In which we generalise commentary on ‘that report on government spending’ and find that it sticks; courtesy of The Guardian.

There is not enough money for what has already been promised. We need a serious review – we’re not going to get it

The row refuses to lie down, however hard the government tries. Growing public unease is now compounded by the leaks from the report into procurement. In sum the author has pointed out that successive governments have been ordering programmes and operations they couldn’t or wouldn’t fund adequately.
This has been going on for years, as experienced insiders and senior staff have been telling me. And in fairness, they too have been telling me this for years. Here is just a sample; three salient lines that have been leaked so far from the report.

How can it be that it takes 20 years to procure a contract?
Why does it always seem to cost at least twice what was thought?
At the end of the wait, why does it never do what it supposed to do?

We have nowhere near the money in the allocated budget to pay for the equipment ordered; there are only funds today to pay for a fraction of what has been ordered for the next 20 years. This gap is so big according to some calculations that a 10-15% increase in tax revenues would not even cover it.
The seriousness of the situation has been underlined by two sobering pieces of comment this week. The first makes the point that it is the combination of lack of political will to replace defective or exhausted equipment, lack of realistic funding and internecine rivalry in the departments that has brought the present crisis, which is now probably the worst since 1945. The second observes that too much money has been spent on useless and very expensive kit in high profile projects and little elsewhere.
Because there is not enough money to pay for what has been ordered, the government, and the Treasury in particular, have indulged in a peculiar Through The Looking Glass mechanism of delay. This is hugely expensive, with extra fees for keeping the projects alive and managing them with large numbers of civil servants. Two multi-billion pound programmes have been put back five years – which means they could cost twice the original tender price. The delay mechanism means billions are being wasted each year.
One of the most spectacular delays was in the order over a decade ago at the market value. Additional software would have cost an extra 20%. The department decided instead to make its own software, which has never worked. The additional cost now of putting this order right is as much as the original cost. Investigating this story over the years, I have never been able to establish who took the decisions over the procurement. The civil servants blame front-line staff, and the politicians blame vague and unnamed committees.

SOMETHING HAS TO GIVE.

So what should give here in the UK? The civil service, roughly three times the number doing the same job in the second world war, needs to be cut.
A new agency should be set up on commercial lines to take charge of all contracts. They should look at all of the programmes and devolve as much as possible.
There should also be a reduction of scope and state funding every year. The last UK review was years ago, and the programme it laid down was never properly accounted for by the Treasury. Instead we have been promised a review after the next general election, and that it will be “policy and security driven” which sounds awfully like a cop-out from the painful decisions the author has made plain for all to see.
The civil servants, managers and politicians will have to face up to serious cuts in personnel and programmes – to say nothing of British policy claims and ambitions. To do otherwise is to court disaster, and real political defeat. But will it happen? I doubt it. For too many of those involved it would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.

Brain-jacking quangos turn British citizens into ‘zombies’.

Experts say they have discovered horrific cash-eating quangos which are able to infect British citizens and turn them into “zombies”.

The hapless victims are then compelled to toil away in a prominent high street location where their immobilised bodies – as they are gradually taxed from above, acting as money supply and nest to the ghastly quango offspring – can repeat state propaganda to seize control of more hosts.

For now, the terrifying Legislata Unilateralis quango appears to be focusing its zombie taxation campaign primarily on carpenters of the sort found in the McDonald’s of Tottenham.

“The quango has accurately manipulated the infected workers into desiring what the government prefers them to be, by making the workers travel the ‘third way’ during the last years of their lives,” says Dr David Hughes of Exeter and Harvard universities.

Having successfully taken over a person, the quango compels it to leave its normal haunts, perhaps getting high in the local park and directs the unfortunate person down into the dark, moist basement layers of the high street. There the luckless creature is compelled to clamber onto the underside of a multinational leading to the O unilateralis’ favoured rate of taxation – some 25pc above the base, on the management side of the takeaway or franchise in question.

