Labour Conference 2016

A friend was doing some research and so I went and found these documents; the conference documents of #lab16. They weren’t hard to find; they are currently on membersnet. I may continue this as a series and I have previously mirrored the rules here, and have also republished the Collins Report on that page. I have…

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New Labour and Party Management

An unfinished white Paper by Emmanuelle Avril of the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. The paper is called, The (Unintended) Consequences of New Labour: Party Leadership vs Party Management in the British Labour Party. and was presented to the Political Studies Association 2015 conference, in March so before the election. The abstract states, 

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Decorating the GDPR

Here is an image documenting the six data protection principles embedded in the GDPR. I made this using powerpoint and got the pictures from flickr and later from Unsplash. This page both established a URL and allows me to document the image credits. In 2023, I reworked the Principles graphic, which has its own URL.

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Privacy & Human Rights at the UN

In 2013, AFAIK, the United Nations General Assembly, passed the UN Human Rights Commission proposal, The right to privacy in the digital age, the results of this led to the establishment of a Special Rapporteur on Privacy reporting to the OHRC. The SRoP reports once/year to the Human Rights Committee and once each year to…

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Investigatory Powers Act 2016

The Investigatory Powers Bill became Law earlier this week. Interestingly the noise and criticism was turned up after the Royal Assent and a Government Site petition opposing the Law reached 1500,000 signatures in a week. I had reason to perform some research on what the Law actually says, and here are my notes and links.

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Boundary Reviews

Im wrote in 2016, “As we know the Tories are having a second go at rigging the General Elections”. It seemed they didn’t need to and have dropped the plans. For some reason I originally made this private but lifted the constraint in Nov 2020. Here are my notes and links,

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Analysing the 2015 General Election

I am fed up hearing about the PLP’s 9m votes mandate. A large number of these 9m votes will have voted for Labour candidates that lost. So I decided to calculate the number of votes cast for the PLP. So something for both political geeks and excel nerds. Here’s how I did it.

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Dictatorship and Plebiscites

For people casual acquainted with political theory, we know that dictators quite like plebiscites in a way that they dislike parliaments. We can see in the UK, the way in which some of the Brexiteers, but not their leadership, are frightened of both parliament’s consideration of interpreting the referendum result and/or running a second one.

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Labour’s NEC Elections 2016

The Labour Party NEC elections have started. Ballot papers are being issued now, to arrive by email by 16th July and by post by 22nd July. They are to be returned by Noon 5th August. I expect them to be both online or paper ballots. This post is designed to be informative and not polemical.

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Labour’s Chakrabarti Inquiry

I don’t know how popular my hosting of the LP rules has become, but the Labour Party doesn’t really get permalinks. I have decided in the interests of informed debate to mirror Labour’s Chakrabarti Inquiry findings. Labour’s launch of the report was a debacle and fell foul of the dead cat on the table disruption.

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Who broke the internet?

This is going to be a shit storm. The CJEU has ruled that US owned storage is not “adequate protection” under EU data protection laws and that their laws around warrants are not an “effective remedy”.  They have torn up the so-called self-harbour treaty. Here are some links.

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Defending the UK

What started it I found myself doing some reading about recent British Defence strategy and policy. It started with a blog by John Snow, questioning the British military’s obsession with supporting the US, it’s a sort of trickle down, but we can’t afford the technology any more. Military technology works because its new and different…

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