I haven’t been blogging for the past two weeks owing to an opportunistic holiday to Scotland to take advantage of the weather.

The day before I left (two weeks ago) I was up at 6:30am in the drizzle delivering Green Party rebuttal leaflets to the nasty LibDem leaflet on my beat in St Michael’s Ward. It’s not possible to get out of this job, because they just give twice as many leaflets to my partner Becka to deliver, knowing she can’t do it all on her own and will arm-twist me until it hurts.

I’m finding that an MP3 player is an invaluable device for keeping the mind occupied as I go to door after door getting my fingers scraped raw by the mailslot lids. There are a good number of BBC Radio 4 political podcasts to listen to, but what I’d really prefer are some campaign podcasts from the parties to put me in the mood.

WHERE ARE THE PARTY POLITICAL PODCASTS?

The Labour Party has a bunch of YouTube videos. So does the LibDems, as does the Green Party, and UKIP (including all those nasty ones they’re so proud of. Bless.)

Only the Conservative Party has any podcasts. Except most of them fail to download and the last one was from 18 January with David Cameron telling you to go to their website.

This is rubbish. This is such an annoying omission that I am forced to contact the parties.

The Labour Party won’t let you send them an email. You have to use this crappy contact form that requires you to fill in your full address and forces you to select from the following subjects:

• Policy Enquiry – Health, Education, Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Trade and Industry, Work and Pensions, Environment and Rural Affairs, Other
• Membership – Join the Labour Party, Change membership information, Other membership enquiry, Contact your local Labour Party
• Contacting your Elected Representatives – How to contact your MP, How to contact your local council

What if I want to tell them something about the content+design of their webpage that would improve it? Maybe they don’t want to know. Well done those painfully, excessively smart people at Tangent Labs. I suppose we’d get suspicious if the Labour Party had significantly more nous regarding the design of their party webpage than they have been in overseeing the general web presences of the government for the last ten years.

I dialed “Policy – Other” and wrote:

Any chance of having some podcasts here instead of only YouTube videos? Some of us have to go out and deliver leaflets and it would be good to have something to listen to to motivate us on our rounds.

After my rounds, I came back and said to Becka: “I don’t know what you were complaining about. I found it a lot easier to fold the rebuttal leaflet in to the main leaflet I was delivering at the same time.”

She said: “You idiot! You’re not supposed to do that. The two leaflets needed to go through the mailbox separately so that they flutter down onto the doormat separately and not get tossed into the bin at once.”

The website TheStraightChoice.org — like The Public Whip — is an obvious website that needs to exist.

But why is it left to me to do it, instead of one of those well-funded democratic institutions that populate London?

I am motivated by specific facts on the ground, not by general wishy-washy democratic ideals. The Public Whip was caused by the Iraq War vote. It was quickly obvious that after a few years had passed, there would be no accessible record of which MPs voted for the war. Only a comprehensive website that contained all the Parliamentary votes would keep this record alive.

TheStraightChoice.org has a similar genesis, of needing to preserve and publicize a series of remarkable LibDem leaflets I was seeing after I joined the local Green Party. This group has been gradually chipping away at the decade old majority control of the corrupt council of Liverpool City where I live, and by participating in their campaign I was able to learn about how the electoral process actually works.

But only if there is comprehensive common website for all election leaflets, will there be a proper home for them. Had there already been a good election leaflet website, I’d have submitted them to that and been very happy. But there wasn’t one, and so I had help get one built.

This is not, repeat not, a partisan project where I secretly lose opposition leaflets and pass on private details to my favourite party for campaign purposes. There wouldn’t be any value in this, and it would be a breach of trust. There needs to be an on-line election leaflet project. And there is not one run by the Electoral Commission, a think tank, a regulated media organization, or a university, so it’s left to me and my friends to do it.

And the following leaflet which showed up in St Michael’s Ward at the weekend is the proof of my point:

Even the Green Party admits your vote is wasted here…

Local People are today feeling humiliated after the Green Party has officially given up in Liverpool.

Paul Steedman, the Green Party’s Election Campaign Director, has told activists that Liverpool is not important… as they’re not going to win.

In a leaked email sent to Green Party members, Mr Steedman said that all resources are to be targeted in Brighton, Lewisham and Norwich. But what about Liverpool?

