Schools

Today we debated Education, I had been campaigning for this to be discussed to develop strong anti-academy policy, I think we got half way there. I wrote a speech but wasn’t called.

I wanted to make two points, the first is that the purpose of the Education system is to create a public good and not a revenue stream for the private sector and secondly that the profit motive clearly conflicts wit pedagogical excellence. (Someone else did get that word into their speech and like me if I’d been called stumbled on it.)

I am sorry that the words are so weak on the FEs.

Here’s Angela’s speech,

The motion text is below or overleaf.  …

The digital equivalent of stop & search

I got to conference in time for the Justice and Home Affairs policy seminar, although not on time. I was called to speak and I asked about the investigatory powers act; I explained a bit about it since most don’t share my monomania and described how it works in that the telcos and ISSPs collect your call data records and internet usage records and make them available to any of 28 law enforcement agencies, all of this without proving probable cause and that the retrieval is not subject to judicial oversight. I said,

It’s the digital equivalent of stop and search.

I noted that its predecessor has been struck down, that Human Rights law is designed to protect us against the state and asked, noting that Labour had voted for this law, what we were going to do. …

A team huddle

We met as a delegation and agreed to vote in the priorities ballot for the first four topics that we’d debated at the GC apart from Brexit which the Unions were prioritising. We had learnt that Momentum were supporting our motion on Immigration and Justice for Windrush which meant it was likely to be and so chose our team to attend the composite. We had one of the motion’s authors present and so agreed to send her, and also sent one of our delegates from our BAME committee; we are only permitted two attendees. We discussed the Democracy Review proposals including the trigger ballot reform proposal but could not come to an agreement. We decided to individually listen and decide a.k.a. a free vote. …

Who’s missing?

In my last article I reported on the results of the 1st Card Vote and there’s some interesting insights to be learned.

Firstly the Affiliates and CLP votes are counted seperately, normalised as percentages and then added together, and expressed as a percentage. The Affiliates have 50% and CLPs have 50% of the final result.

1.84 million affiliate votes were cast, and ~385,000 CLP votes. That’s a lot of CLP votes missing. The card vote values should be based on membership (individual members in good standing) as at 31 December 2017, which was 564,000. (That seems a bit high based on press reporting, but the source is the Electoral Commission).

32% missing!

This means that ~32% of the membership were not represented. I was to hear later in he week that only 17 Scottish CLPs are in attendance. My CLP is fortunate in that it could fund a large delegation and considers that policy formulation is important but it’s clear that many CLPs either cannot afford to send a delegation and/or do not consider it important enough. In my evidence to the Democracy Review I argued that the cost of conference should be borne by the NEC, As Diana Holland, the Tresurer reported last year and was to report later; the Party is now debt free. …

Servants, not Masters

More from my head provoked by Alex Nunn’s book  “The Candidate”, I am reading the chapter on the media. Alex states that George Eaton wrote a negative piece in the Statesman on Corbyn, and ended up supporting Cooper; it reminded me of Jason Cowley’s article, “The fall of Labour’s golden generation”, available behind their identity/pay walls here, or as a .pdf, written a month or so later.

This, though is the quote that makes me remember the article, it’s anonymously second hand,

Parties in the end are machines for capturing power and there is a sort of life cycle, and you’ve got to be absolutely vigilant about renewing it. Blair and Brown thought they could renew the machine with very clever people, but with one or two exceptions they were – what is the word I’m searching for? – they were servants, they weren’t masters, they didn’t really have a vision of where they wanted to go.

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Thoughts on DaaS

I am still struggling to make a remote DaaS for my tablet.  I have built an amazon image based on Server 2012, which is getting a bit long in the tooth and Skype fails to boot on it, maybe I should ensure I have implemented an Amazon “Desktop” experience, but I am not happy with the price. I wondered if Azure might be cheaper, although on first look it would seem not. I need to be more sure and having a remote DaaS would be cool for the tablet, as bit by bit, services will deprecate the version frozen browser. I suppose that bit by bit RDP will also fail, but let’s see. (Microsoft’s desertion of ARM maybe it’s last act of monopoly actions and is a lesson to both consumers and OEMs of the problems in  not owning your own operating system, a subject I used to write a lot about.)

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