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Playing with an @IFTT recipe to send tweets to #google+ via Blogger. Let's see if it works... #plus

2013-09-10T10:53:00.001+01:00

via Twitter https://twitter.com/waggers5

We've moved!

2013-03-18T13:09:00.003+00:00

You can now find this blog at it's shiny new address: dave.wagweb.org.uk

Terrible adult maths - attrition rates in the NHS

2012-12-13T18:25:00.000+00:00

There's a great article on the BBC News website today stating that many adults' maths ability is worse than the level expected of 9-year-olds. I can certainly testify to that. And, in fact, I'm going to, right now.

If someone studies to become a nurse, allied health professional, dentist, etc. then their course fees are usually paid by the NHS. Naturally not everyone that starts a course finishes it, so something that's monitored carefully is the attrition rate for each course.

I used to work for one of the NHS organisations that commissioned education and monitored the activity on each of the courses we had paid for. Different regions used slightly different calculations for their attrition rates, which caused problems when you tried to look at attrition across the country as a whole (which I later did, when I moved onto a national NHS workforce organisation).

Of course everyone agreed that it would make sense to have one single attrition calculation across the country. Indeed the now defunct National Audit Office had commented on exactly this, and suggested a single definition to be used nationwide, which the Department of Health tried to get everyone to adopt. Some areas adopted it, but I'm pleased to say my area refused to (mainly on my own recommendation, if I may say so myself) - because yes indeed, this definition contained errors a 9-year-old would be ashamed of.

Let's get to the detail. Don't worry, none of this is at all hard to understand, but there are some definitions to get to grips with. Basically there are two ways you can join a course - you either start at the beginning (making you a starter), or you join it mid-way through, having already started a course that brings you up to the relevant level (making you a transfer in). Conversely there are two ways you can leave a cohort - by transferring out to another cohort or by discontinuing (due to academic failure, ill health or whatever).

If you start or transfer in to a course and don't transfer out or discontinue, then either you are still on the course or you have successfully completed it. In other words, the number of students on a course (if the course is still running) is the same as the number of successful completers (if the course has finished) and this is wholly dependent on the other variables:

N = s + t(in) - d - t(out)

With me so far? Great. So on to the NAO definition of attrition. Remember, these were proposed by the National Audit Office - the Government's chief maths-checkers - and were pushed hard by the Department of Health. There had been much discussion leading to this point, including recognising the importance of including transfers in the formula.

The NAO and DH published their attrition definition as two formulae, one for completed courses (with a reference to "numbers completing") and one for "cohorts not yet completed" with a reference to "numbers in training". But as we've already shown, these two things are the same, so really there was only one formula, and here it is:

Attrition = s + t(in) - t(out) - N

So far so good - it's a definition that looks straightforward, and, crucially, includes some mention of transfers in and out. Which is all very well until we remember that our numbers of completers / numbers on course (N) is in fact defined by some of these terms too. So the definition in fact is....

Attrition = s + t(in) - t(out) - (s + t(in) - d - t(out))

Oh. Can you see what's happening yet? Any decent nine-year-old mathematician would now collect like terms:

Attrition = s - s + t(in) - t(in) + t(out) - t(out) + d

Which of course means...

Attrition = d

Oops. So that definition is pretty rubbish after all. Thanks for nothing, National Audit Office.

The really annoying thing here is that we raised that issue with the Department of Health in 2003 and kept pushing it. We also explained it to the other NHS regions - some of whom agreed with us and used the definition we were using, and some of whom pressed on with the DoH definition. Eventually, once I was working for that national organisation several years later, we managed to persuade all the NHS education commissioners to adopt our recommended definition and drop the one above. It was still a year or two later that the DoH finally cottoned on, and even then it took a shouty email to a senior civil servant with the words "PLEASE READ THIS" splashed over the top for them to acknowledge that yes, actually, their proposed definition doesn't take account of transfers between courses and is therefore incorrect.

The BBC article begins with the words "A quarter of adults in some parts of England have maths skills below those of nine-year olds." Too right. I know where some of them work.

It's all gone quiet over there

2012-09-25T15:10:00.002+01:00

It's been a few weeks now since the Cabinet reshuffle at which Andrew Lansley lost his job as health secretary, to be replaced by Jeremy Hunt. The feeling inside the NHS was very much one of "out of the frying pan, into the fire" and this was pretty much confirmed a couple of days ago when Hunt lined up Christine Lineen to be one of his policy advisors.

But apart from that and a couple of hospital visits, Hunt has stayed quiet. It remains to be seen what impact he'll have on Lansley's plans for a complete top-down reorganisation of the NHS - the very thing the Coalition Agreement (and the Tories' pre-election pledges) promised would not happen.

It's worth pondering where it went wrong for Lansley. Was it that broken promise, going against the very fabric upon which the current government was built? Or was it his final throw of the dice - his plans to market the NHS abroad? Or perhaps it was his failure to communicate openly and honestly about what he was really planning to do - or maybe, on the other hand, he gave too much away.

That "marketing abroad" thing is a good example of the lack of joined up thinking on the NHS from the Tories. One thing it gets right is that the NHS is a brand, shared by lots of different organisations, not one big organisation. So it wasn't "the NHS" that Lansley suggested should be marketed abroad, but individual NHS trusts.

Now the key thing to remember here is that the NHS is, rightly or wrongly, a competitive marketplace. Just like in other businesses, NHS trusts work together in some areas and compete in others. And just like in other industries, NHS trusts will try to leverage any competitive advantage they can find to out-do their rivals. So it's vital that any new innovation applied to this marketplace is done so fairly and doesn't unfairly hand an advantage to some trusts while disadvantaging others.

This is where the NHS as a marketplace is already institutionally unfair. Because while informed healthcare commissioners will judge trusts based on their performance, many will simply opt for the big brand names. So no matter how hard other children's hospitals work, no matter how much they achieve, they'd never be able to match the Great Ormond Street brand, even if GOSH performed really really badly. This skewing of the marketplace is constantly reinforced by the likes of Lord Sugar and Piers Morgan constantly trumpeting GOSH and ignoring their hard-working competitors and other children's hospitals up and down the country who do just as good a job.

The big hospital brands are already the richest. They are not the ones that need help.

This is where Lansley's suggestion is typical of the Tories. It allows the rich to get richer and keeps the poor poor. Lansley was adamant that any money raised from the "marketing abroad" exercise would be ploughed back into the NHS. What he neglected to say very clearly was which parts of the NHS would receive that money: the answer is that the rich trusts that can afford to market themselves abroad would be allowed to keep the proceeds. The rest of the NHS would not gain a penny from the initiative.

One of the criticisms of Lansley's plan was that Labour had already announced something similar when they were in government. But the stark difference was that Andy Burnham's plan involved marketing the NHS as a whole, with the NHS as a whole reaping the benefits. Lansley's plan was simply yet another way of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Further unbalancing the NHS marketplace in such away offers no hope at all for lower profile trusts, no matter how well they perform.

The NHS was intended to be a single, united, national health service not a brand war battlefield. I sincerely hope Jeremy Hunt catches hold of that original vision and stops the pointless fragmentation and wasteful inter-hospital rivalry that his predecessor was so keen to exacerbate.

Getting blogging right

2012-08-23T12:21:00.002+01:00

Up until now this blog has been a bit of a hotchpotch. It started off as a way to share family news and experiences, before social networking sites really kicked off, and turned into a bit of a commentary on the news, anything I felt particularly fired up about at the time, and, occasionally, posts like this talking about the blog itself.

Dull and messy for most readers; unfocussed and therefore hard to maintain for me. It was a cross between an public, online journal and a random assortment of semi-interesting opinion pieces.

So I'm changing all that. I'm removing posts that really belong on private social networks and sticking to the newsy, opinion based stuff. And by knowing what it is that I'm intending to use this blog for, hopefully I'll be able to update it a bit more regularly.

Here's hoping.

Online photo managers

2011-12-29T15:01:00.003+00:00

The internet is a great place for sharing photos. At first, it was pretty terrible - the only way you could share photos with your friends online was to publish them for all to see. These days, though, there are more and more ways of selecting which photos you share with which groups of people. And of course those groups of people are spread all over the place - some on Twitter, some on Facebook, the sensible ones on Google+, and some elsewhere.

And then there are the photo managers; the best of breed pretty much has always been Google's Picasa, and now the advent of Google+ means some tidy Picasa integration. But as well as Picasa there's Flickr, probably the biggest photo sharing site around; but of course Flickr is pretty much just about photo sharing whereas social networks are about sharing much more - so photo sharing on Facebook is pretty big too.

So what's this post all about? The point is, we end up with different albums shared with different people on different platforms, and we want something tidier. As users we want a service that lets us see all our photos in one place, and to share them with the people we want to. A bonus would be to retain the information we've added to the photos - where and when the photos were taken, people we've tagged in them, captions and comments etc. Not surprisingly there's no service (yet) that can do all that for us - partly due to the limitations of the various APIs and partly because nobody's made them yet - but there are a few that are trying to come close. Below I'm going to explain what I've found, but first here's a list of what the ideal online photo manager should be able to do:

MUST: list photos and albums across various services in one place
MUST: allow copying of photos/albums from one service to another "web-side" (ie. without using any of the users' bandwidth to download photos from one service and re-upload them to another)
MUST: be completely free of charge
SHOULD: copy time and location information
IDEALLY WOULD: copy captions and lists of people tagged
IDEALLY WOULD: manage which circles/lists/users/friends/followers can see which photos/albums
SHOULD: allow easy merging of albums
IDEALLY WOULD: allow automatic synchronisation of albums across platforms

Showzey

Showzey is a relatively new kid on the block and promises much. It searches all of your Google, Facebook and Flickr photos and lists them nicely. It lists albums and, yes, lets you copy an entire album from Picasa to Facebook or vice versa. Another key plus point is you don't need any new username or password - simply authenticate via your existing Google, Facebook or Yahoo account.

