Labour & Education

Labour Party Conference is just two months away and so I am considering what I would like to see discussed. I think it important that we workout what a National Education Service means and so I with some help from some friends have developed the following words.

Conference notes

  1. that the government continues to promote privatisation of the schools system through academies and free schools, with a culture of competition based on ever-more onerous testing and Ofsted inspections. This is bad for students, school workers and society.
  2. our manifesto pledge to “ensure that all schools are democratically accountable…”
  3. our manifesto pledge to “abandon plans to reintroduce baseline assessments and launch a commission to look into curriculum and assessment, starting by reviewing Key Stage 1 and 2 SATs”

Conference believes that “public”/private and grammar schools are also incompatible with an egalitarian and democratic education system serving the many, not the few.

We call for the next Labour government to

  1. Immediately stop all academisations and the opening of any new academies or free schools.
  2. Place all state schools & FEs into full local authority control.
  3. Abolish “public”/private schools by taking them into local authority control.
  4. Ensure all schools are comprehensive, secular community schools, open to all.
  5. Immediately abolish Ofsted, all SATs tests and league tables.
  6. Restore national pay bargaining for teachers, implement the National Education Union’s maximum class size demands, and introduce a national Workload Charter.

(196 Words) with no Trigger.

I say with no trigger because motions to Labour Party conference must refer to an event between the publication of the National Policy Forum report and the 14th September. This is referred to by me, as an event trigger.

Motions need to be under 251 words long. So if you think I’ve missed anything important add or replace some of the demands and we’ll put them together at the composite meeting. If you get this through your CLP drop a comment on this blog. …

Eternal vigilance

I have been pointed at China’s Social Credit Scoring plans via two routes. The first is this extract published at Wired from Rachel Botsman’s book, “Who can we trust”. This details the Chinese Governments plan to build a social credit scoring scheme, but the sources and incentives are horrendously comprehensive, including their leading match making agency. (It’s taken me some time to read this article, an I have bookmarked and annotated it in my diigo feed.) Worrying things about the Chinese scheme is that voluntary participation becomes mandatory; while rewards and incentives are at the forefront of everyone’s mind today, control and punishment is planned, in the Chinese case in the short term they are talking about foreign and domestic travel restrictions but as I note, the countries leading dating agency is one of the surveillance agencies. There is also talk of social investment loans (helicopter money) which become available on the basis of social scores.

The second route was an article on Medium by someone who got banned from AirBnB. He pointed at an article on Buzzfeed, “A Chinese-Style Digital Dystopia Isn’t As Far Away As We Think” where a series of regulatory decisions in the USA seem to be paving the way to something similar, a powerful illustration that the argument that surveillance is OK if it’s private sector is horrendously false.

One worrying aspect of the proposed Chinese system is that your reputation is as good as that of your friends and we have idiots trying to replicate it with peeple, and reading up on that has started me worrying about Linkedin and its competitors and we all know we should get off facebook.

The wired article came before machine learning and massive scale AI became a hot topic, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens to social credit scores when they let rip with the application of machine learning. The automated derivation of reputation scores also raises issues of safeguarding, libel and context. Safeguarding and libel laws require the machines to tell the truth, in fact safeguarding may require machines to hide the truth. Context requires a level of nuance that we are unsure if machines will ever have, but even if they get there, justice and judges must remain human and the code must be open; China’s & Facebook’s is not!. The GDPR gives data subjects rights, perhaps its time to revisit the seven principles.

Of course in the UK, we have our very own examples of machines and data sharing getting it wrong. Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary has suspended the intra-government and some of the other immigration data sharing as a result of the backlash on the Windrush scandal. (I wonder if this I an excuse to look again at the DPA Immigration Exemption clauses.) Much of what is happening in China and the USA is also happening in the UK, it’s just that the surveillance agents are the US owned datenkraken and the British State have legalised the hacking of their data streams.

What’s happening in China is terrible, but our governments are following suit! The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. …

Crime & Brexit

As I said, earlier this week I attended a session of the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee. This was called to take evidence on the impact of Brexit as it impacted Europol and the European Arrest Warrant.

I have published a link to the video recording of the event but I took some notes and wanted to share them with you. They interviewed Sir Robert Wainright, a former Head of Europol and Claude Moraes MEP, Chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) and Camino Mortera-Martinez, Research Fellow and Brussels Representative, Centre for European Reform. If we leave, we are unlikely to get a better agreement than Denmark which has withdrawn from Europol and unless we accept the Court of Justice of the European Union, we will be excluded from the European Arrest Warrant. Moraes made the point that the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act may inhibit a data sharing adequacy finding which may lead to a restrivtion on access to Europol’s databases. …  …

Power in Iran & the UK

A couple of years ago, I found this picture, illustrating the relationships between organs of government in Iran. I we struck by the similarities between it and the UK.

On revisiting it over the last few weeks, I am less enamoured of the similarities. Originally I saw the Queen & Iran’s Supreme Leader as equivalent and the UK’s Premier & the Iranian President as equally the equivalent positions. The Guardian Council is the House of Lords and we should note that the Assembly of Experts is elected.

If you study the diagram and look at the powers appointment of the Supreme Leader, we can see that the British Premier is more powerful as all those appointments are made in the UK on the so-called recommendation of the Prime Minister.

