“If you amplify everything your hear nothing”
- Jon Stewart, Rally for Sanity and/or Fear, 30 October 2010

The latest item on the various strikes and protests (mostly against the austerity measures) is the news that teachers may strike over the alleged privatisation of the state education system, and the policies of the coalition government.

This is perhaps the broadest objection I’ve heard so far. Strikes against austerity measures tended to be about cuts to a specific department, yet this doesn’t seem to mention austerity. Instead, the NASUWT has referred to “ideologically driven attacks” on the education system.

I leave it to others to discuss the merits of the union position on education reforms – I suspect others are better versed than me in the details of the relevant legislation.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder about the language used. The NASUWT has called the plans a “vicious assault” with one head teacher suggesting that the government is behaving as if it is “at war”. This sort of wording will be familiar to anyone who has read anything to do with any of the strikes of the last two years. The terms “war”,”fight”, “attack”, “assault” and “vicious” are regularly used, partly because they neatly imply that there are two totally opposed sides, but mostly because they contribute to vivid imagery.

Leaving aside whether you believe this language is appropriate or not, is its continued use helpful? The quote at the top of this article neatly summarises my thoughts: that the true extent of future damage to a country through policy could be lost if everything becomes analogous to a war in which lives are lost.

As I’ve mentioned on Twitter, I’m working on a new version of this site, which will have room for a little more content.

With the release of the new iPad, websites will be forced to improve. Traditionally, sites could be built by just using a straightforward image, with a defined number of pixels per image. The whole point of the retina display is to try and hide the existence of the pixel, to make the image as detailed as possible.

This is something of a challenge for web designers – sites built with the old methods can look a little blurry. For an example, just look at any app which hasn’t yet been updated with retina graphics.

There’s some discussion as to how to best go about this. Progressive JPEG files seem to work well, whilst Apple themselves use javascript to reduce the load on the site.

I’m not happy with using javascript. Although the new iPad supports it, eventually high resolution screens will be the norm on PCs, which may be using NoScript to block the use of javascript. I’ve gone with progressive JPEG files:

1. For each file, I save it at double the size I will be using on the site, and save it in Photoshop as a progressive JPEG (File -> Save for web -> JPEG -> Checkbox marked ‘Progressive’)
2. The section (or div) I’m using has a fixed width, and has background-size defined as the same width. So for an image of 1260px, the below CSS code is used:

#sections {

background-image:url('img/parliament.jpg');

background-size:630px; 

width: 630px; height: 300px;

}

The drawback of this method is filesize. This site doesn’t get a huge amount of traffic at the moment, so the server is fine. I’d be interested to know if anyone has any problems loading the new site, although I’ve moved to a new web host who should be more reliable. The other problem is the lack of transparency, which was always a wonderful feature of PNG files.

There’s always SVG files – vector images. (For the non-technical, these are images that don’t record pixels, but rather points, and then work out the lines in between them). These are great for logos (and can be zoomed to an infinite level), but are no good for photographs.

Either way, the result is much clearer, even using progressive JPEG files.

There’s a great demo of what the results are here. You need an iPad to see the true results, but it’s definitely worth it. The possibility of the wide use of high resolution displays is an interesting one.

The research by Full Fact into lobbying by way on banqueting, select committees and APPGs isn’t lobbying in the sense often used in the papers, in that very little of it was done by third parties on behalf of their clients. Nevertheless, many charities and companies provide funding for APPGs, or provide benefits such as tickets to sporting events.

When the claims made by Mr Cruddas became public, the debate immediately turned to party funding. Whilst this is a perfectly legitimate point, there was room for a much broader debate about access to politicians, which failed to materialise. Full Fact’s work on lobbying provides another chance for a debate that needs to take place. Simply ignoring the issue will only result in the same problems emerging.

Disclosure: I worked as an intern at Full Fact for two months, and during that time helped process some of the data for the lobbying research.

I’ll be writing a little more on this in the near future. In the meantime, the individual contributions to APPGs are well worth a read. You can find the raw data here (note: this is the latest data, while due to the length of the process the data used by Full Fact was from December 2011).

I wouldn’t really feel comfortable linking to an article I never finished reading, and in truth I’m not entirely comfortable writing about it. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting a recent article on the website of a national newspaper which criticised a political party by stating “we warned you, we told you so”, before arguing that said party was generally disreputable and to be avoided, without really specifying why they disagreed. I only got five or so paragraphs into the article before giving up. There may well have been a carefully constructed argument within the article, but I’m afraid I don’t believe it was expressed within the first half.

It doesn’t really matter which party was being referred to, but more that a large number of people voted for this party. Like every political party at the last general election, they didn’t gain enough votes to win, but they still gained a sizeable proportion of the vote.

Here’s a brief thought experiment: imagine that whichever party you voted for came up with a policy which was criticised, and then not only were the party attacked, but the people who voted for them were criticised for doing so.

If we want politics to be popular, which anyone who believes in a functioning democracy would encourage, then we need to celebrate a personal connection with our vote – the notion that the cross on the ballot paper is an expression of a person’s opinions, ideas and beliefs.

