Shades of grey and the Mozart of the MTV generation

Michael Jackson's death sinks in slowly.

I remember where I was when John Lennon died. The remembering of people who strive to excel - who infuse excellence into the world around them by their example and their endeavour - is easy. Appreciating them justly is rather more complex. It takes time.

It seems to me that the time we need as blogging aficionados to justly appreciate what happens around us is being lost in the helter skelter desire to be the first with the comment, the first with the news. I am aware of how easily the blogosphere can be manipulated - or if not manipulated, then herded in one direction or another - and it does not remind me of excellence. It does not remind me of people who strive to make something lasting and memorable.

Both John Lennon and Michael Jackson do.

Michael Jackson seems, in a way, like the Mozart of the MTV generation.

And so it is that I revert to my technological bunker.

But technology and its implementation is political. Software is code. Code is law. Laws are being made by software engineers. Lawmakers are becoming more and more irrelevant.

If the personal was political in the 60s and 70s, perhaps the technological is political in the early part of the 21st century.

Or perhaps I'm trying to convince myself that I'm not degenerating into irrelevancies.

I've spent the last week fiddling around with Skype Lite and fring on my Nokia E63. I've also installed a DivX player for mobile phones which works like a dream. Even iPlayer runs - though currently unpredictably and more often than not only after a fashion - if you access it via the Skyfire browser.

Today, I managed to install Last.fm - or, at least, the web version of Last.fm - by adding my logon to fring.

There's a lot more you can do with a phone than the operators would have you believe.

This is what makes the subject of communication so very political.

Communication is the key to us understanding and conceptualising the future properly and fairly. It is becoming a utility. This is as it should have been all along. Education used to be the preserve of the wealthy - mainly because education makes us better and more effective communicators; now it - and the ability to make our voices heard, to impact on the degrees of power we enjoy - is a right of the majority.

That is the achievement of our generation.

When all I need to make my telephone calls, listen to my music, post my blogs and watch TV is a mobile Internet connection, so the Internet becomes as basic a right as water, food, gas, electricity and housing. If we are to create a better world, a world which goes beyond the oppressions of menial work, the oppressions that demand of our societies a terrible professionalisation of politics because the rest of us simply do not have the energy to participate, then we must focus on the infrastructure of communication as we have never done so before. We must protect it. We must nurture it. We must battle to keep it free. We must understand its potential to release us.

And we must use it - above all - to deprofessionalise political activity.

They are right. Well before Obama and Oprah, Michael Jackson showed how the world is not black and white but shades of grey.

We should learn how to keep it that way. We should fight to do so. The key is how we talk to each other. In the future, the key will be whether we choose to reproduce the essential stupidities of 24-hour rolling news or whether we decide to use the tools we have to hand to create a reflective environment of healthy engagement.

Only time will tell.

As always.

Digging deeper into my technological bunker (II)

This Skyfire thing is a bloody revolution. It even works with ITV's equivalent of iPlayer - I've just been watching "Coronation Street" on my phone and I haven't had to install Microsoft's wretched software plug-in equivalent of Flash to do so (or maybe it's already installed - who knows?).

Has no one else heard of this browser and what it can do?

Digging deeper into my technological bunker

Skyfire is really good. Really, really good. It's now my default mobile browser. I can see and listen to video on the BBC and the Guardian. The mobile Internet suddenly becomes something rather more than WAP-based links that only ever reminded one of the advent of teletext at the end of the last century. I now have TV on my mobile - what's more, I want to watch it.

No media players. No problems with the BBC identifying my compression IP as extra-British and thus not deserving of streaming video. These people must have set up their server parks on British soil. Either that, or the BBC are being fooled in an almighty way.

This is really good stuff, really lovely software engineering.

Try it out. You really must. That is, if you have a Symbian phone (Nokia and possibly some of its cousins) or a Windows mobile phone.

As I said yesterday, even iPlayer sort of works.

I've fallen in love with my technological toys, even as politics and its shenanigans simply block my writerly desires.

Even as stories like this make me gulp in shame.

Skyfire on the Nokia E63 and the unravelling of the good

I came across a curious little Opera Mini kind of clone today, called Skyfire. It allows you to see videos embedded in web pages whilst browsing the Internet using your mobile. According to the literature, it seems to work with most Symbian phones; I've tried it out on the Nokia E63. You can find out more about it here and here. A little rough round the edges at the moment - iPlayer half-worked then hung, although the Guardian video player went like a dream - but some potentially mighty features, all the same. I liked the double click zoom feature in particular. Well worth a try.

Meanwhile, we had a power dip in our area of Chester this evening. Lights went dim, our digital radio spat out noises like a mini machine-gun, and the toaster and microwave stopped working completely. A quick phonecall to what we used to call Manweb confirmed that up to a hundred houses would probably be affected.