On the downside, it's excruciatingly slow. I have over 15 pages of albums and navigating between pages on Showzey is an ordeal. Shifting photos around between services requires oodles of bandwidth, memory and processing power and it's apparent that Showzey's infrastructure isn't quite up to the task.

Pictarine

This site has a slightly nicer look and feel than Showzey but does require a separate user account to be created, along with yet another user name and password to remember. Considering the whole point is to link other services together, and the first thing you do when you've created an account is to authenticate with those other services, it's a tad surprising that Pictarine hasn't gone the way of Showzey and used that authentication instead of requiring users to input separate credentials just for Pictarine.

Pictarine covers a much wider range of services than Showzey - but seems to suffer from the same performance issues: loading a list of albums takes ages. In fact, performance is so bad that I haven't yet managed to load my Pictarine homepage after signing up and authenticating with Facebook and Picasa. Sbo I can't really report on how good or bad its features are beyond that point; suffice to say if it takes over an hour to load a list of albums it's not really a usable service. Which is a shame, because there are some favourable reviews of Pictarine out there.

Mobypicture

This site sounds promising - "share your photos, videos and audio with your friends on your favourite social sites" - but since the very well established Picasa is not supported - and, therefore, neither is the fastest growing social network in the world, Google+ - this isn't really worth a look. I only discovered Mobypicture though through Pictarine. If Pictarine can't share directly with Facebook, but Mobypicture can and Pictarine can share directly with Mobypicture - then perhaps there's some mileage. But as I write I'm still waiting for Pictarine to load my list of albums, and I won't be going anywhere near Mobypicture until I'm satisfied that it has a robust link with Picasa - either directly or through a reliable third party.

Facebook & Google+

Of course there's no real reason why we should have to rely on third party applications, as it's within the means of both companies to make their own photo handling better. But since these are rivals it's very unlikely that either would see fit to put the wishes of their users first; Facebook are unlikely to put a "share album to Picasa/Flickr/whatever" button on their photo pages of their own accord, and neither are Google+ likely to add a native "Share to Facebook" button in their Google+ or Picasa album views. Which is shooting themselves in the foot slightly, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, whichever service were to offer that function first would most likely become my primary online photo management service. If Facebook want me to spend more time on their site, they need to allow me to manage my content on other sites through their site. The same goes for Google and, indeed, anyone else.

Secondly, both companies claim that they value the notion of putting users in control of their own data, and make it easier to share whatever we want with whomever we want. If they're serious about that, they should acknowledge that some of those "whomevers" don't use their services, and that their users will still want to share with them - which means being able to throw stuff at other services from within their own.

But it's not just sharing that's problematic. There are some pretty basic requirements that neither site meets; the ability to merge two or more albums together at album level, not at photo level, is something that's frustrated me on both sites in recent days. The ability to automatically identify and remove duplicate photos in an album (preferably merging comments/tags if appropriate) is technically more difficult but far from impossible, and would be a very useful feature for users.

Conclusion

Well, I signed up for Pictarine just before starting writing this blog entry and it's been trying to load my list of albums since then and still hasn't succeeded. So the best of the services that are available at the moment definitely seems to be Showzey. But the reality is that there's a substantial gap in the market for a decent online photo manager. It's a gap that could be filled by one of the big players themselves (Google, Facebook or Yahoo [Flickr]) quite easily, or a nice niche for a startup to come along and fill. It's clearly not the easiest nut to crack - lots of issues with APIs and and setting up servers that are able to cope with large volumes of images being punted backwards and forwards - but nobody said these things were easy. They are, though, sorely needed.

Update
Not surprisingly, as soon as I published this blog post I came across another one which lists the services mentioned above plus several others:
http://www.mysensetechnology.com/2011/11/group-albums-and-photos-from-facebook.html

I've started using Fotolink (the last one mentioned in that post) and am very impressed so far!

Privacy is about security, not shame

2011-10-06T13:26:00.000+01:00

A very silly article was posted on the BBC website yesterday. Cindy Gallop is identified by the Beeb as "an advertising consultant and commentator on cultural issues" (well, that makes all of us, surely). In her article she suggests that instead of trying to compartmentalise our lives and only share certain information with certain people, we should just not worry and make everything public, and instead concentrate on our image. Worries about privacy on social networks are unfounded, she implies.

By managing our image, she means that we should be consistent in our behaviour and not be one thing to one person and something else to someone else. If you don't want your boss to see photos of you as an idiot drunkard puking your guts out in the city centre, then don't be an idiot drunkard puking your guts out in the city centre. Just don't do stuff you'll be ashamed for other people to see.

Well, that's a sound argument; it's not one I disagree with. But it completely misses the point.

I'm not ashamed of what I do or of who I am. If I take my family on holiday for a couple of weeks, that's not something I hide from the world because I'm ashamed of it. But if I plaster the fact that my house is going to be empty for a fortnight all over the internet, that's a massive security risk.

My date of birth and mother's maiden name are nothing to be ashamed of. Sharing them could turn out to be pretty useful - more birthday greetings perhaps, and maybe a friendly genealogist might trace my family tree for me. But publicising information banks use to reset online accounts is never a wise move.

I agree with Cindy that it's silly to pretend you're something you're not, that telling lies is a bad thing, and being open, honest and transparent is good. But to pretend that privacy of information doesn't matter, that it's ok to share everything about you, that worries about what Facebook might do with your information are unfounded - well, that's just daft. It's embarrassing.

It's something to be ashamed of.

How to update Twitter from Google+ (without browser extensions)

2011-07-15T20:13:00.002+01:00

Update: The plusfeed.appspot.com feed no longer works, so this method no longer works either! Still, this article may be useful for future reference...

You may have come across this article from Justin Bee, which explains how to update Facebook directly from Google+ without the need for any browser extensions. Justin's approach uses email to send a message from Google+ to Facebook. Justin's article mentions that there may be similar ways to update Twitter, but they would rely on third party services that the author wasn't too sure about. Justin also mentions a significant downside to his method -it relies on the message being in the subject of the email, which Google+ truncates after 50 characters.

So I've taken a slightly different approach - although mine does rely on third party services, and actually doesn't result in a real-time update, but at least has a longer character limit. It also has the advantage of not needing to do anything extra in Google+ - all of your public posts are turned into tweets automagically.

It works in two steps. First, grab an Atom feed of your Google+ public posts; and second, publish that feed to Twitter. Here's the method, step-by-step:

In Google+, go to your profile.
The URL will be https://plus.google.com/[your Google+ ID number]/posts. Copy your Google+ ID number to your clipboard.
There are several RSS/Atom feed-to-Twitter applications available; I use one of the most popular and easiest to use, Twitterfeed. You can log into it via OpenID, i.e. using your Google or Twitter account, so you don't have to remember a new password. So, log into Twitterfeed (or an alternative of your choice)
Create a new feed, selecting the options of your choice, but using the following as your feed URL: http://plusfeed.appspot.com/[your Google+ ID number]
Select the minimum refresh period (currently 30 minutes) and post up to the maximum number of posts at a time (currently 5).

Job done! Now Twitterfeed will check your Google+ public feed for new posts every half an hour and post those to Twitter.

Google+ and Facebook compared

2011-07-12T21:44:00.004+01:00

Google+ is Google's latest attempt at breaking into social networking. They've had several ill-fated attempts before, (Orkut and Google Buzz are the ones you'll hear people talking about) but it seems that they've really achieved something with Google+. But of course most social networkers are already on Facebook, and it will take something special to lure many of them away. So how do the two compare?

Facebook is well established, and has lots of nifty features as well as many annoying ones. Google+ is the new kid on the block - it's features are fewer, but what they do is a bit better. I'm sure there will be many people offering their own comparisons of the two, but you're here now so here's mine.

Organising friends

The Circles feature of Google+ has been a big talking point among those who talk about such things. It's a great, intuitive way of categorising the people you're connected to through Google+. One of the big selling points that Google+ are keen to trumpet is how easy it is to share things with some circles and not others, so you can limit family stuff to your family, work related stuff to your work colleagues, and so on. And it's true, Google+'s circles are great - to a certain extent.

On the other hand, you can already do this with Facebook. It's not as easy and intuitive as circles in Google+, but it's there and it does work. And, actually, the Facebook user interface for managing your friend lists (as they're called in Facebookland) isn't too bad. Google+ Circles is certainly nicer, with it's drag-and-drop interface compared to Facebook's dropdown menus - but once I've categorised someone I'm unlikely to keep moving them around different categories. There is one aspect to this where Facebook actually has the advantage - because Google+'s circles are big and bulky on the screen you can only see 5 at a time, and have to scroll to see more, whereas Facebook goes with a much simpler list, allowing me to see all my friend lists at once.

Verdict: it's a draw. One point each. Facebook 1-1 Google+.

Organising feeds

This is where Google+ makes some serious headway. In Facebook, no matter what friend lists your friends are in, their updates appear in one single news feed. You can choose to hide certain friends' updates from your news feed, but you can't view a news feed of all your old mates from school separately from your current mates from work. With Google+ circles, you can do exactly that; each circle has it's own feed (called a stream in Google+), so as well as your overarching everyone-you-know stream you can filter it according to the circles you've created.