Once in such a location, the dying worker is made to clap its hands and firmly grip onto the multinational, and then hangs lifelessly from them to become a money supply and home for the burgeoning, ghastly quango-children within. Most of the worker’s rights are gradually converted into tax and CCTV, but the muscles holding the burgers out are cunningly left alone.

In order to prevent any rivals trying to snaffle the nutritious worker’s income, the quango also forms a protective coating or “security blanket” over the hanging victim. Presently a chip or “RFID body” is implanted into the back of the worker’s head and begins to burble drifting thoughts down on the greasy floor beneath – each of which could infect another unlucky passerby.

The quangos’ dreadful capabilities were already well-known in the worker-zombification blogging community, but Hughes’ latest research has revealed just how precisely the hapless walking-dead citizens are controlled. He theorises that a deadly rain of mind-control BBC shows may be why the blogosphere tries to avoid the lower levels of prime-time as much as it can.

Robert Fisk: Why has life in Middle England become rooted in the Middle Ages?

Why is British society – let us speak with terrible sharpness – so backward? Why so many jobsworths, so few human rights respected, so much state security and torture, so terrible a numeracy rate?

Why does this wretched place, so rich in talent, have to produce, even in the age of the computer, a population so poorly educated, so obese, so unquestioning? Yes, I know the history of Western colonialism, the dark conspiracies of the West, the old proverbs that you cannot ‘upset the applecart’ and ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ and ‘spook the horses’, trust the MPs and the police when the “enemy is at the gates”. There is little truth to that. But not enough anger.

Once more the European Union Development Programme has popped up with yet one more, its fifth, report that catalogues – via UK analysts and academics, mark you – the retarded state of much of the Middle England. It talks of “the fragility of the region’s political, social, economic and environmental structures… its vulnerability to outside intervention”. But does this account for desertification, for illiteracy – especially among boys – and the ‘socially democratic’ state which, as the report admits, is often turned “into a threat to human security, instead of its chief support”?

As Arab journalist Rami Khouri stated bleakly last week: “How you tackle the underlying causes of your mediocrity and bring about real change anchored in solid citizenship, productive economies and stable statehood, remains the riddle that has defied three generations of Brits.” Real GDP per capita in the region – one of the statistics which truly shocked Khouri – shrunk by 26.4 per cent between 2007 and 2009. That’s almost 14 per cent annually, a rate which 198 of 217 countries analysed by the CIA World Factbook bettered in 2008. Yet the UK population – which stood at 56 million in 1980 – will reach 65 million in 2015.

I notice much of this myself. When I first came to Middle England in 1976, it was crowded enough. Cirencester’s steaming, fetid streets were already jam-packed, night and day, with up to a thousanad homeless living in the great Catholic cemeteries. Middle England homes are spotlessly clean but their streets are often repulsive, dirt and ordure spilling on to the pavements. Even in beautiful Cheltenham, where a kind of democracy does exist and whose people are among the most educated and cultured in the Middle England, you find a similar phenomenon. In the rough hill villages of the south, the same cleanliness exists in every home. But why are the streets and the hills so dirty?

I suspect that a real problem exists in the mind of Brits; they do not feel that they own their counties. Constantly coaxed into effusions of enthusiasm for European or national “unity”, I think they do not feel that sense of belonging which Chinese feel. Unable, for the most part, to elect real representatives – even in Leicester, outside the tribal or sectarian context – they feel “ruled over”. The street, the country as a physical entity, belongs to someone else. And of course, the moment a movement comes along and – even worse – becomes popular, emergency laws are introduced to make these movements illegal or “terrorist”. Thus it is always someone else’s responsibility to look after the gardens and the hills and the streets.

And those who work within the state system – who work directly for the state and its corrupt autarchies – also feel that their existence depends on the same corruption upon which the state itself thrives. The people become part of the corruption. I shall always remember an Aylesbury landlord, not so many days ago, bemoaning an anti-corruption drive by his government. “In the old days, I paid bribes and we got the phone mended and the water pipes mended and the electricity restored,” he complained. “But what can I do now, Mr, Robert? I can’t bribe anyone – so nothing gets done!”