Seems to have been sorted by now though.

I had visions of an early computerless night.

No chance.

For even as I hide in technological bunkers of my own making, I am still trying to work out why I should continue to participate in the political process. Yes. I know. People are suffering. And so they are. But what, in all reality, can my participation do to ameliorate that suffering? I am but a grain of sand on a crude-ridden beach that runs for miles and miles; a beach that occupied a treasured place in Paradise but is currently awaiting a final apocalyptic napalming by people who operate in utter bad faith.

People who will choose to unravel all the good the last decade has brought us and simply build on all the bad.

Jos is right. Politics is not about gratitude but aspirations. We - as a political movement - have forgotten what that means.

No social life - but even so, a happy bunny

You can read about my IT-related exploits over at Zebra Red today. They kept me up till 3 am - but I am a happy bunny, nevertheless. There's always a way, even in the direst of circumstances. A lesson there for politicians of all shades of opinion.

More here.

Gordon Brown describes himself thus as I fall for an atheist soul

A useful interview with the Guardian tonight as Gordon Brown says more than he has generally cared to. I could warm to this man yet - if, that is, the man only chose to properly show himself:

"To be honest, you could walk away from all of this tomorrow." (He often says "you" to distance himself from the intended "I".) "I'm not interested in what accompanies being in power. It wouldn't worry me if I never returned to any of those places - Downing Street, Chequers. That would not worry me at all. And it would probably be good for my children."

More here.

Mind you, there are a lot of people out there who'd love to have the choice - the veritable luxury, in fact - of walking away from work and by thus doing, so achieving the same. That is to say, doing the right thing for their children. The economic crisis that has befallen us has made all of that all the more difficult. Children and families and parents and households are all suffering in their small and trivial, yet measurable, ways because rich people with more money than sense played silly games with all our futures.

In the meantime, I find myself in a sea of contradictions. It was my birthday recently and my family bought me a smartphone - an icon, if there ever was one, of all that I should despise and distrust. And yet I am fascinated by the beast. I have installed Skype on it, Opera Mini, Gmail and Google Maps; even the Mobi ebook reader - a French enterprise now in the clutches of Amazon.

"Who else?" you might say.

I continue to tussle with my conscience as gigantic organisations made to make profit out of the labour of small people bring the fruits of technology to my doorstep. I am a prolific user of free services provided by companies like Google and Nokia and Amazon. I am incoherent with my principles - I am bereft of them even, quite to my dismay.

And yet, on the third day of my proud ownership of my new Nokia E63 (ruby red I promise you - for I could never be a blue, even in my moments of profoundest despair), I download the Communist Manifesto from Project Gutenberg and thus it is that I begin to read a quite fascinating document.

I can't say I agree with the implications of the Communist way. I think it is solidly tied into a time and a place.

It's bond and its coherence with that time and place is - at the same time - its weakness.

But its heart - its atheist soul perhaps I should say - is in exactly the right place.

We must revisit its lessons as we try to fashion a world that does not tear itself apart through its own contradictions but aims to come together out of the dissonance of diversity.

For we are all diverse and any politics must start by recognising this.

Both in its system as well as in its outlook. Both in its benevolence to as well as in its support for human frailty.

How can I justify downloading an ebook of the Communist Manifesto to a tool which is the essence of all that is wrong in instant-gratification yuppie land? Well, I can't. I am frail also. But I do believe our future depends on our ability to accept our differences, our contradictions, our uncertain figures. If this blog has tried to say anything to those who would care to listen, it is that - above all - our differences should make us better, stronger, fitter and wiser. And our ability to countenance difference should serve to make us more humble.

Events over the past couple of months have made me reconsider my relationship with traditional politics.

Too much bad stuff, really.

I need to have more time to reflect, to understand, to try and comprehend. I can't do the blogging of snap judgements. I'm just not good enough a writer. Once, I spent about six months doing that. It wasn't productive. There must be a better way to bridge what Andrew Regan has called the yawning gap between blogging and policy-making. More blogging isn't that way.

I am convinced that the way forward is a different kind of distribution. A different kind of distribution is needed, a different kind of information.

A different kind of voice.

A different kind of soul.

A soul which countenances contradiction and exception - and then loves you because you care, you truly care, to properly countenance it yourself.

The British Economy, Gordon Brown and Paul Krugman's Praise (Everything, That Is, Except Telegenic Smalltalk)

A couple of interesting stories today. This brief one from the BBC has Paul Krugman praising Gordon Brown's economic policies, as he defines Britain's economy as the best in Europe (though this may, indeed, end up being faint praise indeed - for Europe is lurching horribly to the right and the politics of race is beginning to persecute us once more).

Meanwhile, a report published in this morning's El País (original Spanish here, English translation via Google here) shows how it's possible to have the best brain in the class and still not have that curiously necessary ability to find real friends anywhere.