Facebook, quite simply, doesn't do this. So that's two points to Google+. Facebook 1-3 Google+.

Groups and hangouts

What Facebook does offer, though, is it's groups feature. Facebook has old-style groups and new-style groups; the old-style ones are gradually being transitioned to the new-style ones, or archived (amid much controversy). You can't see the status and other stuff that's shared by other people in a Facebook group, but you can see things member share specifically with that group. It also allows you to chat as a group using Facebooks inbuilt chat feature. It also gives you a group email address, so that emails sent to that address appear on the group in Facebook (a bit like Google Groups, which is currently completely separate from Google+).

Google+'s hangouts, however, threaten to eclipse Facebook's groups completely, because they're about sharing in a group chat involving actual chat, using voices and webcams so you can see one another an interact. It lets you view stuff together - a frequently used example is the ability to watch a video from YouTube together, at the same time, and comment on it. Of course this could equally be extended to use in business; video conferencing and web conferencing just became that much easier (and freer). As soon as Google+ was launched Facebook cobbled together a deal with Skype to try and offer something similar - but it's clear they're playing catch-up on this one, and the Facebook/Skype offering only offers one-on-one video chatting, not the Hangout-style group video chat.

But remember this is my comparison of the two and therefore there's an important consideration to bring into play here: I don't have a webcam. I do have speakers attached to my PC and a microphone that I could plug into it (but never have done) - and I could feasibly use my digital camera as a webcam - but I've never found reason to before now. I'm quite happy with the instant messaging kind of chat; if I want to talk to someone I can phone them in the traditional way; if I want to see them then I get off of my backside and pay them a visit. Granted, not quite as easy if they're on the other side of the world, and Google+ will enable that for me if ever I want it, but I can't see it happening any time soon. I'm certain Hangouts is a great feature but right now it doesn't score any points from me.

But Facebook's groups aren't going to get the full two points either - because they're limited to people who are on Facebook. I play in a band, in which all but two of the members have accounts on Facebook. We set up a private Facebook group to interact but can't use it to it's full potential because those two people would be excluded. With Google+ that's no longer a problem, and there's not really any reason why Facebook should make it one either - but it does. So Facebook's groups kind of win, but I'm only giving them one point.

The score is now Facebook 2-3 Google+.

Sparks

Google+ has a feature called Sparks, which lets you search for blogs, news etc. on a particular subject and, if you want to, share it with one or more of your circles. You can save your favourite search terms in your Google+ account.

Frankly I don't see the point. I can search the internet outside of a social network environment, and share interesting links I find via Google+, Twitter or Facebook (or Yammer, or any other network I choose) quite happily without the need for something like this built in. I may be missing the point of Sparks, but I'm not really convinced there is one.

Facebook doesn't offer anything similar - but it doesn't need to. The score stays put, Facebook 2-3 Google+.

Instant messaging

Google+ makes use of the native Google Talk system for this. Google Talk requires that you send a separate invitation to anyone you might want to IM with - even if you've added them to one or more of your Google+ circles and vice versa. Which is really annoying. Google's justification for this makes perfect sense - you don't want to chat with everyone, and you don't always want everyone to see that you're online, so you can pick and choose who can chat with you. Certainly it can be frustrating when you're minding your own business on Facebook and suddenly someone starts chatting away to you in a popup window (you can make yourself appear offline on Facebook if you want to, but who remembers to do that?!).

Facebook's chat is much more instinctive - if one of your friends in online at the same time as you, you can chat with them. Or you can use the Groups feature and IM with a group of people. Google Talk also lets you add several people to an IM conversation. There are some key differences though; to group-chat in Facebook you have to create a group containing the people you want to chat with; with Google(+) you do it on the fly. So Google is a bit clunky because you have to invite someone to chat before you can IM them, and Facebook is a bit clunky because you have to create a group before you can group-chat.

So far, then there's not much between them on this topic - until we think about selective chatting. On Facebook you're either online or offline, and the same applies to everyone. With Google+ you can choose which of your circles you're open to chat to. So you can spend a while on Google+, available to chat to your mates, but with your work colleagues blissfully unaware that you're online - conversely you can safely use Google+ at work for a work related IM conversation without the risk of one of your mates interrupting with pub talk. And if someone really winds you up, you can block them altogether from chatting with you on Google+ / Google Talk. No such functionality on Facebook. Another win for Google+, making it Facebook 2-5 Google+.

Applications (gaming)

Facebook has a rich set of applications built onto its platform, covering a wide variety of purposes - but probably the most popular are the games. Now I love a good game, and I can be competitive at times, so I enjoy comparing high scores and I enjoy playing the online equivalents of Scrabble and the like. But, frankly, these things are not part of Facebook. They're wider internet applications that you can access through Facebook. And there are some games I'm really not interested in - especially those that spam my news feed. I don't care how many sheep you've sheared today on your virtual farm if I'm not competing with my own virtual farm. I don't want to know. What started as one of Facebook's plus points is now one of its biggest pitfalls. Yes I can block Farmville and its ilk from my news feed, but then the friends who play Farmville go and discover something different but remarkably similar, and then I have to block that too. It becomes a constant battle to keep my news feed clean, and that is just not fun. So actually the lack of such things on Google+ is no bad thing.

That said, as I mentioned at the outset, Google+ is in its infancy and I'm sure there are plenty of new features and applications to be added to it in due course. But whereas Facebook is bloated and polluted by its apps, Google+ is cleaner, slicker, and has the opportunity to learn from Facebook's mistakes and keep it that way.

Social networks are about being social. Spamming me with your Farmville activity is not social. The occasional online game of Scrabble is, but that doesn't need to spew anything into a social network's stream/feed and so can be done outside of the social network environment. Having said all that, these applications are a feature Facebook offers that Google+ doesn't, albeit an annoying feature - so it seems a bit mean to award Google+ points for it. We're still at Facebook 2-5 Google+.

Interactivity

I can use Twitter to update my Facebook status, and if I really wanted to, I could do the reverse too. I can also update Facebook (and Twitter) by SMS message, or by email - so it's great for when I'm on the move with my very old and outdated but nonetheless operational smart phone. Google+ will no doubt offer much if not all of this in the future - in fact the SMS option is already available to Google+ users in India, but not to the rest of the world yet - but I have to judge the service on what's available to me now rather than what may come in the future. This is an easy win for Facebook. Two points. Facebook 4-5 Google+.

Photos

One of the things I love about Facebook is the ability to tag people in photos, and share albums. Well, Google+ lets you do that too, and as with the IM thing they've brought in an existing Google technology to help out - the brilliant Picasa photo sharing and organising system. As I use Picasa anyway this makes my life much easier. With Facebook I have to export the photos I want from Picasa, then upload them to Facebook, in my case using a third party uploader because Facebook's native one is utterly pants for Ubuntu users like me. With Google+ and Picasa, it's much simpler - just a couple of clicks and I'm done.

The photo albums themselves display much more nicely on Google+ too; the pictures are bigger in album view, they grow slightly when you hover over them, and the tagging is more flexible that Facebook's version. Best of all, deciding exactly who can and can't see your albums is much easier and more intuitive in Google+ than it is in Facebook. When I first heard about Google+ I was hoping its photo sharing would be somewhere close to Facebook's, because I thought Facebook's was great. I was wrong; Facebook's photo functionality is actually poor compared with Google+'s excellent offering.

The score is now Facebook 4-7 Google+.

Ownership and sharing

This is the crunch point. This is the thing these two companies have been very publicly fighting about. And in that fight I have sided completely with Google, because they've got it right. What am I talking about? The issue is a simple one: Facebook's terms and conditions.

Facebooks Ts and Cs have improved a lot over the years. They were once worded to imply that everything you submitted to the site - every status update, every photograph - belongs to Facebook. Once you put it up there, they own it, they can share it with whoever they like, and your privacy is at risk. Fortunately they've now changed that clause and your information is your own again.

But your information alone is yours alone. The fact that your friends have shared information with you is irrelevant; you're not allowed to take that information away with you. Facebook forbids you downloading a list of all your Facebook friends, complete with email addresses and phone numbers, even though those friends of yours have taken the decision to make that information available to you. Facebook dress this up as protecting privacy - but if your friends wanted that information kept private, they wouldn't have shared it with you in the first place. The real reason Facebook do this is obvious - they don't want you to take your friends' contact information and put it anywhere else.

Google have vehemently argued against Facebook's attitude to this. Google take privacy seriously, but they also take freedom of information seriously. I want my friends to have my phone number and email address. I want them to be able to download them into their address book or whatever. I trust them with that information - if I didn't, I wouldn't share it with them in the first place. (To clarify, not all of my Facebook friends can see my full profile. There are some who can't see my contact details or pictures of my children, for example.)

Unlike Facebook, Google's terms and conditions haven't ever claimed that information I enter into their system belongs to anyone other than me. And neither do Google intend to prevent me from sharing my information with the people I want to share it with, and allowing those people to take that information and do whatever they want with it. I trust that that won't be anything nasty because those people are my friends.

It's for this reason that I've been looking forward to Google+. Up until this point in this post Google+ has had the edge over Facebook, and justifiably so - its features are better, its user interface is cleaner, and this is only the start - but I wouldn't have been too worried if Google+ was a bit of a poor cousin to Facebook as long as the basics are right. And one of those fundamentals is that my information is my information, and when I share that information with someone I share it wholeheartedly.