He even has the cheek to ask people to help in his own area… “We’d love you to help in all 3 seats, but especially in Brighton (where I am based),” adding, “People from across the country join others from Brighton.”

Is this where our Green Party councillors are? Why are they in Brighton when they should be in St Michael’s!

In reality, the Green Party councillors, and the candidate for this local election, were in St Michael’s at the weekend delivering the following leaflet:

Now, I’d say that this Green Party leaflet (on slightly lighter shade of green paper), is more substantive on the local council election — in that it tells you who the candidate is, and it covers recent events of concern within the ward, while also addressing the administration of the council.

It does not contain random incoherent repeated smears of the opposition that have never been party policy.

Now, you can call me partisan if you like, as I have been absolutely clear about my relationship to this particular election battle (I am not involved in any of the others and don’t know anyone in the national party).

But what other kind of person is going to take the slightest interest in a minor election leaflet in some corner of the country?

Anyone who thinks they have a modicum of intelligence will sling these bits of paper straight in the bin — and then they will be outvoted by the bewildered masses who do read them and are fooled by their falsehoods. That’s not a very good habit.

Every vote counts. And only the votes count.

It is of a small note that the current Libdem councillor for the ward, Peter Allen, has been hastily deselected in favour of someone with the name “S. Green”, according to the microscopic imprint on the leaflet.

There will be two Greens on the ballot. People will make mistakes by reading the name of the candidate for the name of the party. A similar thing happened years ago when someone got thousands of votes standing as Literal Democrat. This is one of the reasons the names of political parties are now regulated.

Every vote counts. And only the votes count. Even the mistakes.

Also, in the imprint, as required by Section 110 of the Representation of the People Act 1983, is the name and address of the publisher and printer, a one Paul Twigger, who is the Executive Member for Corporate Performance in the Council.

Paul knows it is very important to follow this law, because in 2007 his fellow LibDem councillor on the Executive Committee, Steve Hurst was caught red handed for delivering leaflets falsely attributed to the United Socialist Party smearing his opponent.

Hurst was defended in court with character references from fellow politicians, including council leader Warren Bradley and deputy Lord Mayor Mike Storey, but Judge Richard Clancy found him guilty as charged and fined him a whole £500 for the offence.

Wow, that’s quite a deterrent for probably the worst possible infringement of the law you can imagine, when what’s at stake is a 46 to 43 absolute majority control of the city that makes it possible for power to be totally removed from the council chamber and into the closed hierarchy of the local party. Democracy is boring. Power is worth fighting for.

This is the context that makes it matter. It is something that transcends all the democratic ideals people might have in terms of policy and political process and debate.

When winning the game has this much as stake, the play gets dirty. You’ve got to have a referee. There is no referee. The Electoral Commission has decided this is not their concern.

This particular leaflet clearly breaches Section 106(5) of the Representation of the People Act 1983:

(5) Any person who, before or during an election, knowingly publishes a false statement of a candidate’s withdrawal at the election for the purpose of promoting or procuring the election of another candidate shall be guilty of an illegal practice.

because it leads with a false statement of the candidate’s withdrawal from this local election for the purpose of promoting the election of another candidate.

The defence will say, “Well, we have evidence you’re not seriously fighting the Parliamentary election, and that’s true.”

But this is a leaflet about the local election, and the statement is false. How widely to interpret the words “withdraw at the election” is a matter for a judge, but the intent and effect of the false statements in this leaflet are absolutely unambiguous.

There’s no point in getting angry. TheStraightChoice.org isn’t going to go away just because you ignore it. Instead I’d like to hear that party leaders are finally smelling the coffee and are putting out the word that they’d like a clean campaign this time. And to prove it, they’d make it the duty of party volunteers to upload leaflets from all parties to TheStraightChoice.org website.

But they didn’t act like this before the Parliamentary expenses scandal broke when they knew it was coming and could have easily diffused it. We can expect systematic myopia and small-mindedness. After all, they didn’t get where they are by far-sighted force of wisdom and character. They got there by back-stabbing and naked ambition. Only the votes count.

