
The Labour Together report is strong on the need to get the strategy right; I think we may need to end the factionalism first and recognise the members must have the first and last word but we also need to resolve the fault lines in our coalition, because much of the pro-Brexit positions came from Labour politicians on the right of the party whose heritage is the “Control Immigration” mug and future road is that of Blue Labour, “work, family, community”. Adopting this sort of rubbish and its racist sub-text will jeopardise Labour’s city heartlands, apart from just being wrong. …
The EEF thought fit to comment on an RIAA DCMA takedown using §1201 of the DCMA aimed at a program called youtube-dl hosted on Github; I forwarded it via Facebook with a cryptic, acronym laden comment, and not surprisingly, some of my correspondents suggested I could have been more helpful and understandable. So I wrote an article on Linkedin, although much of it can be gained from the EFF article, however, this version includes a bit on oppressive economics of copyright maximalism, and a comment noting that Github have reposted the repo and revised their process to ensue their policies of supporting developers is fully considered when considering takedown notices. ...
The last article got me thinking about the US electoral college and so I decided to describe the relative power of its citizens using a ratio. Here’s the chart, and it’s coloured in so you can get an idea of who it benefits, if anyone. I was surprised that Texas is the most disenfranchised …
The EC votes are equal to the number of Congress representatives + two to represent the Senators. Each state must have one Congress representative. The apportionment of the Congress representatives was done nearly 10 years ago and things have changed. Wikipedia has a page on this and I used their table to build my chart, although if I had looked harder, they have one similar.
There are three causes of this inequality
Each state gets a vote for each Senator irrespective of the number of voters in the state
There is a floor of three votes/state which explains the difference in influence between the states with three EC votes
Some states have grown in population, and others shrunk; the allocations are 10 years old.
The US Presidential Election, how exciting! Others will discuss the politics and political fallout, but I want to look at something else. Many will look at the failings of the electoral college and thus the glaringly obvious anti-democratic inertia of the Senate but like our consideration of Labour movement General Secretaries the problem is the powers not the mandate although in the USA, the mandate i.e. the electoral college, where each state gets one vote per congress representative, and one vote per senator thus preferring the views of people who live in states with a lower population, is problem.
The US Presidential elections have been settled via the electoral college usually on the basis of matching the popular vote, but the popular vote has rarely been decisive. This twitter thread looks at the last few and they rarely better our Brexit margin of 52-48 per-cent. The size of disenfranchised minorities is too large, the power of the winning coalition too broad and the nature of the decisions is such that expressing a change of mind becomes impossible. This is not right nor is it democratic.
Presidential systems based on the US model have [dual mandates] built in, as does the French system and on a smaller scale our system of Executive Mayors. It should be necessary for a President to build a wide-ranging coalition to win, which should be a protection against the degeneration of Democracy, but history would suggest this is not the case. Where a society is split on critical social & economic issues, or religious or national identity issues, the “winner takes all” nature of Presidential systems and Plebiscites is a centripetal force on the unity of the polity. (This is powerfully identified in Juan Linz’s paper, Democracy: Presidential or Parliamentary, Does it make a difference?) I say,
Only a Parliament can represent the breadth of interests in a complex society, only a Parliament can negotiate popular compromises based on 2nd choices and changing priorities.
Dave Levy – but democracy!
But in both the UK & USA fundamental reform albeit of differing nature is required.
In the USA, the problem is the powers of the Presidency not the mandate, it’s the powers and strangely the term limit, but also the disproportionate power of the US Senate is becoming inappropriate as the growing majority now live in cities. …
The EHRC have issued their report into Antisemitism in the Labour Party, they say that Labour needs to rebuild trust & confidence in the antisemitism complaints handling process, reform and provide education & training, most importantly to complaints handling staff, and monitor and evaluate the changes. Everyone has committed to doing this and the proposals are not controversial. They also found that unlawful acts under the Equalities Act had occurred and therefore served an unlawful act notice on the Party. The Labour Party is now legally obliged to draft an action plan by Thursday 10 December 2020 to tackle the unlawful act findings that were made in the report. The action plan should be based on the EHRC recommendations to avoid such acts from happening again. With good will, this should be possible, but with the remaining actions taken that day, we have to question if the Labour Party actually wants to move on. The rest of this blog article looks at the report and selects some quotes, it concludes, with the statenebt that, "The Labour Party will not fix the problem of anti-semitism or other appalling behaviour whether it be based on a protected characteristic or just straight forward bullying and cheating, until it recognises the corruption of the disciplinary process caused by factionalism. This diversion i.e. the suspension of Corbyn will make the task of making the Party a welcoming place for all who wish to join much harder. I have signed the petition that he should be reinstated, and the CLPD have published a solidarity motion to put to CLPs and Union Branches."
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