Facebook absolutely fails to give me control over my information. Its privacy settings are notoriously difficult to manage (although better than they used to be) and the people I've shared information with can't do anything with it because Facebook won't let them. This is a biggie, this is worth much more than two points; more like two hundred.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. The contest finishes with Facebook having 4 points, and Google+ having 207. Google+ was winning anyway, but Facebook's refusal to let me control my own information - including setting it free if I want to - makes it a big time loser.

Bye bye Facebook, hello Google+.

Do the proposed NHS reforms amount to privitisation?

2011-05-23T13:07:00.000+01:00

Privitisation is difficult to define. Our railway system is privitised, yet receives a certain amount of public funding. Our roads are public, but almost all the work done on them is delivered by private contractors. So it's not who delivers the services that makes it public or private, but who commissions the services and whether the service user has to pay up front or not.

With prescription, opticians' and dental charges the NHS can no longer be said to be free at the point of delivery. With private businesses (GP practices) instead of publicly owned primary care trusts doing the commissioning, the fundng can no longer be said to be under public control. Which makes the NHS under reforms more akin to the rail system, where service users pay some up-front fees and the state provides a subsidy to the private operators, than to the road system, where although the providers are mainly private, the commissioning is done by national and local government organisations and the service user pays through taxation, not up-front fees.

Those in favour of the reforms will cry foul at this point, pointing out that the GP commissioning consortia won't have complete free reign but will be accountable to the central NHS Commissioning Board, and providers of NHS services will be accountable to the regulator, Monitor. However, that's no different to the train operating companies being accountable to the Office of the Rail Regulator. The only real difference between the two systems is that the trains are privately owned whereas some, but not all by any means, of the hospitals and other clinical buildings are publicly owned. The owner of the title deeds doesn't really matter to the service user; what makes the difference is how the service runs operationally, and who calls the shots. Under the proposed reforms, the organisations choosing what services are available and being given the cash to spend on them will be private businesses. It is privitisation in everything but name.

Superinjunctions - not a question of privacy

2011-05-22T23:36:00.000+01:00

"If you can't do the time, don't do the crime" - it's a common mantra and an argument that's been frequently used in the current debates about superinjunctions, and it sums up my own opinion of the matter pretty well. The case of the footballer, whose name is already widely known and will be on the front page of a Scottish newspaper tomorrow, is a good one to pick on. The footballer, who is married with children, allegedly had an affair with a reality TV contestant, and subsequently took out a superinjunction, barring any mention of the said affair in the press. The affair allegedly lasted for 7 months, and the footballer has allegedly sued his mistress for leaking the story.

That's enough "allegedly"s.

The big debate around superinjunctions is being described as a battle between an individual's right to privacy versus the right to freedom of expression, and the freedom of the press. However in my view these are not opposite ends of the same spectrum that are incompatible with one another. Individual privacy and freedom of expression can coexist hand-in-hand, even in this footballer's situation; the real question is this: who owns the information?

When two people have an affair in private, that is a private act that only the two of them are privy to. Nobody else knows about it. The information that the affair happened is known only to those two individuals. But, more importantly, the information is shared equally between those two individuals. Unless a prenuptial agreement was signed, neither one has more claim to knowing the act happened than the other, and neither one has the right to stop the other from talking about it. Granted, "kiss and tell" is a pretty sloppy way of behaving, but so is cheating on your wife and family. There's no moral high ground to be had there.

Your private life is not exclusively your private life if you share it with someone else. If you have a relationship with someone, that's their private life as well as yours, and they have the right to talk about their own private life - including that relationship with you. That's not to say you should never have any relationship with anyone, but that you ensure you trust the people you share things with, and (unlike Chris Huhne) treat them well enough to not have a reason to betray that trust. The footballer's clumsy attempts to keep the story secret - most of which have only served to draw more publicity to it - simply make no sense. Essentially he is trying to impose a prenuptial agreement that is neither prenuptial nor has the other person's agreement; whatever the law says, that cannot be right.

Something the defenders of superinjunctions draw attention to is the issue of families, especially children: that front page headlines of the footballer's affair would cause undue distress to his family, and his children could get bullied at school because of it. As a father I know the importance of protecting my children, but I'm afraid this argument doesn't wash with me for a number of reasons...

Firstly, superinjunctions are horrendously expensive, they are a plaything of the rich and famous that is unavailable to the rest of us. In any environment there is gossip, and rumours travel fast - whether or not they have any truth in them. Ordinary families who cannot afford superinjunctions have to grin and bear this kind of speculation. Their problems may not be national front page news, but the local gossiping and playground bullying is no different, and neither is the damage it causes. Superinjunctions do nothing to stop that, and even if they did, it is wrong that such a tool should only be available to those who could afford it.

Secondly, it is not the news of an extramarital affair that is damaging to a marriage - it is the extramarital affair itself. The footballer and his wife clearly have a few problems to sort out between them, and really what the rest of the world knows or thinks about them is nowhere near as important as addressing those issues as a couple. Being unfaithful is shameful, but the footballer would get far more respect from the public at large by being honest and accepting a tarnished reputation than by trying in vain to protect the false impression of him that he would prefer us all to have.

A final reason why the use of superinjunctions is just silly relates to a corollary of my main point about the owner of the information, and that's about the control of information. We're all aware of the power of spin, and therefore if you know a story is likely to leak to the press eventually it is far better to release it yourself, using your own words, and telling your side of the story, rather than allow a mass of rumour and speculation to twist it into something horrendous. Getting your own account of the news out quickly prevents the story from becoming protracted and drawn out in the way that this one has; it also reduces the value of that news to the press, thus diminishing the risk of other people from profiting at your expense by selling their version story.

Given all that, the footballer's superinjunction and subsequent attempts to protect it, when the story is already in the public domain, look very silly indeed. Instead of dousing the flames, his actions are fuelling the fire; it's a good thing he isn't a goalkeeper because he's getting his fingers well and truly burnt.

Some AV myths, busted

2011-04-27T18:24:00.002+01:00

Next week's referendum on the UK's voting system is really important; it's vital that we get rid of the ridiculous First Past The Post (FPTP) system and replace it with something fairer, like the Alternative Vote (AV). Sadly though both sets of campaign teams are letting us all down. The "no" camp are slinging naked lies and misinformation around the place, which a lot of people are apparently being taken in by, while the "yes" camp keep harping on about how AV would "make MPs work harder" - which is a pretty poor thing to latch onto given there are much better reasons for voting AV.

So here I hope to dispel some of the myths that the "no" camp are spreading around, as well as give some better reasons to vote AV.

Myth #1: Hung parliaments and coalition governments are more likely with AV than FPTP
Australia has been using AV for over 80 years. During that time we have had more hung parliaments in the UK, using FPTP, than in Australia have had with AV.

Myth #2: Switching to AV would require hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment in vote-counting machines
There are no plans to introduce vote counting machines if the country says yes to AV. In Australia, votes are counted by hand and the system works.

Myth #3: AV goes against the principle of one person, one vote
On the contrary, AV upholds this principle better than FPTP does. With AV every voter's vote counts exactly once towards the result of the election; there are no wasted votes. With FPTP, any vote that isn't for the biggest two or three parties doesn't affect the outcome and is wasted.

In an AV election, if your first-choice candidate is eliminated your vote is transferred to your second-choice candidate, while my vote stays with my first choice candidate. Neither of us gets any more votes than the other.

Myth #4: AV is complicated, most people can't understand it
AV is very similar to the voting on most reality TV shows - the candidate with the least votes is eliminated, and the people who voted for that candidate can transfer their support to someone else. Millions of people in Britain are familiar with this kind of system because they've watched it at work on Strictly Come Dancing, Dancing on Ice, The X-Factor, Big Brother, etc.

Of course if you applied FPTP to those shows, not only would the losing candidate at each round be eliminated but the people who voted for them wouldn't be allowed to vote in any future rounds.

Myth #5: AV can't be explained in one sentence
I pretty much did that above: the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes transfer to those voters' next preferences, until a candidate has more than 50% of the votes.

Myth #6: You need more knowledge of politics to use AV effectively
The vast majority of people have enough knowledge to rank the candidates on offer with a simple 1, 2, 3. There's no need to think about tactics with AV in order to make your vote count, whereas with FPTP you need a good understanding of how people voted last time and how they're likely to vote this time to decide which of two fairly close candidates you should choose to vote for. FPTP encourages gameplay and dishonesty, and requires a great deal of political tactical knowledge and a lot of guesswork to make your vote count; AV simply doesn't.

Myth #7: AV costs more than FPTP
In the UK most vote-counting is done by volunteers. It's true that an AV election may take longer to count and process than an FPTP one, but if this time is being given for free there's no real cost implication. Even if AV does cost slightly more, it is surely a price worth paying for a fairer system. All elections cost money and if cost was more important than democracy surely we wouldn't have elections at all.

Myth #8: FPTP has served us well for this long, it's therefore fit for purpose now
The political landscape has changed significantly over the last 20 years or so. Gone are the days where we had a two-party system and everyone was either Labour or Tory with a few floating voters in marginal seats having all the power to make or break governments. With the advent and increasing popularity of other parties (not all of which are still active) such as the Liberal Democrats, UKIP, the Green Party, Socialist Labour, Veritas, the BNP, the Referendum Party, and others, FPTP no longer cuts the mustard. Most voters, instead of lining up solidly with one party, find that their views are partially represented by many parties, some more so than others. AV allows voters to express this range of preferences, whereas FPTP comes nowhere near reflecting, or even recording, what voters' views really are.