Apparently still unable to find anyone both photogenic enough and willing to back the policies on their election leaflets, the British National party have again resorted to using stock imagery for their latest mail-shot. For your consideration we present you with this BNP leaflet uploaded to The Straight Choice earlier today:

… and this image from stock photography website Fotolia:

As you may remember, this isn’t the first time the party have pulled this one. Back in May last year Stephen Paulger and Tim Ireland reported that the BNP  had made use of stock imagery in their Euro election leaflets. After a bit of extra digging, the Telegraph then tracked down the photographer and son of the Italian pensioners featured in the leaflet and found him distinctly non-plussed at being featured in a political leaflet.

As the Telegraph went on to point out, this is at best legally dubious, and probably illegal. Back in June The Straight Choice actually tried to contact the police regarding the original leaflet and find out if it was being investigated, but after being bounced around 3 different departments (and one local cop shop) we had to give up and admit the police didn’t know who would look into it if there was even a problem. Maybe it’s worth another go tomorrow?

PS, does anyone recognise the police woman on the first page? I’m sure she used to be on some kind of low rent version of The Bill but the internet is failing me.

In an amazing feat of Not Getting It, a young man from Experian QAS has been phoning round all the former users of EarnestMarples.com trying to get us to buy their post-code lookup file to better serve our customers.

The conversation went on for at least 20 minutes after I had made clear that (a) TheStraightChoice.org didn’t have any money, (b) we are morally against this Postcode information being private (the whole justification of the EarnestMarples site), (c) even if we did want to buy it we’d get it direct from the Royal Mail, and (d) we’re now using the freely available google geocoding API (which he hadn’t heard about).

Add to that, this postcode data is supposed to be made free this year, in spite of high level difficulties.

So what was so good about their product, which was fully derived from the Postcode Address File?

Well, the PAF is apparently not in a very good format, and they have to spend 42 man hours per month to fix up for every release, and they add corrections (including changing I’s to 1’s and vice versa), and improve on its area naming, and shrink the file size down by a factor of 5 to make it more useful to commercial organizations.

My goodness, this is a damning indictment of the PAF, whose management has a budget of £18million, with numerous board executives and staff and Postcomm reviews, and so forth.

Indeed it is, I was told. And QAS, which is backed by very prestigious and successful Experian company (with really stupid salesmen, or they wouldn’t have called me), fix it up so well that the Royal Mail buys our postcode lookup product for use in their call centres.

This is known as a customer endorsement. And what better customer to endorse your added-value than the one who sold you the data in the first place! (Shame this one is not included in their page of customer case studies.)

I’m sure what he claims is not strictly true, because what Royal Mail will have done is outsourced all their call centre needs to an Indian company, who will have bought in the QAS Experian product as part of their commercial package — rather than actually taking advantage of the special-case efficiencies due to this particular customer.

But as all our great managing class knows, outsourcing is always better in the larger term, no matter how many specific and provable inefficiencies it raises. It’s a matter of faith. And this article of faith feeds back to the sales pitch by the assumption that if the Royal Mail is buying back its own data, then that proves it is better, rather than just being one more example of a long series of deranged economic structures that make money for the wrong people.

If the PAF was made public, this kind of nonsense wouldn’t happen, because people would say: don’t sell me the corrections, why don’t you put them back into the dataset? I mean, Wikipedia has a lot of very useful data in it, and nobody sells improved copies of it around the place. People understand. But with private corporate data, it can happen, even though the management of Postcomm document explains:

7.39. PAF accuracy is important to PAF customers, and broadly speaking the more accurate PAF is the better. Under the Act, Royal Mail is required to maintain PAF so that it is capable of being used to encourage good addressing. Therefore, Royal Mail should work with the advisory board towards an appropriate measurement system, targets, performance measurement, reporting, and formal arrangements with data suppliers.

But as long as there are enough fools to buy this old rope to fund at least one salesman to waste his pitiful life phoning round all possible users, this business will continue.

Now excuse me, I have a company to set up for selling people train timetables.

But first a letter to the PAF board:

Dear Sir,

I have just had a call from a representative of QAS explaining that their PAF derived product is superior to the data obtainable directly from Royal Mail because theirs contains corrections and other formatting improvements.