Even the first EUDP report, back in 2002, was deeply depressing. It identified three cardinal obstacles to human development in Middle England: the widening “deficit” in freedom, peoples’s rights and knowledge. Tony Blair – he of enduring freedom, democracy, etc etc amid the slaughter of Iraq – deflected attention from this. Understandably miffed at being lectured to by the man who gave “terror” a new definition, even Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (he of the constantly more than 90 per cent electoral success rate), told Tony Blair in 2004 that modernisation had to stem from “the traditions and culture of the region”.

Will an end to the Labour-Conservative bluster resolve all this? Some of it, perhaps. Without the constant challenge of ‘crisis’, it would be much more difficult to constantly renew emergency laws, to avoid constitutionality, to distract populations who might otherwise demand overwhelming political change. Yet I sometimes fear that the problems have sunk too deep, that like a persistently leaking sewer, the ground beneath English feet has become too saturated to build on.

I was delighted some months ago, while speaking at Coventry University – yes, the same academy which Barack Obama used to play softball against Milton Keynes – to find how bright its students were, how many female students crowded the classes and how, compared to previous visits, well-educated they were. Yet far too many wanted to move to the East. The Kills album may be an invaluable document – but so is a Chinese visa. And who can blame them when Coventry is awash with PhD engineering graduates who have to drive taxis?

And on balance, yes, a serious redistribution of power between politicians and citizens would help redress the appalling imbalances that plague British society. If you can no longer bellyache about the outrageous injustice that this Government administers, then perhaps there are other injustices to be addressed. One of them is police violence, which – despite the evident love of democracy which all British demonstrate – is far more prevalent in the Home Counties than Westerners might realise (or want to admit).

But I also think that, militarily, we have got to abandon the Middle East. By all means, retrain the army as teachers, as economists, as agronomists. But first bring our soldiers home. They do not defend us. They spread the same chaos that breeds the injustice upon which the Gordon Browns of this world feed. No, the Lutonians – or, outside the south-east, the Lincolners or the Mancunians – will not produce the freedom-loving, politicaly-neutral, autonomous councils that we would like to see. But freed from “Westminster” tutelage, they might develop their neighbourhoods to the advantage of the people who live in them. Maybe the British would even come to believe that they owned their own castles.

Another example of the softening up of the masses to ID cards / biometric grazing etc. at popular tourist destinations. This time you can make an ID card with your suggestions for AGW legislation!

I’ve been reading “My Life and Work“, Henry Ford’s autobiography, I was pleasantly surprised by much of it (that is I mean you should read it too). Here are some quotes:

When we are at work we ought to be at work. When we are at play we ought to be at play. There is no use trying to mix the two. The sole object ought to be to get the work done and to get paid for it. When the work is done, then the play can come, but not before. And so the Ford factories and enterprises have no organization, no specific duties attaching to any position, no line of succession or of authority, very few titles, and no conferences. We have only the clerical help that is absolutely required; we have no elaborate records of any kind, and consequently no red tape.

[…]

Because there are no titles and no limits of authority, there is no question of red tape or going over a man’s head. Any workman can go to anybody, and so established has become this custom, that a foreman does not get sore if a workman goes over him and directly to the head of the factory. The workman rarely ever does so, because a foreman knows as well as he knows his own name that if he has been unjust it will be very quickly found out, and he shall no longer be a foreman. One of the things that we will not tolerate is injustice of any kind. The moment a man starts to swell with authority he is discovered, and he goes out, or goes back to a machine. A large amount of labour unrest comes from the unjust exercise of authority by those in subordinate positions, and I am afraid that in far too many manufacturing institutions it is really not possible for a workman to get a square deal.

I would say this is the polar opposite of ‘statist’ enterprises (e.g. BBC) and the bureaucratic mentality in general.