I am, for some strange reason, reminded of Nixon in that exchange at the end of the film "Frost/Nixon", where the now ex-president suggests he should've been the rigorous TV interviewer and Frost the hand-squeezing politician, instead of the other way round.

On the other hand, perhaps, in his own way, Frost was a politician of sorts.

The truth of the matter is that getting it right doesn't mean people are going to love you. Perhaps a better analogy is World War II and how the British people dispensed with Churchill. The recent European elections will most likely be politics' Dunkirk. As the economy resurfaces from its dismal and miserable cruelties, it will be down to other politicians to reap the positives of Brown's wisdom and steadfastness.

He will not win at the next general election, but he will have a place in history.

That of the man who knew how to pick up the terrible pieces through an insider's knowledge of just how everything functioned.

Everything, that is, except telegenic smalltalk.

The Hobson's Choice That Is Our Digital Worlds

I spoke recently on Paul's site and also alluded here on my own of the difficulties I'm having at the moment. Speaking up about the incongruities - and sometimes the downright injustices - of the economic world we live in is very easy when you don't have a big employer breathing down your neck. But subtle mind games are part and parcel of working in large corporations. Thus it is that I cannot even talk about my work in a throwaway fashion on Facebook.

All well and good, you may say. Who is ever going to want to piss on their own turf? (Unless, of course, you happen to be a member of the Labour Party - in which case it kind of comes with the territory.) But, if truth be told, those who are best placed to offer a useful opinion on anything that happens on this planet are those who work at the coalface. In a global village of digital worlds the permanence of our words can far outreach their intended weight. In this sense, I can understand big companies' reluctance to allow its workforce to communicate as anyone else might.

I can understand it but I do not approve.

For the man or woman at the coalface has a right to say what they think. If large companies truly believe in a work/life balance, they must also contemplate us being able to talk about work in those parts of our life which are not work. And these days, that may almost exclusively mean Facebook, Twitter and blogging.

Otherwise we are, as communicative, social and democratic subjects, being disenfranchised by the powerful in yet more insidious ways.

I no longer feel free to speak. I censor even my thoughts, before they can spring to mind.

Is that healthy?

Am I in the right job?

Should I simply retire from what I do and find somewhere else which may offer me the freedoms I feel I have a right to?

And, yet, would that not be me throwing in the towel? Should I not stay and hold my ground? Is there any point to contemplating such a quixotic enterprise?

Observations and advice most welcome from you all.

Moral compass, education, education, education and how to make of a kiss a dropped pound coin

There must be limits to what politics can do. These days, it's almost as if politics and politicians are the dialectic equivalent of Google, reserving the right to seep into everything. The Reith Lectures are currently addressing the issue. More can be found here. Meanwhile, this curious little gem of a poem published in today's Guardian reminds us better than we knew how to remind ourselves of what is going wrong in public life and how politics has become the mosquito-ridden waters of latterday narrative:

How it makes of your face a stone

that aches to weep, of your heart a fist,

clenched or thumping, sweating blood, of your tongue

an iron latch with no door. How it makes of your right hand

a gauntlet, a glove-puppet of the left, of your laugh

a dry leaf blowing in the wind, of your desert island discs

hiss hiss hiss, makes of the words on your lips dice

that can throw no six. How it takes the breath

away, the piss, makes of your kiss a dropped pound coin,

makes of your promises latin, gibberish, feedback, static,

of your hair a wig, of your gait a plankwalk. How it says this –

politics – to your education education education; shouts this –

Politics! – to your health and wealth; how it roars, to your

conscience moral compass truth, POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS.

Triangulation

The dangers of a life led entirely under the shadow of triangulation. This paragraph in particular hits uncomfortably home:

Triangulation is the only effective tool many New Labour politicians know. Even after years of warnings about it's brief shelf-life and unsustainability, along with its moral destitution, people stick to their guns. Even if that means triangulating fascists.

More here.

Mr 10%

I don't normally republish chain emails but I'll make an exception with this one. Alan Johnson sets the record straight as the Tories reveal their true plans:

Today the Tories finally admitted just how much they want to cut from our public services. I’m writing so that you have all the facts because we need to get this message out there in our communities up and down the country.

I think a lot of people listening to the BBC this morning will have been shocked when they heard David Cameron’s health spokesman Andrew Lansley stating that the Tories would make 10 per cent spending cuts in the vast majority of government departments. It wasn’t a gaffe – even though Mr Lansley seems to have gone to ground at the minute, he hasn’t been sacked for revealing the truth about the Tories’ plans.

I’ve only been Home Secretary for a few days, but I can already see what an impact a 10 per cent cut in that budget would have. Looking at the figures in my department, it would mean front line police officers would be subject to real cuts next year, leaving our streets much less safe. And I’m sure there would be similar risks when those kinds of cuts hit public transport or the skills and science budgets.