This concerns me, as I would have assumed that the best data should be available from source, and that the resellers should be returning any errors they find back to the primary database, rather than casting assertions about the accuracy in order to drum up business.

Also, according to the “management of PAF Final report April 2007″ available at the Postcomm website,

7.31. Royal Mail should publish:
* its process for measuring PAF quality;
* PAF accuracy target;
* actual performance; and
* analysis of exceptions or failures against target and steps to be taken to ensure targets are met.

In order to clarify the situation about the accuracy for when I in future receive such calls from salesmen, can you please point me to where the above information is published?

Thank you

Ho hum. Email spammed again by the extremely well-funded Power2010 circus:

Dear Julian,

We’ve reached a major milestone. More than 25,000 votes have now been cast in our contest to choose the five reforms that will make up the POWER2010 Pledge.

Nick Riley, the person who last week cast the 25,000th vote, voted for a “None of the above” option on ballot papers. When Guy, our campaign blogger, asked Nick why he supported this idea, he said it’s the only way for him to register his “total dissatisfaction”.

“An abstention doesn’t seem to register with the political classes who seem quite satisfied when they have achieved, say, 30% of the vote on a 45% turnout! They then attribute the low turnout to apathy instead of the true cause, which is disgust!”

You’ve already voted, so I know that, like Nick, you want to change politics. Click here to vote for more ways that we can fix it.

25,000 votes is a major milestone, but we haven’t finished.

You can vote for as many issues as you like – and the more votes we receive, the more legitimacy we will have in the eyes of the political class when we take the POWER2010 Pledge to them before the general election.

So, for the sake of our democracy, please vote again:
http://www.power2010.org.uk/ourdemocracy

Thank you, and best wishes,

Pam Giddy
Director, POWER2010

What they’ve done is to take ideas for reforming the political system from thousands of people who don’t know how the current political system actually works, and then added up their votes on those ideas to provide a final list of reforms.

The reforms on the surface are pretty reasonable (for a set of reforms voted on by people who don’t know how the political system actually works), but they don’t get to the heart of the problem.

For example, Number 6 on the list is for a fully elected Second Chamber, which would be quite nice to have if you’re not concerned that it may be as bad as the fully elected First Chamber.

In this country people have got used to leaving all of politics entirely up to the parties to sort out, so it doesn’t exactly matter what the system is (proportional representation, appointed bodies, elected, income capped, whatever), because the parties will own it completely.

That’s where the trouble lies.

Until there is a mass understanding of how parties work, and a greater move for normal people to join their membership and influence their decision-making processes in order to determin the choices we have, nothing is going to change.

So it would have been nice if these emails went out with requests for people to upload leaflets they are receiving to thestraightchoice.org so we could all start to find out what is going on, because reform without understanding is just a shot in the dark

On the left is a page from the leaflet of Libdem Sandra Gidley of Romsey defending a wafer thin majority over the Tories. On the right is fellow MP Martin Tod attempting to inherit Winchester, the former seat of an embarrassing sex scandal

I’ve no issue with recycling leaflet templates in neighbouring constituencies. What is strange is the So-Duko numbers quiz that is of no infotainment value.

Why can’t we have an interesting cross-word with a political theme about your latest party policies?

Meanwhile, up in Edinburgh South Conservative candidate Neil Hudson is kind enough to include the solution to his so-duko in case you get stuck!

Minutes from an Executive Team meeting of the £25million/year Electoral Commission disclosed by Freedom of Information request (link) show that, when offered a range of five options for monitoring compliance with laws concerning political election leaflets, the board chose to pursue Option 3 known as “Enhanced desk-based research”, over Option 4 which involved any form of partnership with The Straight Choice website.

Chief Executive Peter Wardle was skeptical about the added value of a project where citizens scanned political leaflets live onto the internet to its compliance objectives, and was not sure that the benefits outweighed the risks.

Enhanced desk-based research involves hiring a maximum of four agency staff in April and allocating them to marginal high risk constituencies at the budgeted cost of £12,182 in addition to normal staff sitting at their desks and reading random political twitter feeds and other sites on the internet.

Julian Todd of The Straight Choice said, “These sniveling cheapskates in the Electoral Commission will probably spend part of their day at their desks scanning through our website for material they should have helped us collect in the first place.”

