Not a radio button. Image via Wikipedia

Oh, here’s a hideous survey. It invites you to tell the DWP what you think about Social Justice – the capital letters are clearly important. On the second (final) page of the survey you can opt in to hear more about Social Justice, although they’ve missed off the box where you can opt out from being not refrained from not being uncontacted by our carefully selected third-party partners with offers that we believe will be of interest to you.

Here are a few of the problems:

• Basic point, but a survey isn’t going to tell you much about public or expert opinion on something as fuzzy as “Social Justice”. If you want public views, run a focus group. If you want expert views, ask experts.
• The key question “what does Social Justice mean to you” is a teeny-tiny free text entry box.
• The key question is not a compulsory question, though the region where you work is.
• The survey also asks “what do you think Social Justice means to the Government?” to which the only answers are either a political rant of one kind or another, or “Dunno”.
• The second page of the survey has another teeny-tiny text box question, also not compulsory, which is “what do you think the Government is doing about families with multiple disadvantages?”. This question is clearly connected in some policy official’s mind with Social Justice – in fact, my wonkdar suggests that this is what the Government means by Social Justice – but to most people answering the survey, it’s a curveball. And what, in any case, is the Government “doing”? Presumably the question is intended to exclude “running the NHS, the police, the benefits system, and funding large chunk of local authority work”.
• The next question is “how effective is the Government’s approach to dealing with individuals and families with multiple disadvantages?”, and the answer is – I’m laughing as I type this – a radio box with options running from “Very effective” to “Very Ineffective” via “Neither effective nor ineffective”. Fortunately there’s an “I don’t know” option, though not one for “I can’t sum up a huge range of interlocking and often conflicting Government initiatives of which I have only partial knowledge using a radio button, at least not if you’re looking for any input that might be regarded as even slightly useful rather than just a random neural firing”.

What’s perhaps worst about this survey is that it doesn’t feel like DWP are looking for consultation cover for a decision they’ve already reached. They seem to want – tragically –  to get some external input into this fuzzy discussion. They’ve just chosen completely the wrong way of doing it.

The report is a good assessment of some of the potential downsides of digital development, arranged in eight themes and with links to relevant articles and media coverage:

Orestes pursued by the Furies. Image via Wikipedia

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who is as Eurosceptic as you would expect a former Telegraph Europe correspondent to be, has a piece comparing the treatment of the Greeks to that of the unfortunate Melians massacred at the hands of the Athenian army during the Peloponnesian war. I don’t think that the analogy works, because the Melians were fighting a war (which the Greeks aren’t), and the Athenians were looking for territorial advantage (which the Germans aren’t), and because it was in the context of a pre-modern society (not a Europe of deeply interconnected sets of banking institutions) but aside from those small niggles, I think there is a different classical analogy for what’s starting to happen in Europe – the Eumenides of Aeschylus.

Fade in: Orestes, son of Agamemnon, arrives in Athens pursued by the hideous vengeful Furies (the Eumenides – appeasingly-named “kindly ones” – of the title). He has murdered his mother Klytemnestra, in revenge for her murder of her husband/his father Agamemnon. The Furies are pursuing him because that’s what they do – they are ancient spirits of vengeance who hunt down who have broken oaths or spilled kindred blood. They say themselves:

Remorseless Fate gave us this work
to carry on forever, a destiny
spun out for us alone,
to attach ourselves to those
who, overcome with passion,
slaughter blood relatives.
We chase after them until the end,
until they go beneath the ground.

Athena appears, and – to the Furies’ horror – summons men from Athens to create the first jury court, to try the case of Orestes.

I’ll appoint human judges of this murder,
a tribunal bound by oath—I’ll set it up
to last forever. So you two parties,
summon your witnesses, set out your proofs,
with sworn evidence to back your stories.
Once I’ve picked the finest men in Athens,
I’ll return. They’ll rule fairly in this case,
bound by a sworn oath to act with justice.

The Furies are concerned about moral hazard:

If his legal action triumphs,
if now this matricide prevails,
then newly set divine decrees
will overthrow all order.
Mortals will at once believe
that everything’s permitted.
For Furies who keep watch on men
will bring no anger down
on human crimes—so then
we loose death everywhere,
all forms of killing known to man.