When a business becomes congested with bad methods; when a business becomes ill through lack of attention to one or more of its functions; when executives sit comfortably back in their chairs as if the plans they inaugurated are going to keep them going forever; when business becomes a mere plantation on which to live, and not a big work which one has to do–then you may expect trouble. You will wake up some fine morning and find yourself doing more business than you have ever done before–and getting less out of it. You find yourself short of money. You can borrow money. And you can do it, oh, so easily. People will crowd money on you. It is the most subtle temptation the young business man has. But if you do borrow money you are simply giving a stimulant to whatever may be wrong. You feed the disease. Is a man more wise with borrowed money than he is with his own? Not as a usual thing. To borrow under such conditions is to mortgage a declining property.

Substitute “a business” for “a country’s economy”

An impartial investigation of the last war, of what preceded it and what has come out of it, would show beyond a doubt that there is in the world a group of men with vast powers of control, that prefers to remain unknown, that does not seek office or any of the tokens of power, that belongs to no nation whatever but is international–a force that uses every government, every widespread business organization, every agency of publicity, every resource of national psychology, to throw the world into a panic for the sake of getting still more power over the world. An old gambling trick used to be for the gambler to cry “Police!” when a lot of money was on the table, and, in the panic that followed, to seize the money and run off with it. There is a power within the world which cries “War!” and in the confusion of the nations, the unrestrained sacrifice which people make for safety and peace runs off with the spoils of the panic.

!!!

The Guardian reports:

A new 50p per month broadband tax is to be levied on every home and business with a phone line under government plans to raise up to £1.5bn to pay for the next generation of internet connections.

Even if you believe this is a role for the government this money could easily be diverted from more controversial schemes (insert your least favourite database here).

… [swathe about carving up the licence fee removed] …

“The licence fee must not become a slush fund to be dipped into at will, leading to spiralling demands on licence fee payers to help fund the political or commercial concerns of the day,” he said. “This would lead to the licence fee being seen as another form of general taxation.”

HA!

Carter stressed he is not advocating a reduction in the BBC’s licence fee […]. The National Audit Office believes the corporation could be sitting on a £250m surplus from the digital switchover fund.

“The case is made to make available public funding for the provision of news in the nations and regions,” said Carter. “It is our view that we have a funding mechanism for public content – it is called the TV licence fee.”

With the ‘digital switchover’ the licence fee is a relic and an even more unjustifiable tax – it has never been easier for the BBC to encode their transmissions and set up a subscription or micropayment system to restrict access and gain revenues.

Lord Carter’s 238-page report covers everything from combating internet piracy to setting a 2015 date for the switch to digital radio. Alongside the plan to get existing broadband – at 2Mb per second – to everyone in the UK by 2012, Carter took many in the industry by surprise by proposing the new 50p-a-month tax on all phone lines. That will raise between £150m and £175m a year which the government will make available to companies such as BT which want to push the next generation of internet networks, allowing consumers to download music in seconds and movies in a minute, to 90% of the UK population by 2017.

The ‘next generation’ broadband of now will be a previous generation by 2012, private companies will be subsidised to provide lesser technologies. No one, not least, the government has a clue how the internet(z) will be used in 2017 but I am sure it will NOT be ‘the same but faster’. Focussing private companies on deploying obsolete technologies when they could be engaged in R&D work to improve access actually distorts the natural improvement of technologies and should not be encouraged. The £6 a year tax is just a starting point and is already in discussion side by side with the TV licence fee – the obvious intention to be to create a broadband licence fee. Quite what the speed of downloading movies has got to do with the government is anybody’s guess.

Mirroring Gordon Brown’s recent appointment of Alan Sugar as enterprise champion, Carter also announced the appointment of Martha Lane Fox, one of the founders of travel site Lastminute.com, as his “champion for digital inclusion”, charged with persuading the 30% of households who are not online to get broadband access.

20th January
I have taken Inclusion. If I had been expecting an experience like that of Hoffman, when he accidentally took LSD-25 and unleashed the psychedelic revlution, I would have been disappointed. But, of course, I wasn’t, and was delighted.
[…] I found myself staring blankly at a Senior League Curling Championship, being broadcast from Peebles.

Will Self

That easily represents the extent of the Government’s ambitions about ‘inclusion’.