Myth #9: The voting system is a matter of personal preference - there's nothing objective
On the contrary, there have been many independent studies looking at voting systems, their relative merits and pitfalls, and what would fit best for the UK.

When New Labour were elected in 1997 they established an independent commission to examine the options for voting MPs into the UK Parliament. The Independent Commission on the Voting System published their findings in 1998, having looked at FPTP, AV and proportional representation. Their findings were conclusive, and they recommended AV for electing constituency MPs. (They also recommended that there should be some additional "top-up" MPs that span several constituencies).

A New Scientist article last yearFPTP]".

Some would argue that these next two are not as independent as those above; I'll let you be the judge of that.

The UK's leading progressive think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, published a paper earlier this year whose title says it all: Worst of Both Worlds: Why First Past the Post no longer works.

The Electoral Reform Society favours a fully proportional system, which would do away with the notion of having a single MP covering a single constituency; instead teams of MPs would be elected covering much bigger constituencies, using the method we currently use for electing MEPs. But when looking at AV against FPTP, which is what next week's referendum is a choice between, they are clear: "The Electoral Reform Society regards AV as the best voting system when a single position is being elected."

The "no to AV" campaigners have completely failed to find any similarly independent papers or evidence that supports FPTP over AV. With such strong evidence showing that AV is the better system, there's little wonder that the "no" campaigners have resorted to smear tactics and the peddling of myths in order to help their campaign. But if the public believe those myths and vote "no" next week, it will be a very sad day indeed for Britain and a very sad day for democracy.

We're unlikely to get another chance to change the voting system, and it sorely needs changing. Please vote Yes to the Alternative Vote.

Cameron "incorrect and highly misleading", says Oxford University

2011-04-11T22:05:00.001+01:00

Tony Blair. Remember him? He was a pretty good prime minister on the whole, did wonders for the NHS and education, but made a few blunders on the international front. He'll always be remembered for the Iraq War - probably his biggest blunder by quite a long way. Perhaps the reason Iraq stands out so much in our minds when we think of Blair's tenure is that a mistake of that magnitude was in stark contrast to what Blair's government were doing in other areas. It wasn't all good, but it was infinitely better than what the Tories had offered in the previous government under John Major. And when you hear Blair talking about Iraq, he still thinks it was the right thing to do; perhaps that's naive of him, perhaps it's incompetent, but the important thing is that it's genuine. Blair was trying to do what was right, he believed his advisors when they told him that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and he acted on that advice. He did not set out to deliberately mislead people.

Sadly that cannot be said for David Cameron. He hasn't been in office long, and he has already made some pretty stupid mistakes; today, for example, Oxford University responded to his daft assertion that they had only admitted one black student in 2009, saying he had been "incorrect and highly misleading". Apparently the actual number is 26, which is still appallingly low, so Cameron's argument should still hold some weight - but because he got his facts wrong, Oxford University have pretty much dismissed his argument. It's a bit like the light bulb thing all over again.

In that case, though, perhaps Cameron made an honest mistake. It makes him look stupid for a few moments, but it's forgiveable; it doesn't really undermine any trust we happen to have in him. Were he, though, to attempt to deliberately mislead people, that would be a different matter - and sadly, today, he's been doing exactly that.

"It's a system," he said of the Alternative Vote, "so undemocratic that you can vote for a mainstream party just once, whereas someone can vote for a fringe party like the BNP and it's counted three times..."

Wrong.

The circumstances he's alluding to are where a party, in this case the BNP, receive the smallest share of the vote. Under AV in those circumstances, the BNP are wiped out of the competition and those votes are transferred to the second choice candidates. The key word there being transferred. Votes for the BNP would not be counted three times - in fact they would stop counting at all. David Cameron knows this, and in making statements like the one above he is deliberately trying to mislead voters, attempting to scaremonger them into submission.

A true democrat would lay the facts on the table in an honest way, argue his corner without fabricating rubbish like that, and let the electorate decide. A worthy Prime Minister would not deliberately attempt to mislead the electorate in such a despicable way. Today David Cameron showed his true colours: he's anti democracy, and he's not sufficiently trustworthy to be our Prime Minister.

The cost of democracy

2011-04-04T19:50:00.000+01:00

Elections cost money. The more votes that are counted, the more the election costs. But true democrats believe that these costs are a price worth paying for the people to have their say. The 2005 general election cost more than £80 million to organise,¹ and last year's election will have cost even more.

The no-to-AV campaign have been rightly ridiculed for their adverts implying that May's referendum is a straight choice between reforming the voting system and a new cardiac facility at your local hospital (as it happens, the Government's current preference is to close Southampton's cardiac facility despite it being second best for quality and survival rates in the country, regardless of the outcome in May - but that's another issue), or a straight choice between reforming the voting system and bulletproof vests for our soldiers. As the New Statesman pointed out back in February, and Charlie Brooker reiterated on last week's 10 o'clock Live, the conclusion of this "you can't have both" approach is also that there's a straight choice between the cardiac facility and the bulletproof vests - or the subjects of the other idiotic no-to-AV adverts.

The point these utterly stupid adverts are trying to make is that the alternative vote system costs more to administer than the first-past-the-post system. Well, yes it does (possibly the only correct assertion that the no-to-AV campaign has made) - in much the same way that elections suddenly cost a bit more about a century ago, when women were allowed vote. The fact that it cost more did not mean it was the wrong thing to do then, and the same applies now. Under AV, every vote counts towards the final result; under FPTP, that does not happen. In a true democracy, every voter's opinion should matter, and it's worth an election costing slightly more to ensure that it does.

¹BBC News Election 2010: FAQ

One person, one vote - which system delivers?

2011-04-01T20:11:00.002+01:00

The principle of one person, one vote is a simple one, and one that nobody really disagrees with; nobody's vote should carry more weight than anybody else's - in other words, every vote should count. I'm somewhat surprised that those campaigning for first-past-the-post as opposed to the alternative vote are using this principle to back their views - because FPTP does not deliver it whereas AV does.

In FPTP, the only votes that count are those for the winning candidate, which is very often a minority. It means that the majority of people's votes don't count at all in the final result. Whereas with AV, every vote counts. If your first choice candidate is ruled out, your vote still counts, because it's transferred to your second-choice candidate. Thus the result of an AV election takes account of every person's vote, whereas many FPTP elections result in most of the votes not counting at all.

The FPTP (no to AV) campaigners say that those supporting minority parties get a greater say in AV, that their votes get counted several times over, that AV is unfair. This is tosh; under AV every person's vote counts once, no more and no less. No one person gets more choice than anyone else, nobody's vote counts for more than anyone else's. Under AV, votes for losing candidates get transferred; but a transferable vote is still one, single vote, and doesn't count for any more than anybody else's vote. Failing to transfer that vote would mean it would no longer count - that voter's choice would be ignored completely - and that is undemocratic.

So let's make every vote count, precisely once, no more and no less: vote yes to AV in May.

Will the foster carers' charter deliver?

2011-03-31T19:57:00.000+01:00

Britain is in dire need of more foster parents. Fostering has been in the news a lot lately, and much of it has been discouraging, but the Government's announcement a couple of weeks ago that there will be a new charter for fostering provided a glimmer of light among all the darkness. Tim Loughton, the minister for children, said: "This charter makes it clear that these foster parents should be able to play the role of any parent looking after his or her own children, and they should have the back up of the local authority to be able to do that."

Loughton mentioned things like haircuts and sleepovers - things that some local authorities make foster parents seek permission for - as "things that we would take for granted with our own children", that foster parents should also be able to do freely. The Department for Education also weighed in according to the BBC report on the matter, saying "the charter was designed to make it clear that a foster child should be treated as part of the family, and their views taken seriously".

Great stuff, especially when you consider that one of the things any parent has to do is to talk frankly with their kids, to answer their questions honestly. It's the role of the parent to let their children find their own way, but not without guidance and advice. Inevitably, children won't always do what the parents want them to do, and the parents don't love them any the less for that. Yet it would be completely wrong for those parents to say "I think what you're doing is fine" if they thought it was morally wrong.

Therefore if the fostering charter is to work, it should reverse the stupid decisions made around Eunice and Owen Johns. The Johns are an ordinary couple with ordinary mainstream views. They applied to be foster parents, willing to take on any children and love them as their own, accepting them as they are, nurturing them, protecting them... in a word, parenting them. The Johns are Christians but that doesn't mean they would be pushing their beliefs onto the foster children - it just means that if someone asked them about their beliefs, they would explain their views.

The mainstream Christian belief that sex belongs only inside a marital relationship does not stop those that hold that belief from loving those that have sex outside of marriage - from accepting them, protecting them, nurturing them, loving them. But the Johns were not allowed to be foster parents simply because they hold that belief. It's not something they would have ever raised with their foster children, unless the foster children asked them for advice or their opinions on sexuality. Whatever the children's beliefs and actions, the Johns would have treated them the same way. No discrimination, no lack of acceptance, no inequality, no undervaluing of diversity. Yet just because they held that view - even without the intention of ever expressing it unless explicitly asked - the Johns' application was rejected and a court disgracefully upheld that decision.

Somewhat bizarrely, the judges said "No one is asserting that Christians - or, for that matter, Jews or Muslims - are not fit and proper persons to foster or adopt. No-one is contending for a blanket ban." Yet Christianity, Judaism and Islam all teach that sex outside of marriage is morally incorrect. If that wasn't the reason for refusing the Johns' application, then what was?