The trial proceeds, and at the verdict the votes are equal, which under Athenian law means Orestes is acquitted. The Furies rage:

Sterility will spread across the land,
contaminate the soil, destroy mankind.
What can I do now but scream out in pain?
The citizens make fun of us, the Furies.
How can we put up with such indignity,
daughters of Night disgracefully abused,
shamed, dishonoured, our powers cast aside?

However, Athena appeases them with the promise of a permanent shrine in Athens, where they will be honoured as protectors of the country.

Where Evans-Pritchard sees in Europe the red-in-tooth-and-claw world of the Melian Dialogue, I see the first stirrings of transition from old rules to new that Aeschylus’s play memorialises. Aeschylus was describing the mythical beginnings of the Athenian system of jury-trials (precursor to the Athenian democracy) – and did so by telling the story of how the old world of vengeance and blood-guilt was replaced by a new world of laws and evidence. Maybe the Greeks will leave the Euro in the end, but across Europe as a whole it feels like the Furies of austerity and no-bailout clauses are starting to lose the trial against a more rationalist, growth-driven, unifying approach. When the elections in France and Germany take place in the next couple of years, we should see what the outcome is.

After the phone- and email-hacking and the illegal payments to police and other public officials scandal currently engulfing the British press the key question is, What needs to be done to make sure that it doesn’t happen again?

Journalists are obviously resistant to statutory regulation, which they believe will undermine the watchdog role that the press is supposed to play with respect to the government and the police. The belief by journalists is that this isn’t an issue of regulation but rather of enforcing existing laws. In an interview with the Guardian, outgoing Associated Press president and chief executive Tom Curley sums up that point of view nicely:

The laws on hacking and payments are rather clear. We don’t need more laws there but somebody didn’t enforce what was already there. Why did they not enforce them? What was really going on and how does that get resolved?

That’s really key. Not only is there clear evidence of wrong-doing, there has been clear evidence of wrong-doing for years, almost a a decade. What perverted the course of justice to such an extent that the News International’s ‘rogue reporter’ defence stood up for so long?

As an American, I come at this from a distinctly American point of view, not just in terms of journalism but also in terms of a fundamentally American civic point of view. The entire basis of US constitutional governance is a system of checks and balances. The Founding Fathers believed that government power needed to be held in check, which is why they invested counter-balancing power in the courts, Congress and the office of the president. Despite an increase in the concentration of executive power beginning in the 1930s, you only have to see how Barack Obama is checked by a hostile Congress to see how checks and balances operate.

The press is often referred to as the Fourth Estate, another centre of power, another check against authority. However, it’s pretty clear that in the UK, power actually became so concentrated in the tabloid press that it effectively has gone unchecked. The police didn’t hold the tabloids to account, and politicians actually courted Rupert Murdoch’s king-making Sun.

Now as the investigations into illegal payments to public officials and police yield arrests for questioning, Sun Associate Editor Trevor Kavanagh thundered in defence of his paper and the British press today under the headline Witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on Press freedom.

An effort by the police to finally do a proper investigation and hold people to account is a Soviet-style witch-hunt?

Read his article. It’s typically good Sun bombast, but it’s also typical of tabloid diversion: Change the subject, frame the argument so that something very unseemly seems righteous and pure. He says his journalists are blameless:

Their alleged crimes? To act as journalists have acted on all newspapers through the ages, unearthing stories that shape our lives, often obstructed by those who prefer to operate behind closed doors. These stories sometimes involve whistleblowers. Sometimes money changes hands. This has been standard procedure as long as newspapers have existed, here and abroad.

Chequebook journalism is a pretty common feature in securing tattle for the tabloid press. However, if you start to whip out the chequebook to pay a police officer or a public official, that’s something entirely different. It starts to establish a potentially corrupting relationship between officials and the press. Yes, it is done in extraordinary circumstances, such as obtaining the records for the explosive MPs expenses story. However, a nonchalance about money changing hands between journalists and public officials shines a spotlight on the problem; it doesn’t provide a defence for the practice or for those involved in it.

Occasionally journalists will engage in surreptitious recording if it is in the public interest. Occasionally, and in extraordinary circumstances when there is no other way to get a story, we will conceal our identity as journalists. However, we only bend or break our own professional rules if there is an overriding public interest in doing so. There is no public interest defence for breaking the Computer Misuse Act. There is no public interest defence for intercepting voicemail messages.

