Labour outsources digital policy, Tories turn up to finish it Do tax avoidance, monopolistic business practices or your right to determine your digital identity bother you? Well don’t look for help in the new "digital manifesto" that the Labour Party launched this week. The audience for the crowdsourced "mashup" policy document is VCs, the media, and nervous unions – not you. The People’s …
Armed with our free 1Gbps broadband I see that we are to have on-line voting in local and general elections, please see paragraphs 80 and 81.
This will ensure that the result of elections is not determined by the voters but by the body with the greatest hacking ability.
Not all that democratic but achingly fashionable.
... the consultants are writing promises that, they reasonably hope, will provide plenty of nice cushy jobs for themselves and their cronies, and a limited pool of largesse that they get to hand out to those they want to patronise.
And because none of the actual party faithful, on either side, has the remotest idea what they're talking about, it all goes uncorrected.
In Labour's case, the sad part is that once upon a time, it would have called its friends in the Licensed Taxi Drivers' Association and other unions, and they would speedily have told it exactly what was wrong with Uber. But post-Tony Blair, they don't seem to be making use of those contacts any more. They're just getting (bad) advice from the same professional wonks as the other parties.
UKIP have claimed that mantle. Or was that the peoples army?
Too many slogans.
If it ain't broke, dont fix it.
For he Labia/Lieberal/Toria cartel the real problem seems to be that they can't lie unopposed on social media without some nary troll poking a digital stick in their recta.
Diddums. Bless!
There are at least two Labour Party digital manifestos.
The one Andrew Orlowski cites is by Jon Cruddas.
Then there's the one by Chi Onwurah which hasn't been published yet.
While we wait for Ms Onwurah's, let's remind ourselves of some of Mr Cruddas's obiter dicta. These are taken from a speech he gave at the Royal Society of Arts, Radical Hope, where he was channelling the thoughts of a consultant he approached, Plenty Coups, great chief of the Crow Indians (Native Americans). He says:
• Our welfare state is ill-equipped to deal with modern social evils like loneliness and the loss of community.
• Our health service is struggling to cope with the rise of chronic illnesses like depression, obesity and diabetes, and we literally lack a proper system of care for our growing elder population ...
• Our present model of education rewards conformity in pursuit of a narrow, logical and mathematical form of intelligence. It fails far too many children and it reproduces the power of the already privileged. It is wasteful of our most important economic resource which is human ingenuity ...
• The future represents a powerful challenge to my party. Historically, our instincts have too often been to centralize, conform and control. To shape the future of our country we in Labour know that we have to do things differently.
That's the problem.
And the solution Mr Cruddas proposes, him and the old Crow, is digital government.
Deploy digital government, and the buffalo will come back.
"I've always been ready to admit I'm on the romantic and conservative side of socialism" says Mr Cruddas, "one that values the local, the parochial and the magical as sources of political agency and power".
Ms Onwurah's manifesto, we may radically hope, will rely less on magic.
I think you'll find that the proposals come from http://www.labourdigital.org . This is a crowdsourcing effort led by Lord Parry Mitchell and John McTiernan although like so many of these exercises how ideas get to the top, no-one knows. This makes @labourdigital a Labour Party caucus or pressure group or a front and as far as I can see not something John Cruddas has been associated with.
You are right in that there is a second Labour review, led by Chi Onawurah MP, a Labour MP, shadow spokesperson for the Cabinet Office. The questions and personnel involved have more significant track records and while the launch was quieter, the thought going into the agenda was broader, better informed and focused on citizenship. It also looks to address those aspects of the public/private sector relationship which are at their worst problematic. These questions are not easy to answer and I know that my reply was weak on this aspect of the call for evidence. The interest, which some Tories share, in solving the dual problems of citizen participation in IT projects and “too-big-too fail” is certainly not one that’s expressed in headlines. It’s a serious set of questions which this article and most commentators fail to understand or question.
While I agree, and stated on several occasions that e-voting is dangerous and unproven, @labourdigital continue to pursue it. It is only 9th on their list of proposals, although Labour’s National Policy Forum included a one line statement to pursue (i.e. repeat) experiments including online voting. I have written at length on Labour List, my blog and on @labourdigital’s crowd sourcing site on why this is a mistake. It was the most controversial item on the @labourdigital crowdsourcing site, which didn’t have a down button, which is good for brainstorming, but not so good when the sorting of proposals is not transparent. I don’t think anyone submitted the idea to the http://www.yourbritain.org.uk/ site, where Labour asked people to contribute their ideas to for the next manifesto. I know that my statement, asked for the support of the EDRi’s Digital Charter which doesn’t call for e-voting.
However we can’t have it both ways, we either want evidence based policy or not. I know that for many, blind prejudice is enough. However if we do want fact based policy, then the people who know the evidence are likely to be earning their living in the business; to write them off as part of the extended public sector client state is ignorant and wrongheaded. It’s certainly the case that better public sector project governance will only come from experts who learn from both success and failure. I am hopeful that modern IT architectures will help make this easier.
"Another part of the problem is the narrowness of the intellectual pool from which the wonks all sup." and ".... at the front of the queue when money is being handed out."
Those pretty neatly sum up the key problems with political interaction with IT in the UK. Those asking the questions are largely clueless, but worse, either don't realise they are or to what extent. Those answering are either from the 'winky wanky woo' school of policy that can't ever work outside lab conditions, or simply pimp voracious self-interest as a panacea, through delusion or malice. And almost all concerned are angling for an easy slice of goverment cash that comes without meaningful oversight or strings that demand actual results.
To heap insult on tragedy, the whole process is repeated ad nauseum, despite plenty of evidence its never produced anything more useful than a few expanded waistlines from the freebie food. Until the political thinking is upgraded and modernised to being equal to the task, nothing at all will change.
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