At least the Iranian President is directly elected and the Supreme Leader indirectly so.

ooOOOoo

I think I might create dot graphs of the two governments. …

On Adequacy after Brexit

I attended the Home Affairs Committee on Europol and the European Arrest Warrant yesterday. Don’t say I don’t know how to have a good time. One of the members, suggested that since we have passed a new Data Protection Law, we will be compliant from Day 1, or Day 0 as we engineers call it. I think  not and here’s why. In short, the Government say they’ve implemented the GDPR into British Law, but once we’re a third country, it’s the Commission that has the last word, and they have questions we need to answer. …

Firstly, I don’t think the Commission would act that quickly and they’d need to issue an adequacy decision and there are four questions of substance that the Commission would need to consider.

  1. The European Data Protection Supervisory Board’s predecessor, the Article 29 Working Party and the Commission had outstanding issues with the UK’s implementation of 95 Directive, to the extent that it seems the Commission had started infraction proceedings. (I find it very hard to get explicit data on this, and much of what is available reads like conspiracy theories, but the most vocal campaigner published his views in the Register, here. The author argues that the infraction process proposes to carry forward to the 2018 DPA. ) The author checkpointed his findings in a 2011 blog article, called “European Commission explains why UK’s Data Protection Act is deficient”, he also points to an Out-law Article, “Europe claims UK botched one third of Data Protection Directive” 17 Sep 2007.
  2. The House of Lords Committee on Data Protection found that as a 3rd Country we may be required to meet a higher standard than as a member state. (This is because we will lose the powers granted to member states under Article 23 Restrictions of the GDPR. These powers relate to the exemption of national security organisations and the courts (and others) from some aspects of the GDPR). This is why there is concern with the Investigatory Powers Act, already declared deficient by the UK Courts and the DPA immigration service exception will jeopardise any attempt to obtain an adequacy finding. i.e. a member state might be able to have these laws but a 3rd country may not.
  3. The loss of member state status and privilege means that our intelligence sharing arrangements with the US, a country which still has the death penalty, and operates under a different military legal doctrine may be deemed to be a critical problem in granting adequacy. (We should note that Tom Watson MP, obtained a barrister’s opinion on the legality of sharing intelligence and wrote to the Prime Minister at the time on the legality of this activity; it was taken up by Rights Watch who are pursuing this through the courts.)
  4. Depending on the withdrawal agreement, and it seems that no-one is thinking about this, we may cease to be covered by the US Privacy Shield agreement, and thus will be prohibited from transferring EU citizens personal data to the USA, and they to us. (Actually prohibited is a bit strong, participants in cross border data transfer would need to be covered by model clauses, or binding corporate rules and both of these are under judicial review (Schrems II) and create a barrier to entry because of cost to SMEs).

It should be noted that the ECJ has required the US Safe Harbour agreement to be re-negotiated; its successor allows US corporate self assessment, but also requires EU citizen access to the US Court system. The important thing here is that the Commission consider protections of EU citizens’ personal data, and the establishment of rights against the State’s intelligence, security and police services to be part of an adequacy findings and since the EU is not frightened of a row with the US; it wont be with us. …

More on Tidemill

The Council (actually the Cabinet says No!), so does the Mayor of London. (Actually what they say is more complex, I was channeling Little Britain.) The Council says go ahead with the Developer’s current plans, so does the Mayor of London.

Len Duvall, the area’s London Assembly member, reports the Mayor of London’s decision in a press release called “Old Tidemill Garden could be lost for ever“. Crosswhatfields reports the lead up to the Council decision in an article called “Save Tidemill & Reginald House update“.

It would seem that the Cabinet want the houses now, are frightened that the developer will walk, or sue the council, and that grant support for the project will be lost through delay if they voted to instruct the developer to consider the alternate plan, which is designed to provide the same number of houses.

Here’s the alternative plan, which the developers have rejected, and the Council has not reviewed. It saves both the current council houses, and the Garden.

One of the increasingly powerful arguments for keeping the Garden is its role as ‘lung’. Given the amount of building work surrounding the area; its 3.3 thousand metres2 protects people from the shit created by the building works at Deptford Church,the Tidemill site itself, and the coming Creekside development.

 

 

I have been told that the Council believe they are replacing this capability, but if so it would be a departure from previous practice.  A friend writes,

There will NOT be an increase in ‘publicly accessible space’, as claimed by Council officers. The new public realm is said to be 3915sqm, but more than 50% of this (1973sqm) is private courtyards. 20% of the remainder is hard landscaping, leaving only 1565sqm of public green space. The current garden and the lawn on the corner are 3364sqm in total. What is offered is 1799sqm less, which represents a net loss (or deficit) of 53%.

, although see the comment below.

Here is a picture of some of the trees that’ll go, although they’d going both plans.

I wonder what the next steps are.

This is a missed opportunity for the new Labour Group.

ooOOOoo

Other articles on this blog are tagged “tidemill gardens” and I wrote up my notes during the initial planning consultation on my wiki, in an article called “Giffin Street Redevelopment“. …

Big Copyright strikes again

Big Copyright strikes again

This time in the European Parliament. They want upload filters and to tax ISSP’s reuse, but you can do something about it.

Last week a committee of MEPs voted 15 – 10, reported here by one of its members, Julia Reda, the sole Pirate Party MEP, in favour of the EU Copyright Directive’s disastrous Article 13. This misguided measure will introduce upload filters that would change the way that much of the Internet works, from free and creative sharing, to one where anything can be removed without warning, by computers. They also voted in favour of Article 11, which Europeanises a German & Spanish law and places a monetary liability on internet software service providers who use snippets of news articles originally published by for-profit publishers.

This article explains why the measures are wrong, and points to the campaign sites. It was amended on the 5th July after the vote to report the result, which was that the Parliament voted to re-open the discussion in plenary.

Here are the votes, interesting splits. …