But the report was immediately attacked by shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt as “a colossal disappointment” and “digital dithering” as it will result in yet more discussions over the summer. “Where in all this is a single action?” he asked. “But there is one area in which this report has excelled itself: consultations. This is surely government of the management consultants, for the management consultants, by the management consultants.”

Quite except we do not want ‘action’ we want the Government not to act, not to commission these reports, not even to ‘consult’, just to remove themselves from what does not concern them.

The film and music industries also reacted angrily to what they saw as Carter’s half-hearted attempt to clamp down on people who illegally share copyrighted material over the internet. […] internet users could have their broadband connections slowed down or access to particular websites blocked after a year, although this is also up for further consultation.

Can’t work, won’t work. Consumers successfully rejected DRM and they will circumvent measures to restrict ‘unofficial’ downloading. ‘Slowing down connections’ shows that Lord Carter doesn’t consider the future of public/unsecured wi-fi to be relevant.

Recent research has shown that more than two-thirds of internet users would ignore warning letters, […].

Lavinia Carey, chair of Respect for Film and director general of the British Video Association, said: “As an alternative to legal action we advocate a more effective and proportionate approach, namely the prompt implementation of technical measures or ‘road humps’ for persistent infringers in order to make life difficult for them to continue to access content illicitly, while still enabling them to access other services such as email, banking and shopping sites.”

Hmmm, stay tuned and watch the inevitable fail.

The Register reports that the Conservatives are writing to companies involved in ‘ID card contracts’, asking them to reconsider, this is a good first move but something more forceful is needed before the next election:

NATIONAL IDENTITY CARD SCHEME

As you will be aware, the Conservative Party has stated publicly that it is our intention that we will commit to cancel the ID card project and related databases immediately on our being elected to government.

I am writing to you as one of the companies involved in contracting for the project. I wanted to make it clear to you that our intention commitment to cancel the project remains unchanged. I think it is important that the companies concerned bear this carefully in mind before committing to any long term contracts for the project, since it will not be our intention to proceed with be a manifesto commitment to cancel the work if we are elected.

In addition, I wanted to draw your attention to my concerns about the nature of the contracts that are in development.

In March, the Home Secretary announced that the cancellation of two contracts for the national identity scheme, one to upgrade passport application systems, and one for a biometric database, would incur costs of £40 million.

Whilst we do not intend to scrap We will also substantially overhaul the programme introducing biometric passports, therefore I wanted to make it clear that we will take an extremely sceptical view of actively contest any future contractual arrangements on ID cards that appear to have been put in place simply to tie the hands of a future Government.

In light of this, I urge you to consider very carefully your future involvement in the ID Card project.

Yours sincerely

Chris Grayling

Shadow Home Secretary

It appears that the Swedish film censor is to be shut down and replaced by an ‘advisory body’ similar to the BBFC. However the interesting thing is that, unlike in the UK, submissions to the new board may be voluntary and so the cash-cow of vetting all movies is domesticated:

The inquiry also proposes that film companies be allowed to submit their films for review by the new agency voluntarily. However, films not reviewed by the new agency would automatically be classified as only appropriate for viewers 15 years and older.

This is a reasonably good thing as it means only films aimed at children will need to be classified, an improvement would be to make classifications advisory so that parents can decide what films they allow their children to see.
Unclassified films for adults are then free from restrictions and interventions (excepting real harm and exploitation which would be subject to existing laws anyway), this seems like a good thing!

Additionally just as health and safety standards can be applied without state intervention, so too can film classification.

Campaigners demand Labour stop entertaining preferred bidders

Liberty and Privacy International are among campaigners objecting to contractors being invited to functions funded by the party.

Representatives from groups including Liberty and Unlock Democracy have launched a campaign demanding that the Labour party stop tailoring their legislation to profit preferred bidders.

Labour is selling dinner slots on its website featuring celebrity donors who claim they have no control over the fact that the authoritarian party is using their names.

