An Irishman was working on the railroad when he heard a train coming along the track he was fixing. In panic, he jumped up and started sprinting down the track as fast as he could go, but he’d only managed a hundred yards when it caught up and ran him over. When he came to in hospital, the foreman asked him “Paddy, why didn’t you just run up the side of the track?”, to which he replied “Don’t be silly. If I couldn’t beat it on the level, what chance would I have had going uphill?”

Political correctness luckily means Irish jokes are now less vogueish than when I was a yoof, so how surprised was I to see the self same joke in today’s Guardian?

“Ireland’s recovery from the deepest recession of any eurozone country came to a quick and unexpected end today when the Irish government announced that national output dropped by 1.2% in the second quarter of 2010.

After posting an increase in growth in the first three months of the year, official data showed that the former “Celtic Tiger” sank into a double dip recession in the spring.

News of the relapse rattled the financial markets and put additional pressure on Dublin’s unpopular coalition government, which had previously insisted that its tough budget cuts were helping to stabilise the economy.”

(hat tip Adam at ToUChstone blog)

1. Announce you’re going to close 3/4 of government websites, claiming you’ll do away with:
   1. anything unco-ordinated,
   2. anything unnecessarily expensive,
   3. anything under-used,
      1. (in which case, said currently paid-up websites will presumably have to be broken up and re-developed into other sites or DirectGov – see 1.2)
   4. any vanity sites.
2. Announce all new websites will go through Frances Maude’s new senior committee, which will:
   1. decide if they’ll be useful enough to be allowed,
   2. decide if they’re usable and used enough to be allowed,
      1. (for which they will presumably have to quickly gain a lot of technical knowledge to make tactical judgements below their pay grade – see 1.2)
   3. champion centralised co-ordination in eGov web resources,
   4. have no remit over print and outdoor ad campaigns, as you obviously never get any kind of poor value there.
3. Immediately announce two new websites (admirably cheaply constructed), offering:
   1. a half-arsed show of consultation (see 2.1), and
   2. nice videos of George Osborne and Nick Clegg (see 1.4).
4. Replicate stage 3 in Facebook, claiming in an online chat with Mark Zuckerberg that actually building a website for stage 3 (as you did) would have been silly as it would have cost “millions if not billions”.
5. Call for exclusive use of the web in recruitment as it’s cost effective and transparent, even though:
   1. your proposal of cutting print job ads might make it harder for 30%+ of the population to access them,
   2. your idea that local people could investigate ‘non-jobs’ will mean jobs have to be spelled out in much more context to justify them to Have Your Say users (see 1.2).
6. Announce a 1/3 cut to DirectGov, the service which co-ordinates government web properties (see 1.1, 1.3.1, 2.3).

Phew! That all clear then?

Quick & dirty vid of today’s flashmob at in Westminster, in protest at our favourite media barons’ attempts to swing the election to suit themselves, and get themselves out of the mess a hung parliament might land them in.

Nice to see so many people there (including from Avaaz, 38Degrees, and Liberal Conspiracy), and a chance to meet some new faces, and get thumped by them with a roll of paper. If you weren’t there, don’t forget the 38degrees petition.

Parliament flashmob today. Check the Facebook event page for more info.

Are you in London this lunchtime? Then I guess I’ll see you at a location soon to be divulged for a newspaper swordfight. The coverage from the partisan press has been pretty shameful this time round – Clegg and Brown have had the same dumping on that Kinnock faced, as Murdoch scrabbles to make sure he’s backed the winning side in the election.Â

Let’s come together to show that whatever is leading the news on Sky or writ in big letters on news-stands isn’t necessarily what people are thinking, and that it’s the views of the ordinary voters of the UK, not the opinions of an Aussie billionaire paper baron that should determine the outcome of this election.

Plus it’s sunny of course – nice lunch break…

More on the event here, and if for some wierd reason you find yourself out in the provinces today, then you can always take 38Degrees’ online action instead!

Still smarting that we’re not considered wholesome enough for a Cameron marriage tax break – my wife earns a few hundred quid too much – I was cheered a bit to see Sunder Katwala’s recent post on Next Left. It looks like we’re in good company.

It’s supposed to cover civil partnerships too (might buy them a nice stay in a B&B), but Sunder thinks it will be hard for Cameron to find himself any beneficiaries there. Pensioners are likely to get a third of it – A very welcome boost on pensioner poverty, but would another £150 on winter fuel not be better targeting – or is divorce and anti-social behaviour amongst pensioners one of the main indicators of the Tories’ Borked Britain?