There are lots of Christian parents in this country. Not all of us are good parents, but the vast majority are - and certainly being a Christian does not make you a bad parent. Yet, apparently, it does make you a bad foster parent. If the Government are genuine about making sure foster parents can treat their foster children the way they would treat their own children, they must be allowed to have, and to express, views on sexuality - including that they believe some practices to be morally wrong. Is that really so much to ask?

How many tories does it take to recognise a light bulb?

2011-03-04T12:59:00.001+00:00

This morning it was widely reported that the Army was wasting huge amounts of money by buying ordinary 65p light bulbs for £22. This was all based on a story in the rarely accurate tabloid "news"-paper, The Sun, which cited an invoice leaked to them by a soldier working in the stores of an Army base. It was met by a reaction from the Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, who described it as an inexcusable waste, saying "This is classic evidence of how Labour wasted taxpayers' money and shows a complete lack of common sense."

The invoice reads as follows:

INTERNAL ISSUE VOUCHER

Basic price is 22.51 per DofQ as at 18-JUN-10

Item: 51WR 6240-99-9965601 LAMPFILAMENT

Well I'm no expert but that doesn't sound like your everyday run-of-the-mill light bulb to me, and indeed the Ministry of Defence confirmed that later this morning: "It was a precision-made lamp filament for the Watchman radar. The MoD purchases about five per year."

The Sun article says "The Sun launched a War On Waste campaign last year, calling on readers to report bunglers who throw around public money." Well, in my view it's high time the media launched an internal campaign of their own to stop the "bunglers" posing as journalists spewing out wildly innaccurate stories whose only purpose is attack those who strive to deliver excellent public services and defend our country.

Similarly, we need to stop the "bunglers" who somehow managed to find jobs as government ministers from taking more heed of tabloid newspaper stories than of the experts in their own departments. If Liam Fox had bothered to enquire within the MoD before blurting out his attack on his predecessors, he could have saved himself from demonstrating the idiotic incompetence we witnessed from him today.

Update:
The MoD have since responded again, this time saying (according to the BBC) that the "the thrust of the Sun's story was correct." In other words, there are some dodgy procurement practices in the armed forces that mean sometimes more money is spent on items than it should - but there's no mention of the specifics around the light filament invoice, which is central to the Sun's story and to Liam Fox's comments.

What has almost certainly happened here is that the ministers have realised how silly they looked and ordered the civil servants in the MoD to release a statement admitting to some unspecific, vague guilt around overspending - hence the assertion about "the thrust" - but that fails to address the fact that the example that was held aloft above all others - that of the £22 light filament -relates to a specialist piece of equipment and not a generic light bulb. If this government is to reduce the UK's deficit without doing undue harm to our services, they need to have much better attention to detail than that.

What Ed Miliband's victory means

2010-10-01T10:34:00.002+01:00

Firstly, an apology; when I've been tweeting about the Labour leadership contest, and that pair of political brothers in particular, I've been spelling their surname with two "l"s. That I should waste one of those precious 140 characters allotted by Twitter on a spelling mistake is shameful. But hey ho...

I haven't been tweeting about the contest that much, really - because it hasn't exactly been interesting. Labour aren't likely to be back in power for a few years at least, and there wasn't that much difference in policy between the leading contenders that I could fathom, so the short term impact of the contest seemed pretty negligible. Until, that is, the result was announced.

The lead in all the news stories was the same - "Ed Miliband beat his brother David by a margin of just over 1 per cent" - but that didn't tell the whole story. The Labour Party leadership is decided using the alternative vote (AV) system, whereby voters list their preferences. The least popular candidate is eliminated from the competition, and the second choice votes of those who voted for that candidate are then used in place of their first choice votes, and the loop continues thus until only one candidate remains, who is then declared the winner.

David Miliband was ahead throughout the whole process. If it was a first-past-the-post (FPTP) contest, like the election of MPs, he would have won because he had the most votes in the first count. As each candidate was eliminated, David remained ahead, until the very final redistribution of votes. So what does all this mean?

Let's get one thing straight: Ed won, fair and square, and nobody is denying that. But under the FPTP system, David would have won. The point being of course that next year, there will be a referendum on whether to change the MP election system from FPTP to AV. The Labour leadership contest showed how this can change a result quite dramatically; David Miliband received the primary backing of more MPs and party members, yet Ed won.

I'm a strong advocate of proportional representation (PR), and it's important not to confuse the AV system with fully fledged PR. There are many who will look at this result when they come to think about the referendum and vote against AV on the basis that it isn't fair. However, they would miss the point; if David Miliband had received more second/third/choice votes, he might have won. The AV result basically says that while David had more people saying "if I have to choose one person, I'll chose him", more people said "out of all the candidates, I prefer Ed to David", and it is this latter statement that matters more in AV.

The choice we have to make next year is which of those "majorities" should hold more weight; should the winner be the person with the most "first choices" or the person who the majority prefer over their nearest rivals? My view is that AV is a much fairer, more democratic system than FPTP and I think the Labour party leadership election can be used to demonstrate that. Crucially, if Labour campaign for FPTP next year, they'll be committing an act of gross hypocrisy and essentially stating that Ed Miliband shouldn't be their leader. Let's hope they see sense and do the right thing: back AV in the referendum.

Why the Pope should be treated as a head of state

2010-09-16T09:25:00.002+01:00

The Pope visits the UK today, apparently amid some controversy. The Catholic Church's views on contraception and its dire record of harbouring and covering up child abusers are notorious, and not things I condone in any way shape or form. To that end, a number of people are stating the opinion that the Pope should not be treated as a state dignitary - no red carpet, no meeting the Queen, etc - during his visit to our country, or perhaps not be allowed to visit at all.

The accusations against the Catholic Church are usually summed up in a single word: intolerant. Which is astounding when you consider that that's exactly what those who oppose the Pope's visit at all are being. Tolerance means putting up with, accepting and even welcoming and showing hospitality to those with whom we disagree. To say someone is not welcome because they are intolerant is hypocrisy in its most blatant form.

But the majority of those I've heard are not saying the Pope is unwelcome here, just that he should not be treated as a head of state. Putting aside his beliefs and views for a moment, this comes down to a simple question of fact: is he a head of state or isn't he? Well, I think you'll find that the Vatican City State is, shock horror, a city state. It is a sovereign entity in its own right. I think you'll also find that the Pope is the head of that sovereign state. So, whatever you think of him, whatever his beliefs and however they match up to your own, the Pope is a head of state.

Let's get something else right; despite the Catholic Church's horrific record when it comes to child protection, the Pope is not child abuser and nor does he condone such things. He has apologised for those horrible things that happened in the Irish Catholic Church and, while acknowledging that words alone are seldom enough to heal these things, he's doing what he can to put things right. As for his views on sexual conduct - well, he wouldn't be the first Catholic head of state to visit Britain and he won't be the last. I don't see the same outcry when Muslim heads of state visit Britain, despite their views and record of how women should be treated among other things. So campaigning against the Pope being treated as a head of state is at least one of three things: (a) ignorant of the straightforward fact that he is a head of state; (b) hypocritical, from those who whinge about intolerance; (c) discriminatory, singling him out while not complaining at all about state visits from others with similar beliefs and principles.

A final note is to state the obvious; the Pope has a global following and during his visit to the UK the international spotlight will be on our country. The Pope's views are well known but there are many who don't really know much about modern Britain. If, while we're in that spotlight, all we manage to do is demonstrate an inability to welcome and tolerate those with different views to our own, if we sell Britain as a stuck-up country that refuses to engage in open discussion with those we disagree with, then we are doing our country a great disservice.

Response to Stephen Fry's blog

Stephen Fry, one of the signatures in a letter opposing the Pope's visit being treated as a state visit, has been heavily criticised for doing so. The Daily Mail, the "news" paper we all love to hate, has called the letter a campaign of hate, which it clearly isn't. But the ridiculousness of their front page today has prompted our beloved national treasure (sorry, Stephen, if you're reading this - which I sincerely doubt) to blog on the subject.

In his blog Stephen outlines the reason for his objection. His argument goes like this:

My only objection is that this be a State Visit. It hasn’t happened before and the Vatican is in no real sense a nation state. Visit the place: it takes fifty minutes to walk round. You don’t need a passport or visa to enter. It is a curlicue of history that makes this “absolute monarchy” (to quote the Holy See’s own website) a “country”. Under no reasonable or worthwhile definition does the Vatican match up to the old-established and widely accepted Montevideo protocols on statehood.

So, the Vatican can't be a state because it takes fifty minutes to walk round; it's too small to be a state. Well I'm sorry, but size is not a factor in statehood, under the Montevideo Convention or any other definition that I've seen. You don't need a passport or visa to enter from neighbouring Italy - big deal. You can travel across most of the European Union without a passport these days, and certainly can visit a few sovereign entities a bit closer to home without one: Guernsey, Jersey, the Isle of Man. The same applied to Ireland prior to 1997. Are they suddenly not sovereign because they've relaxed their border controls? Of course not, and again the Montevideo Convention says nothing about border control or the need for passports and visas.

So what does the Montevideo Convention say?

The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.

The Vatican has all of those. That is the bedrock of the "the old-established and widely accepted Montevideo protocols" that Stephen Fry blogs about, and clearly the Vatican matches up. So unless he's now going to assert that the very protocol he pointed to as being the one we should uphold is now in his "no reasonable or worthwhile definition" category, it would appear the great man has snookered himself.