Obscure records show that the Electoral Commission has in the past stumped up £125,586 in a grant to encourage adults with learning disabilities to vote (link).

Although numerous laws apply to what can and cannot appear on political leaflets, the Electoral Commission’s statutory duty to monitor compliance only applies to referendum materials (link), while other bodies — such as the police — have the responsibility for the investigation and prosecution of allegations relating to election materials.

Notwithstanding this setback, The Straight Choice website will carry on with direct donations from Julian Todd and other volunteers who are able to see the point.

Julian hereby challenges Peter Wardle on his £120k salary plus pensions allowance, or anyone else from the gong-encrusted board of commissioners and deputy commissioners to match his substantial £3k cash donation so far, if they know what’s good for democracy.

Having done an awful lot of desk-work this morning, Julian can disclose that Wardle’s standard biography included in brochures for various shindigs attended (link), which contains the sentence “He has also worked on the first major outsourcing of government IT services” is probably referring to his time at the Inland Revenue in the 1990s(link) during the first in a long line of obscenely catastrophic IT outsourcing projects to the “world class player” formally known as EDS (link). No wonder he leaves that crucial detail out of his CV.

Monitoring of the procurements of the Electoral Commission should be undertaken for signs of the common Business Management graduate intuition of how to manage IT work in the public sector.

Still, it could be worse.

A lot, lot worse.

They could have spent the last 5 years trying to give us electronic voting.

Can you spot what’s funny about this leaflet?

That’s right, it’s paid for out of MPs’ expenses, as you can see from the obvious fine-print.

Therefore this is not an election leaflet, even though it contains lots of photos of the candidate incumbent MP cutting ribbons, kissing babies, and generally doing the sorts of things that working politicians need to do in order to get elected in these unenlightened days.

This is what a real election leaflet looks like:

Can you spot the qualitative difference? No? That’s because, unlike the self-appointed committee of MPs who oversee the rules, you are not an expert. The difference is that one goes on about how great the party is, while the other is published by and for the interests of the candidate sitting MP who is up for re-election.

The mandate for devising this Communications Allowance “to assist in the work of communicating with the public on parliamentary business” was given to the Members Estimate Committee by a vote on 1 November 2006.

Now, the Committee could have checked out the sterling work being done by the volunteer websites TheyWorkForYou.com, PublicWhip (my one), and WriteToThem when considering how to facilitate effective communication between Parliament and the public, but instead they simply granted a new £6.46million annual allowance (£10,000 per MP on top of the £7,000 postage allowance) — with predictable results.

The Communications Allowance was formally established by a vote on 28 March 2007.

One month later the three Plaid Cymru MPs had used their allowances to place full page ads in the local press outside their constituencies in which their party logos were “not proportionate and discreet” during the run-up to elections for the Welsh Assembly. After a forensic analysis of the rules that were not broken, the Committee on Standards and Privileges asked the three MPs to refund the value of their expenses claim.

That was it.

Other MPs who have been busted for breaching the woolly rules…

… include Malcolm Bruce MP who showed photos of himself with a fellow LibDem MSP during the Scottish Parliamentary elections (report here), Sadiq Khan MP who featured his Labour Party rose logo too big (report here), and David Tredinnick MP who printed 40,000 copies of a glossy 4-page leaflet featuring numerous photos of fellow local Conservative Party members standing for re-election ahead of the June 2009 elections, as well as a three year old photo of himself shaking hands with David Cameron (report here).

For his impropriety, Tredinnick was asked to repay £1,945, which was “half the cost of printing and distributing the newsletter”. In my opinion, proper democratic compensation would have been to donate £1,945 to the campaigns of each of the opposition candidates in his constituency for the up-coming General Election.

For the most recent news, I recommend checking out Mr Stephen Byers – Third Report of Session 2009-10 where the original complaint was thrown out by the Committee on a technicality (his endorsement of the mayor standing for re-election on the Labour ticket came outside the new 28-day-prior-to-the-election rule), but the Department of Resources found issues with other parts of the leaflet.

Mr Byers was not amused by the fact that the Commissioner had “widened his inquiry beyond those specific issues that had been complained of”, to which the Committee replied: “This is not the first time that a Member has challenged a Commissioner’s interpretation of his remit.”