And then there’s the amount. Not enough to be a bribe, or to genuinely be of help to families – something that few people will get, and those that do get won’t notice. Shudder the thought it might be calculated to be the cheapest way possible to avoid the embarassment withdrawing the silly policy. As is stands it seems to fall squarely into the category of ‘pin money for wives who know their place”.

Sod Gene Hunt, it seems like Cameron’s taking us back to the 50′s.

He hits one of my bugbears fairly squarely: “I will support all measures to bring non-personal public data into the public domain“. I think a pretty important point on this one is that it should be freely available. It may sound obvious, but that’s not what’s happened in some recent attempts to open up data.

Take Tribunal judgement defaults for example. It’s great the Government made information available so that ordinary employees can find out whether their company, or one they’re thinking applying to of has a dodgy employment relations history. But management of the database has been farmed out to Registry Trust Limited (back in 1985 by Lord Hailsham). This helps get it off the public sector’s hands, and saves some costs to be sure, but in order to help the non-profit private company make a buck on the back of taking over the information, there’s an £8 a pop on searching it. Of course, that’s per speculative search – if the company comes up clean, or you want to probe a subsidiary to be sure, it’ll be another £8 please.

Check out the suggested uses that Registry Trust Limited choose to highlight on their site – it’s all about checking out employees, or vetting companies as business partners. Nothing there about empowering employees or job seekers, and for good reason. From starting as something to name and shame companies and redress a power imbalance between ordinary individuals and companies, it ends up being a boost for companies (good and bad) who can afford to open up multiple search accounts to check out individuals.

When Hailsham farmed this information out in 1985, it was analogue. Ordinary people couldn’t get hold of it anyway, so it’s easy to see why he considered closing it down, even without my usual tin foil hat on his motives. However, now the data’s digital it could be put to loads of uses empowering individuals – the nature and relevance of what’s being collated has fundamentally changed, and so has its value to society.

So my challenge to Tom is to see that not only is data made available, but that it becomes the job of government to do it themselves. Manage it in house, even if it costs more. Link it together with other datasets, so researchers can widen the picture. Make APIs so others can come up with uses that nobody even thought of yet. There’s a lot of scope for good here – and good luck to Tom in being re-elected to be one of the good people who gets to try it.

I haven’t been a member of a Labour affiliated union for nearly ten years now – my current union don’t even have a political fund, let alone one that affiliates to Labour, but something really irks me about the latest Tory billboard – criticising Labour for taking union money (no, the one above is my take on it, not the original, which you can see here).

If the Tories are honestly able to believe Michael Ashcroft wants to give them his tax-dodge savings purely out of civic duty, rather than attempting to buy any kind of influence, it should hardly be too big a leap of faith that millions of union members might voluntarily give small change every month to Labour, collected through their unions.

It’s not because they want Derek and Tony to lean on Gordon in industrial disputes or that they think it will get them all a pay rise. It’s for the same reason that the unions started the Labour party. The party is a part of the labour movement, and it represents the interests of the ordinary working majority in the UK. Members of around a quarter of UK unions give funds to Labour in this way, and for this reason.

83% of Unite’s members seem to think that giving working people a stronger voice in politics is worth getting together and pooling a few pence a week. I think that’s pretty honest cash, that Gordon should be proud to be able to call on.

UPDATE 19/3/10: Carl has some good points on union party funding at Stronger Unions.

Satirical genius from Political Scrapbook, based on the Tories’ current poster campaign. This deserves to win the internet for today, tomorrow, and much of this week!

Amidst talk of changed strategy to duck the virtual and physical graffiti that’s dogged the Tories’ election posters so far, three new billboards have been unveiled today, detailing why people might like to consider crossing the floor and voting Tory for a change. None of them have the easy-to-deface looming face of Dave, but there’s a nice strapline and design style that should give ample room for parody.

MyDavidCameron.com are already on the case, and I’m looking forward to see how they rise to the challenge. The hashtag #ivenevervotedtory is already doing brisk business with lunchbreak surfers. Here’s my quick & dirty contribution to the fun.

There’s a new ToUChstone report out today on the background to the issue of electoral reform, and a roundup of the options on the table and the impact each might have (you can download it here), and you can also take a practical walkthrough yourself online with the electoral reform test.Â

Answer a bunch of yes/no questions about how you’d want politics in the UK to operate and it will tell you the systems closest to your ideal. I’d be an AV+ (AMS) supporter, though no change there since I last studied electoral reform in my politics A levels 20 years back.

If you don’t know your AMS from your elbow, give it a spin at the ToUChstone blog.