Politics should be a battle of ideas – a genuine open debate where concepts can be explored and politicians held to account for their policies. But when a party itself is attacked, and worse, the people who voted for it are attacked, there will be little reaction other than bitter resentment and a reluctance to engage. It only serves to reinforce a “them and us” approach, which immediately alienates part of the electorate, and often cements the views criticised.

Here are a few of the articles I’ve done over the last few weeks:

• Are claims on the scale of media police investigations correct? – Trevor Kavanagh claimed that Operation Weeting and the related investigations into the media constituted “the biggest single police operation in the history of British policing”. Given the prominence of the Leveson Inquiry and the investigations, this was the most popular article I’ve done.
• Does the majority of the public oppose same-sex marriage? – Checking a claim made by the Coalition for Marriage campaign that most of the public were opposed to same-sex marriage.
• Would a “marriage tax break” benefit the poor more than raising the income tax threshold? – Turns out this depends on your definition of ‘more’, but it’s interesting to see what happens if we get too bogged-down with the term ‘progressive’
• Could the government refuse written consent for Network Rail bonuses? – Maria Eagle claimed that the Transport Secretary Justine Greening was able to block network rail bonuses – a claim the government disputes. Turns out a lot of it depends on legal interpretation.

There are of course, many more factchecks available on the Full Fact site, which (unsurprisingly) I very much recommend.

Boris Johnson remarked that he couldn’t understand the bonus awarded to Stephen Hester as it was “completely out of whack” with other people’s pay. Many argued the Mayor of London was being opportunist, jumping on a bandwagon due to the upcoming mayoral election.

But Boris’s remarks had a secondary effect which won’t have gone unnoticed by his rivals. The dramatic difference in opinion between the Mayor and his party catapulted him straight into the headlines, ahead of Ed Miliband. An opportunity for Mr Miliband to refer back to his previous comments on “predatory capitalism” suddenly vanished as he was relegated to the second commentator on the issue. Despite it being the major story on the BBC News Channel, at one point I counted 7 minutes before his interview was featured, as Boris “became the story”.

The received wisdom is that when Mr Johnson goes “off-message” it is immensely frustrating for the Conservative party. I suspect yesterday might have been an exception.

Last week, most heads of state or government of the member states showed their willingness to move ahead with European integration towards a fiscal stability union. They showed that they want more Europe, not less

The BBC News website has been an interesting one to watch lately. For all the accusations of bias, their comments sections on the EU articles go completely against the perceived line. Most of the top rated comments either attack the BBC’s reporting or praise Cameron’s veto. If (and it’s a big “if”, although the polling numbers support it) most people agree with Cameron, Barroso’s line will not go down well with the British public, and could well provide fodder for a debate on our membership of the EU.

Edit: Changed link for polling numbers to the original Daily Mail article, which was cited by the Huffington Post but not linked. The original Huffington Post article I linked to can be found here.

Edit 2: It appears the BBC have updated their article since I first wrote this post, but the quote can still be found about half way down

The public inevitably like optimism in politicians, particularly when it is contrasted with the “doom and gloom” of 24 hour news channels. So it’s interesting to see what’s being said around the EU veto.

A majority of the criticism of the Prime Minister revolves around isolation and loss of influence, but the eurosceptics are for the most part keeping quiet. Despite reports that they are happy with Cameron’s veto, it would be quite a stretch to accuse them of gloating.

One of the most prominent eurosceptics, Daniel Hannan MEP, has written an article in the Daily Mail about the current arguments between europhiles and eurosceptics. What struck me most about the article was the final few paragraphs:

We can be a friend and sponsor to European integration, but our place is in the wider world, exploiting the growing markets of developing and Anglosphere nations, rediscovering the global vocation which our parents took for granted.

We are tied to peoples on every continent by custom and law, by affinity and affection, by blood and speech. Let us raise our eyes to those older and more distant horizons.

This is remarkably optimistic language which wouldn’t be out of place in an election campaign, and stands out amongst talk of the collapse of the Eurozone. We may be about to see a dramatic shift in tone from those keen to repatriate powers from the EU, drawing large numbers of voters with them.

He accused those posting the tweets of misogyny, and he may well have a point – there was no corresponding trend for things that ugly men should be banned from.

I’m not going to go off on a rant about it. Yet I’m curious as to what sort of mindset caused the trend. Inevitably, there will be a huge amount of “I was only joking” responses, not to mention “I didn’t mean it”.

Pressed further, I suspect the majority of those who tweeted anything along those lines would acknowledge all sorts of broadly academic points, such as the subjectiveness of appearance, the link to self esteem, and how the comments could be construed literally. I also imagine that many would be horrified at the prospect that a friend or someone they know might consider themselves “ugly” and take the remarks personally.

The thing about Twitter is how public it is – every remark made is openly available to anyone unless specifically directed at someone through a DM (Direct Message). Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I don’t think the views expressed are entirely the consequence of people thinking those views are “OK”, but rather a consequence of not knowing enough about how public their remarks are.

When it’s published, it’s available to everyone with internet access, and with caching is almost certainly stored forever. I wonder if a little more caution might dramatically affect what trends.