The lesson is that the politicians are going to sail as close to the wind as they can on this one. There will be problems wherever you look. This allowance is too new to have been through a General Election cycle, so we are entering new territory.

The Department of Resources receives the expenses claims for printing these so-called communications leaflets, and will they give free advice to any MP who wants to know if they are considering printing something dodgy.

So why the heck don’t they also take the opportunity to demand an actual copy of every single leaflet they are funding with public money so we can have them all put up on-line to see?

In the meantime, we — the public — will have to muddle along with only TheStraightChoice.org website, and occasionally we’ll grumble about how all the money is going to the pointless picture-fest of a website on the left, and not to the one on the right that contains actual political content of — you know — whipped votes and stuff.

Hi folks. Things are getting moving again. The postcode problem seems to have sorted itself out, and we now have a partner in the form of:

Democracy Club

Democracy Club is also a self-funded volunteer-run project. Go there. Sign up. And do what you’re told to do. There will be many exciting crowd-sourcing actions in the run-up to the election — beyond simply uploading leaflets. We’re not going to forget all those politicians’ pre-election promises again. This time it will be different.

Meanwhile, our attempts at shaking down the some of our great national democracy-promoting institutions for a modicum of support and/or cash has drawn a blank.

Available resources appear to be reserved for more exciting projects than gathering actual data. For example, Power2010 has just published its list of ideas for reform that will be subject to a public vote between January and February.

You’re going to hear a lot about it as I suspect they have money to burn.

So, faced with the choice of either letting TheStraightChoice.org die due to a universal lack of vision by our moneyed elite institutions, here is a picture of me handing over a cheque for £3,000 of personal money to Richard Pope on the platform of Moorgate tube station.

In the event we need some more disk space for all the leaflets being uploaded as the election looms, I can always kick journalisted off my server where they have been living rent-free for the last couple of years, and have completely failed to piss-off a single journalist in all that time. What a waste. “If it’s not hurting, it’s not working,” as John Major used to say.

Oh, and one last point, now we’re back. There are a number of laws governing election leaflets. If you’re as curious as I am about what plans the Electoral Commission has for monitoring compliance with these laws, the answer should be available here by 21 January 2010.

Cheerio.

The United Kingdom has an extremely valuable social resource in the form of the Postcode Address File that could — if handled properly — make this country the world class leader in geo-referencing innovation.

I call it a social resource, because the postcodes are something which everybody who lives in a flat or house anywhere in the country knows by heart. It’s part of our national heritage, like the national parks or the M25.

The fact that computers — with the right data — can convert from this code to a reasonably accurate Latitute-Longitude global position has major implications for what people with big ideas and very little budget can achieve.

Historically, that’s where inventions in IT come from. TheStraightChoice.org, for example, wasn’t invented by one of the political parties, or a newspaper, or one of the well-funded think tanks, or by a university professor with a research grant.

It was made by a couple of guys who don’t have £4000 to throw at the Royal Mail to satisfy their bean counters.

If there was culture of actually giving out enabling institutional grants to projects such as TheStraightChoice.org, or PublicWhip, or PlanningAlerts.com, or OpenStreetMap (and quite a few others), then maybe we wouldn’t feel so hard done by when faced with these otherwise prohibitive charges.

We don’t need a fraction of the money that is routinely given out for public works of art. And these web-projects, free and open as they are, are undeniably part of the public good.

But there are no available grants whatsoever for these types of projects. So there is no money to spend on buying back essential information from quasi public institutions that have been subject to substantial tax-payer bail-outs. They don’t even consider licensing the data for non-commercial use.

In light of this, the good people of earnestmarples.com provided system for enabling free access to the postcode -> latitude/longitude location numbers essential for the smooth running of TheStraightChoice.org and other worthy unfunded projects.

But today they got their very own threatening letter from the lawyers to take it down, which means that all the other services which depend on it have also effectively been taken down.

I am personally not party to the Plan B at the moment. (Maybe there isn’t one.) If anyone out there has £3,850 spare to buy a legitimate copy of the Royal Mail Postcode Address File, please get in contact as we have no way of raising this from the operation of the not-for-profit site.

For email updates when we get things working again, please sign up to DemocracyClub.org.uk