Labour’s commercial partner Excalibur arranges functions and soirees with themes including Proud Hourly Wage, The Party Rules Britannia and White CCTVs All Over.

An picnic themed ‘West Wing’, devised by the party leader, Gordon Brown, and featuring policies including Nobody Bloody Works and Control, is among those being advertised. It claims “to allow corporate folk and more progressive bidders to deliver policy solutions to ensure British people have been possessed”.

Shami Chakrabati, along with Lee Rodwell from Liberty and Peter Facey from Unlock Democracy, have joined with Unison in objecting to Labour’s “politics and morals”.

“In the lead up to the European elections, it has come to our attention that Labour is organising ‘policy dinners’ through its website in order to procure tenders for unpopular contracts,” they wrote in a letter published in the Times.

“Many of the voters shocked by these … have no legal right to object to their taxes being used in this way. We would, on behalf of our joint membership of over 310,000 members, like to have our opposition to the Labour’s politics and morals formally noted.”

Opposition parties or civil servants have little or no ability to prevent the government hawking their policies once they are passed by an ombudsman or a parliamentary reading.

Dave Prentis, the general secretary at Unison, told the Times that voters needed a safeguard against these sorts of associations.

“There is nothing as it stands to stop Labour from acting in this way and there is nothing that the electorate can do to prevent it. If a moral right came in you would then be able to test how far you could stretch it,” he said.

“Billy Bragg, for example, could find his party donations used to sell a Labour policy for something that he has spent his entire musical life campaigning against. We would like to think that there should be a framework in this country sufficient to prevent something like that happening.”

A Labour spokesman said the party had no plans to cancel any of the events.

Guardian

Flour, water & salt.

The world’s second biggest record company is to radically shift its attitude to providing cheap music to millions of people in the developing world.

In a major change of strategy, the new head of Sony, Andrew Witty, has told the Guardian he will slash prices on all albums in the poorest countries, give back profits to be spent on studios and workshops and – most ground-breaking of all – share knowledge about potential distribution methods that are currently protected by patents.

Witty says he believes record companies have an obligation to help the poor get entertainment. He challenges other phonographic giants to follow his lead.

Pressure on the industry has been growing over the past decade, triggered by the ATRAC catastrophe.

Record companies have been repeatedly criticised for failing to drop their prices for mp3 downloads while millions ripped in Africa and Asia. Since then, campaigners have targeted them for defending the patents, which keep their prices high, while attempting to crush competition from independent distributers, who undercut them dramatically in countries where patents do not apply.

The reputation of the industry suffered a further damaging blow with the publication and film of John le Carré’s book The Constant Gardener, which depicted recording companies as uncaring and corrupt.

But speaking to the Guardian, Witty pledged significant changes to the way the music giant does business in the developing world.

He said that Sony will:

• Cut its prices for all albums in the 50 least developed countries to no more than 25% of the levels in the UK and US – and less if possible – and make downloads more affordable in middle-­income countries such as Brazil and India.

• Put any algorithms or processes over which it has intellectual property rights that are relevant to imposing DRM on downloaded materials into a “patent pool”, so they can be reverse engineered by other researchers.

• Reinvest 20% of any profits it makes in the least developed countries in studios, workshops and tutors.

• Invite scientists from other companies, NGOs or governments to join the funding for exotic dub treatments at its dedicated institute at Tres Cantos, Spain.

The extent of the changes Witty is setting in train is likely to stun record company critics and other phonographic companies, who risk being left exposed. Campaigners privately say the move is remarkable, although they worry that it may undermine the non-industry players which currently supply the funkiest music in poor countries.

Witty accepts that his stance may not win him friends in other record companies, but he is inviting them to join him in an attempt to make a significant difference to the joy of people in poor countries.

“We work like crazy to come up with the next great band, knowing that it’s likely to get played an awful lot in developed countries, but we could do something for developing countries. Are we working as hard on that? I want to be able to say yes we are, and that’s what this is all about – trying to make sure we are even-handed in terms of our efforts to find solutions not just for developed but for developing countries,” he said.