Government to ditch child protection database

2010-08-06T09:05:00.000+01:00

The government has elected to shut down the contraversial ContactPoint database, which holds records of all the children in England. The database was established at great cost to enable different agencies (the NHS, social services, police, etc) to share information in the wake of the Victoria Climbié murder.

As a parent I'm wary of my children's details being stored on large databases, especially given the UK's record of poor public sector information governance. (Actually, to be precise, most of the breaches have actually been the fault of private sector contractors working for the public sector; the public sector itself is actually very good at looking after peoples' information). But equally I'm very aware that ContactPoint was set up for a very good reason.

Scrapping ContactPoint now is like a football club sacking its manager without having a clue who to replace him with. Usually in that situation, the team's performance suffers, sometimes with disasterous consequences. ContactPoint was by no means the ideal solution and the government are correct to look for an alternative, but they should make sure that alternative is set up and ready to replace ContactPoint before removing the existing solution. As things stand they're reverting back to a dangerous vacuum of information.

Bovine bother in food chain

2010-08-05T08:40:00.001+01:00

There have been a couple of news stories this week about milk and beef
derived from cloned cattle entering the human food chain. The media
seem to be focusing on two particular viewpoints related to this:
those that are outraged about the very idea of cloning and those who
say the products are safe so there's nothing to worry about.

Both of those perspectives are missing the bigger picture. The issue
here is not about the morality or ethics of cloning, and neither is it
about whether or not these particular products are safe. The issue for
me is that something that was expressly prohibited from entering the
food chain was allowed to do so. We may have got off lightly in this
case as yes, perhaps those products are safe - but if the controls
that were supposed to keep these goods out of our food failed then
they will also fail for much more dangerous prohibited goods and
practices. Instead of focusing on the issue of whether or not
products from cloned cattle are safe, the media should be asking
questions about how something that's meant to be forbidden from
entering our food managed to find its way onto the shop floor.

It's particularly interesting that the news has come from the Foods
Standard Agency. If the FSA is aware of these problems now, in
retrospect, why were they not aware at the time? To use a well worn
cliche, they're being reactive not proactive, and clearly that needs
to change.

Is repeating a joke a crime? Keith Chegwin rocks Twitter!

2010-07-19T22:09:00.003+01:00

Some very strange things happen on Twitter. Right now, the biggest trending topic on Twitter is Keith Chegwin. Keith is an active Twitter user; he's made it his policy not to use Twitter to endlessly promote books, tours, concerts etc. as many celebrities do; instead he uses Twitter to tell jokes. Sometimes they are jokes he's made up, sometimes they're jokes he remembers from some time ago and chooses to repeat. Either way, it's just a bit of harmless fun and raises a laugh. Or at least, a bit of a chuckle. Ok then, a grin. Occasionally.

Back to the point. He's trending today because Simon Evans, who is apparently a comedian himself, remembered that one of the jokes that Cheggers tweeted was actually one told by the brilliant Milton Jones a telly some time ago. Evans took issue with the fact that Cheggers didn't credit Jones with the joke, and launched a campaign to that effect. Evans' take is that it takes time and effort to write jokes, comedians earn their living by doing this, and by repeating their material Cheggers is effectively stealing. Perhaps Evans thinks Cheggers should pay a royalty.

Technically, there's something in Evans' argument. But it is a technicality, no more. It's quite well known for example that the song "Happy Birthday to you" is still under copyright and therefore any profitable performance of it should result in royalties being paid to Warner Music Group, who own the copyright. Equally, you might be right to insist that every time you have a tune in your head that you've heard on the radio recently, you resit singing, whistling or humming it until you know whose it is so that you can credit them - but that's a ludicrous idea. Equally silly would be to stop children in the playground repeating catchphrases from sketch shows like Little Britain a few years ago.

Comedy is an art form, and art is not primarily about the artist. If someone admires a piece of art, they admire it for what it is, not for who created it - and most artists would be pleased and proud that people like their work. So Cheggars repeating Milton Jones' joke is a complement to Jones, and something to be proud of - even if Cheggers didn't remember where the joke came from at the time. By repeating the joke Cheggers is showing respect; Evans' assertion that the opposite is true is petty and needless.

Keep tweeting, Cheggers!

Why "thees and thous" are bad

2010-06-26T08:27:00.012+01:00

Making the decision to follow Jesus, to love him almost as well as he loves us, is the most important decision anyone can make in this life, and I'm passionate about expressing that love for him; I'm passionate about worship. Worship is what every human being was created to do, so it's not surprising that in fact lots of people are passionate about worship. And therefore it's not surprising that aspects of worship are some of the most contentious areas of disagreement among Christians. Arguments about worship can be divisive, and they can be distracting from the real purpose we have, so on one level they're best avoided; but equally it's important not to stifle open and honest debate or to prevent people from expressing and exploring different viewpoints.

It's very much in that spirit that this piece is intended. This is my opinion; there are other opinions out there, and they are all to be respected. I welcome challenge to my thinking and am open to change; equally I would hope that by putting my case forward it would also challenge some of the ideas and opinions that others have formed.

So back to that opening sentence; the two most important things in life are choosing to live for God, and actually living for God. I don't believe that worship and evangelism are separate - quite the opposite in fact. The particular aspect of worship that fires me up the most is its ability to enable people to access God, to banish foolish stereotypes about God and Christianity being old fashioned or irrelevant, and to help people to realise that God is alive and relevant today, in the here and now. So I have a few principles that I believe apply to worship:

Our worship should not encourage the mistaken view that Christianity is about a fuddy duddy, old fashioned ritual based set of traditions as opposed to a living, vibrant, current relationship with a real person who is alive today and engaged in our culture
We should address God in a way that is respectful, but also allows for intimacy; a way which demonstrates our patriotism to his kingdom but that doesn't patronise the king
Our worship should not put up barriers that impede people's understanding of what's going on or prevent them from being actively involved themselves
Our worship should help to demonstrate that God is alive and relevant today to everyone
Principles should be applied consistently, without picking and choosing when and where they

All this leads me to the point of this particular post: to explain my opposition to the unnecessary use of old fashioned language in worship - why we should sing "how great you are" instead of "how great thou art" and why we should say "our father in heaven" instead of "our father who art in heaven" - I'm sure you get the idea.

1. Not encouraging the "old fashioned" stereotype

In Britain the media love to spread the notion that Christianity is old fashioned and based on little more than a set of historic, traditional rituals. They like to propagate the idea that only traditional pipe organ music with archaic lyrics should be sung in church, and that any congregation embracing anything more up to date are a bunch of happy clappy weirdos. This perception of Christianity is of course completely and utterly false, but like a lot of urban myths it has become deeply ingrained in our society's psyche.

When the church meets it shouldn't be like a period drama or one of those groups that re-enact battle scenes at ancient monuments, but an experience that reflects the style of and is engaging to the society and culture in which we live today. Christianity is not about keeping old traditions alive but about a real, current relationship.

It can be a very difficult task for a Christian to demonstrate to his non Christian friends that actually God, and the church, are very much in the world today and very much relevant to it, and to them on a personal level. To reach the stage where that friend accepts an invitation to a church gathering can take monumental effort. If just one small part of that gathering only serves to encourage the idea that Christianity is out of date and out of touch, then it can be the undoing of months and years of effort, and only further propagates the myth that we are working hard to destroy.

2. We don't need a special language to address God

There are some parts of God's family where there exists a belief that addressing God in archaic terms is somehow a sign of respect and reverence. Of course we should respect and revere God, but we can express that in everyday language. He knows our innermost thoughts, he sees us naked; we don't need to put on special clothes or use special words to in order enter God's presence, personally or corporately.

When someone meets royalty, there is a certain etiquette involved. You address the Queen in a certain way (first "your majesty" and thereafter "ma'am" - pronounced "mam" not "marm") but you don't have to suddenly change the modern form of words to some ancient way of speaking. You don't suddenly suffix every verb with "-eth", change "you" to "thee" or "thou", "your" to "thy" and so on. I suspect if you addressed the Queen that way she would look at you with a somewhat bemused look on her face. The thoughts "what an idiot" might pass through her mind - such things impede communication, aren't particularly respectful and just make the speaker look a tad silly. It also sends a message that her majesty wouldn't understand you if you just spoke normally to her, or that you believe doing so would not be fitting for her ears to hear. That of course is simply not the case, and it's even less the case with God.

"Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."

Jesus (John 4:23-24)

Jesus says we should worship "in spirit and in truth". "In truth" means honestly; not putting on special airs and graces, but instead being humble, open and honest before God. Putting on a show of reverence by using silly old words that fell out of contemporary use decades if not centuries ago does not tick that box. True reverence, true respect, is an attitude of the heart, not a an act of tongue-tying linguistic trickery.

3. We shouldn't make it harder for the "unchurched" to access church

We want people to come to church. So why would we make conscious choices that put them off, or make it harder for those who aren't used to attending church to understand what's going on and take part in it, for no particular reason other than to uphold ancient traditions?

Now, brothers, if I come to you and speak in tongues, what good will I be to you, unless I bring you some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or word of instruction? Even in the case of lifeless things that make sounds, such as the flute or harp, how will anyone know what tune is being played unless there is a distinction in the notes? Again, if the trumpet does not sound a clear call, who will get ready for battle? So it is with you. Unless you speak intelligible words with your tongue, how will anyone know what you are saying? You will just be speaking into the air. Undoubtedly there are all sorts of languages in the world, yet none of them is without meaning. If then I do not grasp the meaning of what someone is saying, I am a foreigner to the speaker, and he is a foreigner to me. So it is with you. Since you are eager to have spiritual gifts, try to excel in gifts that build up the church.