With sufficient justification and internal editorial oversight, normal guidelines can be set aside when there is an overwhelming public need to do so, but journalists cannot break the law without understanding that we will be held to account.

The journalists now being investigated are not being treated any differently than anyone else would be in an investigation, and if journalists are suspected of breaking the law, there is nothing special about our profession that allows police to treat us any differently than anyone else. Members of the Fourth Estate are not exempt from the laws of the other three. A press card, even the new one proposed by the Daily Mail’s Paul Dacre, is not a licence to break the law. The sooner that tabloid journalists accept that, the sooner we can move on from this dark chapter in the history of journalism.

The report calls for a voluntary regulation regime, with strong incentives for joining, such as easier press accreditation or possibly labelling schemes. A new code of conduct would be at the heart of the regulatory regime.

Jenkins also calls on civil society organisations to fund innovative practice in news and information, particularly focusing on technological and editorial innovation to broaden reach and access.

Finally, the report recommends a stronger push on high-speed broadband, more emphasis on ethics in journalism training, and ongoing support for public broadcasting.

Declaration: Carnegie are helping out with our thinking on media regulation, but this is their project rather than ours.

François Hollande, the Socialist candidate for president of France, is well ahead in the polls, so it’s worth reading his pre-manifesto, “The change is now: 60 commitments for France”, published last week.

François Hollande. Image via Wikipedia

It’s striking, as others have pointed out, that the Internet and new technologies get sparse mention in the 23 pages of political commitments. Other than a few business-focused promises about high-speed Internet and tech businesses, there’s nothing that touches on public service reform, let alone the sort of internet-enabled participation and co-design that was being discussed at UKGovCamp last week.

The closest M. Hollande gets is commitments to decentralisation (pledge 54, p. 35), but that is at its heart a specific proposal to undo one of the local government reforms undertaken by Sarkozy.

Compare that with the proposals in the UK Conservative manifesto from 2010, whose summary promises:

“We will give people much more say over the things that affect their daily lives. We will make government, politics and public services much more open and transparent. And we will give the
people who work in our public services much greater esponsibility. But in return, they will have to answer to the people. All these measures will help restore trust in our broken political system.”

Similarly, the Labour party’s manifesto at the same election said:

“Citizens expect their public services to be transparent,
interactive and easily accessible. We will open up government,
embedding access to information and data into the very fabric of public services. Citizens should be able to compare local services, demand improvements, choose between providers, and hold government to account.”

We await the full PS manifesto, and that from incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy. Perhaps the absence of public service reform ideas reflects a socialist conservatism around public service delivery.

I suspect, however, that the lack of commitments on new models of public service reflects its lack of currency in the French political system. On Twitter, during UKGovCamp, Nicolas Vanbremeersch (@versac) said that there had never been a French GovCamp – but perhaps there should be.

It feels like, at a time when the French government is under the same pressure to make savings as the British one, that this is something where Britain could take a lead, if the appetite for change is there among the leaders and we can find the disruptors.

So, thanks Strange Maps blog, who have posted about it with the original place-name graph – obtained by stopping every two hundred metres along the A10 and asking ten people “where am I?”

Was this the face that launched a thousand blogs? Getty Images via @daylife

My back-of-a-cornflake-packet physics knowledge tells me that matter has a counterpart, called antimatter, and if the two meet, they are annihilated in a burst of energy. It turns out that the Euro and Stephen Hester‘s bonus package have the same relation, except that when they meet, consistency is annihilated in a burst of comment pieces.

Thus those who, on European issues, utter full-throated calls for the People’s Voice To Be Heard are, on Hester’s bonus, pursing their lips, wringing their hands and imploring us to look at the long-term economic consequences of giving in to populism.

Meanwhile, the compromise-hugging internationalist pro-Europeans are transformed into Tribunes of the Plebs, praising the people from the rostrum for their sturdy common sense.

Almost as if they weren’t interested in what the people thought at all, except when it suited them.