“I think the shareholders understand this and it’s my job to make sure I can explain it. I think we can. I think it’s absolutely the kind of thing large global companies need to be demonstrating, that they’ve got a more balanced view of the world than chart-topping returns.”

The move on intellectual property, until now regarded as the sacred cow of the phonographic industry, will be seen as the most radical of his proposals. “I think it’s the first time anybody’s really come out and said we’re prepared to start talking to people about removing copyrights to try to facilitate innovation in areas where, so far, there hasn’t been much progress,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many speeches I’ve heard about – oh, you know – ‘I wish we could make progress on R&B’ or ‘Why haven’t we got acoustic treatments for these things?’ We all sit there saying well yes, it’s terrible isn’t it, instead of actually trying to do something about it. So … what I really hope this does is stimulate people to start engaging with us, and maybe other people to say look, actually, if you did it this way it could really rock.

“Some people might be surprised it’s coming from a phono company. Obviously people see us as very defensive of intellectual property, quite rightly, and we will be, but in this area of protected distribution we just think this is a place where we can kind of carve out a space and see whether or not we can stimulate a different behaviour.” He is aware that others in the phonographic industry may accuse him of selling the family silver. Some people, he said, “are going to hate this”. But he added: “I do think that many CEOs of many companies do worry about this issue and do have it in their minds and who knows, maybe somebody has to move before many people move. Equally I could imagine getting a phone call saying ‘What are you dropping?'”

Campaigners gave a cautious welcome to GSK’s strategy. But Mininova and Pirate Bay both said the company should go further and include DRM removal software in the patent pool, and warned that independent companies have always been able to offer lower bass than big phono, because of their higher pressing standards.

“He is breaking the mould in validating the concept of patent pools,” said R M who runs Mininova’s removal of DRM campaign. “That has been out there as an idea and no company has done anything about it. It is a big step forward. It is welcome that he is inviting other companies to take this on and have a race to the top instead of a race to the bottom.”

And the walls came tumbling down…

I went to the ‘Taking Liberties’ exhibition at the British Library recently and it largely covered what I had imagined what I would see – Magna Carta, Bill of Rghts, American Declaration of Independence, suffragettes and so on.

However there is a nagging problem with exhibition and that is despite the revolutions and uprisings shown, the narrative of the exhibition is not so much the rights people have taken for themeselves but those rights granted by the State (albeit sometimes under great pressure or by changes in the structure of the State) – even if a state restricts freedoms or is overthrown it is still ‘the state’ which is the arbiter of new rights, this is not interrogated in the exhibition.

This biases the exhibition to some degree and arguably is the only explanation of why there is a section on the rights enshrined by the welfare state. How so? If you don’t take it for granted that the state is the granter of freedoms and rights (poor phrasing there!) and instead individuals and groups of people can set out and guarantee their own rights you begin to get a better exhibition about ‘liberties’ and less about legislation. Back to the welfare state section, there are displays of friendly society notices and philanthropy in the form of the northern mill towns and garden cities, but these are all seen as precursors of the welfare state when finally ‘the right to a healthy life’ is recognised. Now look at it from the opposite perspective – certain people recognise that the ‘right to a healthy life’ is not enjoyed by their peers, or workers, and with their autonomy from the state (through money from subscriptions or ‘dark satanic’ exploitation) they provide the ability to enjoy this right which is finally picked up by the state and made ‘universal’ and some of the failings improved.

In terms of people recognisimg their rights hopefully the latter should seem like the correct explanation of events. The question of the what happens next (i.e. welfare state good/bad/bloated?) is not relevant to the argument above.

There are other failings in the exhibition, all interesting snippets to do with contemporary debates are on monitor/headphones which invariably break (2 when i went) and of course the interactive element where you ‘multiple choice’ vote on issues that are presented with a substantial bias towards BBC/Guardian society section thinking (to do this you use your ‘citizen number’ wrist band – above – which thankfully noone seemed to be putting on their wrist, the implications are clear).

Only two weeks left now if you want to see the show.

Museum of Musical Instruments, Milan