Paul (1 Corinthians 14:6-12)

Paul is talking about speaking in tongues here but he is actually imparting a universal principle, not something specific to speaking in tongues: that we should strive to make our worship accessible to those from outside of our usual congregation. "If then I do not grasp the meaning of what someone is saying, I am a foreigner to the speaker, and he is a foreigner to me." - it couldn't be much clearer. Except for scholars of Shakespeare and those brought up in traditional church settings, Old English is a foreign language that has very little relevance to modern British culture. If we want modern Britons to attend, understand, and participate in our activities, we must embrace today's language and dispense with the "thees and thous".

4. Our worship should be culturally relevant

An accusation often levelled at modern Christians is that we pick and choose which parts of the Bible we embrace and heed. This usually stems from a misunderstanding of two important things - firstly that when Jesus came he fulfilled the law, and set his people free from many of the rituals and practices that were the norm up to that point; and secondly that the perception interpretation of some passages, particularly some of Paul's writings, has changed from a black-and-white literal view to an examination of what he was communicating while acknowledging he was doing so in a different cultural and societal setting. So there's much in Paul's letters about who should and shouldn't wear hats when worshipping God, and when (and whether) women should speak during church gatherings, that are not approached in a literal way in most modern churches. But we still believe that the Bible is God's word, and that Paul's letters are a part of that. Which means that we need to not ignore what Paul wrote, but to understand what the message is that we need to heed today.

The chapter I quoted from above, 1 Corinthians 14, contains some of the more contentious instructions:

Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.

Paul (1 Corinthians 14:34-35)

This of course was at a time when women received no education at all; they were ignorant of what was going on because of the culture they lived in, and were therefore full of questions which interrupted the flow of proceedings, so Paul's instructions do make some sense in that context but we don't apply that particular instruction literally today. But does that mean we can just ignore the things that Paul says in this chapter, which are all about how the church should conduct worship in the context of its culture? Well, no:

If anybody thinks he is a prophet or spiritually gifted, let him acknowledge that what I am writing to you is the Lord's command. If he ignores this, he himself will be ignored.

Paul (1 Corinthians 14:37-38)

Strong stuff indeed. So we cannot ignore what Paul is getting at in this chapter; and what Paul is fundamentally doing throughout 1 Corinthians 14 is explaining the etiquette, customs and style of the culture of the time, and stating again and again that the church should embrace those things. There are caveats of course; the city of Corinth was famous for its sexual immorality and earlier in this letter Paul warns the church strongly against engaging in those practices - so cultural relevance in worship does not mean surrendering our morality or "giving in" to the pressures in our modern world to do things we know are contrary to God's will. But it does mean that if a certain style of music, dance, fashion or visual art is popular in our culture and doesn't impede others from getting close to God, then let's have it in church. So... when was the last time a book full of "thees and thous" won the Booker prize (or whatever it's called these days!), or a song with lyrics full of "thees and thous" topped the singles charts? Can't remember one? My point exactly.

5. If we can change musical style, why not linguistic style too?

Now don't misunderstand me; I love old hymns and songs. There's a lot of value in them, some brilliant tunes and lyrics, and many of them are quite adaptable and can be altered ever so slightly to bring them up to date as far as style and cultural relevance are concerned. It frequently happens; many old hymns can be played in a much more modern style than the historical pipe organ dirge of yesteryear permitted, and in some cases music for some classic hymns has been rewritten completely from scratch. This is all good stuff, but there are a surprising number of people who are more than comfortable with experimenting and altering the music, whether that's just in terms of style or as a wholesale makeover, but fiercely protective of the original lyrics - even if those lyrics can be translated really easily into modern English without any loss of meaning or impact.

That irks me; if the principle of bringing a song up to date is sound, then it applies as much to the linguistic style as it does to the musical style. What's wrong with singing "how great you are" instead of "how great thou art" other than the fact that a selection of people - those who have been in the church a while - are more used to singing the latter? Worship isn't about being comfortable, and doing what we've always done. If we truly want to progress to another level of worship, one that is genuinely accessible to today's British culture, one which doesn't reinforce incorrect stereotypes, and one which doesn't put up man-made barriers between ourselves and God, then such a tiny step outside of one's comfort zone is surely something we can deal with.

I mentioned above the frequent criticism of Christians that we apparently pick and choose which bits of the Bible we apply, and which bits of our lives we apply them to. It's vital that we answer such criticism not by arguing against it but by demonstrating its untruth with our actions and decisions. If, then, we apply the principle of modernising worship for the reasons I've outlined but apply it just to music and not to lyrics, or indeed other areas of worship, then we simply play into the hands of those levelling that criticism at us. After all, for many of the songs in question, it's not as if the lyrics we sing today are exactly what was originally written (see the Wikipedia article on How Great Thou Art, for example) so what's the problem with performing a further minor tweak?

Conclusion

I began this piece with the qualification that this is my opinion, that other opinions exist, and I'm happy to engage in discussion on this very important (to me, at least) subject. But I hope that I've demonstrated that this is about more than simple personal preference; it's not a case of "I like this style, you like that style, let's agree to disagree" but there's something more fundamental in this: it's about enabling people to access worship, it's about challenging false stereotypes, it's about being honest with God, it's about being relevant to the society we live in, and it's about being consistent in our application of principles and values.

That said, I do need to qualify this some more, because I haven't addressed the subject of the target audience. The target audience for my worship is God; therefore for me to address him as "thee" or "thou" in my worship would be incongruous, because that's not how I speak. But there are people out there who have lived long lives and been brought up in ultra-traditional churches, who would really struggle to engage in any style of worship that wasn't the pipe-organ-hymns-with-archaic-lyrics style. So when I facilitate worship in retirement homes and the like I don't consider for a moment that we should update the lyrics of their favourite old hymns, because they can worship God more effectively with those old words. But the same songs, the same style, in a different context, could be a complete disaster of language barriers and alien musical styles. So while God is the ultimate audience of all worship, there is something to be said for ensuring worship is not just relevant to our culture at last, but occasionally specifically tailored to a particular subculture that we may be serving at a particular time.

So if a church decides that it's purpose and strategy is to serve the elderly that are already steeped in (very) traditional Christianity, then clearly "thees and thous" are in order. But if a church decides that it wants to be relevant to today's culture at large, or to any other particular demographic, then I think what I've said above stands; "thee" and "thou" are foreign words to the majority, so we serve the majority best by not using them where perfectly clear and equivalent modern alternatives would do the same job.

10 things I would do if I were Prime Minister

2010-05-06T12:57:00.004+01:00

There seem to be quite a few people drawing up these kind of lists, so I figured I'd join them...

Ban cats (outside of zoos and wildlife parks)
Create a parliament/assembly for England, with equivalent powers to the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts
Introduce a quota system to limit how many private motorised vehicles can enter city centres (they have to book in advance)
Buses. More of them, and cheaper fares. Probably a national franchise system similar to the rail network.
Er... this is harder than I thought it would be. Ok, proportional representation: it's the right thing to do
Create more retail jobs by changing the VAT rate by a random amount each week
Cap the amount of airtime given to soaps on terrestrial TV to 2 hours per channel per week
Make the first Monday in November a bank holiday in celebration of All Saints' Day and Guy Fawkes Night, and also introduce new bank holidays in any other months that currently don't have any.
Close down Arsenal Football Club, or at least relegate them to make up for the 1919 fiasco
Make "causing death by dangerous driving" punishable by the same sentences as murder would be, and clamp down on speeding. Speed cameras on every lamp-post if need be. Hold on, is that two things?

What's on your list? Comment below!

What a week!

2010-05-04T10:47:00.005+01:00

This is going to be a very interesting week, on so many levels. In fact the next three days each have something profound to offer in one way or another.

Tomorrow's probably the least important one in terms of the impact it will have, but in its own way it's a massive event: Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City face one another in the Premier League, in their penultimate game of the season. At present Spurs are one point ahead of City and both teams are fighting it out for the all-important fourth place. For the uninitiated, finishing fourth puts a team in the lucrative Champions' League competition next season; the fifth placed team will still have a place in Europe, but in the less prestigious Europa League.

Tottenham have been hanging on to the fourth spot for most of the season, albeit with Man City having a game in hand for much of that time. If Spurs win tomorrow evening, they will have sealed Fourth spot; any other result and things will go down to the final matches of the season on Sunday, when Spurs visit Burnley and Man City go to West Ham. But tomorrow's match takes place in the City of Manchester Stadium, so it won't be an easy match for Spurs. If things do go down to the final game, then in theory it should be easier for Spurs to beat Burnley than for Man City to beat West Ham - but as the cliché goes, nothing's certain in football.

Uncertainty is rife this week! On Thursday we of course have the general election, and it's probably the closest and most exciting one we've had for many years. I've already voted (I have a postal vote) but as I live in a marginal constituency I'll be keeping a close eye on local developments as well as the national picture.

Then there's Friday. It's not confirmed yet, but that could be the day when I get interviewed for... well, for the job I'm doing now, but potentially on the salary of the job I used to have. Things are far from certain and obviously there's a lot I'm not going to say in a public blog (at least, not yet) - but hopefully over the next few weeks things will become clearer. One thing that is certain is that there's no such thing as a secure job in the 21st century!