I seem to keep encountering folks who respond to new bits of news unfavorable to their guy by reflexively adjusting all of their other views to preserve their pre-conceived notion that their guy is The Man.

via Are Primary Fights Becoming Dueling Cults of Personality? By Jim Geraghty. (National Review)

Leveson is considering a range of matters, from criminal abuses to the disputed terrain of privacy. But press criminality should properly be the concern of a hitherto lax police force. The excessive dominance of certain media players could be tackled by considering market share, the province of an existing regulator, the Competition Commission. Recent witnesses have warned against new statutory restrictions. So unless Leveson recommends a new privacy law, which none of the pre-Christmas panel advocated, what would be left for a new regulator to regulate?

Plenty, in my view.

Katie Price gets doorstepped by photographers. Difficult to get excited by this if no law is broken: her wealth and fame depend on a cultivated symbiosis with the media. But if the same treatment is meted out to a “private” individual, it looks different. And imagine that individual was the subject of stories hinting, on mere supposition, they were complicit in a crime.

A political party sees the worst constructions put upon its motives by a hostile newspaper. Provided the coverage isn’t libellous, tough. Same for big businesses, corporations, football teams. They are big and ugly enough to take it. But the same treatment to a local charity or a corner shop?

No one was specifically libelled by The Sun’s Hillsborough coverage on 19th April 1989. But an entire community felt besmirched. But how would redress be pursued? A legal action: City of Liverpool versus News International?

In many areas of life, public service, for example, there are bodies which people individually or collectively can approach and seek redress outside the courts. Complainants may lack resources to pursue legal action. They may not actually want damages, but simply an acknowledgement of wrongdoing and an apology, or they may have been treated unfairly but within the letter of the law. One can easily imagine something like this for complaints against the print media: a body hearing claims from members of the public that they had been unfairly pursued or traduced by a newspaper.

Would it be a regulator? Many myths abound about regulators. Time for a few truths.

Regulation suggests standards, rules and procedures, inspection, licensing or permits. Regulation suggests all these things. But regulators rarely do them all. Some regulators issue licences. Many have competence to inspect categories of business, but do not licence or control market entry. Economic regulators may not inspect individual businesses at all, but uphold market standards – competition, fair pricing – to protect consumers. Some regulators develop laws. Others police laws set elsewhere. Whenever a regulator is established, it is almost always an innovation of range, scope and competence. It is possible to create proportionate, risk-based and non-invasive regulators that leave most businesses alone and focus relentlessly on wrongdoers. And it is possible to create overbearing, intrusive, meddlesome regulators that fail to spot wrongdoings because they cannot see the wood for the trees.

Further, it is simplistic to equate regulation with state control. Plenty of regulators are statutory and funded from general taxation. But independence from ministerial control is often a defining characteristic.

One group of independent, publicly funded, quasi-regulatory bodies are the various Ombudsmen. They do not inspect, but respond to complaints. Funded by government, they are not subject to political control. Indeed, the Local Government Ombudsman regularly finds against politicians and administrations of all political shades.

A publicly funded Press Ombudsman could develop and promulgate standards and then receive complaints.

This sounds a bit like the Press Complaints Commission. However, it would not suffer that body’s “producer capture”, which Leveson clearly sees as a major problem. Neither would it be the repressive thought police of news editor imagining. Established by statute, it could be subject to guaranteed long-term funding and non-departmental (ie not overseen by a minister). Senior officials could be Crown appointments, but not selected by the Prime Minister, chosen instead by an independent recruitment panel drawn from a range of stakeholders, including the public. And the Ombudsman could avoid becoming a rich celebrity’s privacy shield by concerning itself with the comparative “vulnerability” of claimants.

Leveson sniped at the PCC in recent exchanges, describing it as a mere complaints handler. Our putative Ombudsman would have to be more than that to satisfy him. It would need real teeth.

The Local Government Ombudsman specialises in restorative justice. This approach might have force with print media. Being required to print full front page apologies could cause editors to interest themselves in the factuality of their coverage. But so would the occasional imposition of very steep fines.

A Press Ombudsman would be mostly silent. It wouldn’t inspect. It wouldn’t licence. It wouldn’t meddle. Its scope would be narrow. But it would be credible, independent and carry a medium-sized stick.

This option, which we discussed at the December session, seems to me a proportionate and constructive step. It fills a perceived gap in the scheme of redress, but does not risk state control or censorship. It builds on existing arrangements, but gives them backbone.

A softly spoken but respected sheriff in the Wild West of news.