Labour’s investment in police officers and community support officers is vital to making our streets safer. Since 1997 there are over 14,000 more police officers and nearly 16,000 community support officers. We now have 3,600 neighbourhood policing teams across the country - one for every community.

We know that there is no appetite in this country for cuts that would undermine the fight against crime. It’s up to everyone in our party – MPs, ministers, activists and trade unionists – to make sure that we get this message out to the country.

It's time to tell David Cameron - Mr 10 Per Cent - that no one wants his Tory cuts.

Meanwhile, Paul says all sorts of things my job precludes me from saying in public. You can read more here, though please don't say I told you.

The National Wealth Service

Need just one reason to continue believing in Labour?

This is what happens when you throw money at health and refuse to coordinate the effort:

Pockets of medical excellence dot the landscape, but at least 100,000 people die each year from infections they acquired in the hospital, while 1.5 million are harmed by medication errors. Of 37 industrialized nations, the United States ranks 29th in infant mortality and among the world's worst on measures such as obesity, heart disease and preventable deaths.

Bright young physicians trained at prestigious and expensive universities enter a profession built on perverse financial rewards. They, like assembly-line workers of the past, are paid on a piecemeal basis, earning more money not by doing better but simply by doing more.

Yet more care rarely translates into better health. Extensive research by Dartmouth College has found the exact opposite: Health outcomes are often best in communities that spend less compared with cities such as Boston and Miami where the medical arms race of specialists and high-tech gadgets often leads to greater risks and injuries.

More here from the Washington Post today on the sadnesses of market-driven healthcare.

Free speech baloney and the party of personality politics

Must have been aired quite widely by now as it's amongst the most read on the Guardian at the moment. Even so, it deserves a mention here:

A row between the fast food giant Burger King and one of its major franchise owners has erupted over roadside signs proclaiming "global warming is baloney".

The franchise owner's marketing president justifies their posture (though not their science) in the following way:

McNelis added: "The [restaurant] management team can put the message up there if they want to. It is private property and here in the US we do have some rights. Notwithstanding a franchise agreement, I could load a Brinks vehicle with [rights] I've got so many of them. By the time the Burger King lawyers work out how to make that stick we'd be in the year 2020."

He continued: "Burger King can bluster all they want about what they can tell the franchisee to do, but we have free-speech rights in this country so I don't think there's any concerns."

More here.

So. It's a question of free speech. The subtext perhaps is that even under Obama, private property continues to mean something.

In this case, a verbal baloney of quite monumental proportions.

Verbal baloney is quite the order of the day. The BNP is simply symptomatic of how disgraceful ideas can reach a twisted state of grace. When papers like the Guardian begin to write stories which include "genteel" and "neo-fascism" in the same headline, so it is that the normalisation of the abnormal and stomach-heaving ends up taking place.

Nazism was always part of our political DNA. The prejudices against Jews and other ethnic groupings were shared - gently perhaps but nevertheless persistently - by many people at the time. There has to be a Petri dish for any culture to take hold. Many people formed that Petri dish and allowed that culture to take hold. I even remember my grandfather expressing certain views about international finance which I found hard to stomach. He was a lifelong member of the Labour Party.

Now British Nazism has a European-funded voice. Whether the BNP is right- or left-wing is beside the point (though some would continue to engage in a childish battle of name-calling). It is extreme and feeds off the anger of both ends of the political spectrum. It is also a sign of how ineffectual our mainstream politicians are becoming.

It is an awfully explicit metaphor for how the Labour Party has failed to lead the country. Even as Brent and Sheffield show that local leadership can make a difference, at a national level there is really nothing further to be said.

Sterile debate is leading to sterile decisions, as the party which would be the party of policy politics becomes - in quite an entrenched way - the party of personality politics.

AM/PM

If you didn't see it on Sunday, grab it on iPlayer whilst you still can. Minute 39, to be precise. Via John Naughton today.

You can tell I'm feeling a little miserable, but watching Andrew Marr do a Manchester United in the face of Mandelson's Barcelona has definitely heartened me a mite. Whilst that "united against him" Freudian slip in minute 58 actually serves to endear him to me.

Yes. Peter Mandelson is also human.

If only our leaders knew how to play European football.

Berlusconi's Neverland

Here's a quote and a half:

"Politicians, even those with fewer prejudices, are not yet ready to admit what they do, fearing that someone will compare it with what they say."

Horrified by hidebound tradition in Anglo-Saxon Britain? You might want to take a peek over the borders and check out what another player in the Iraq War got up to whilst young men and women gave their lives on behalf of empire-building.

Of course, all they serve in Villa Certosa is free ice-cream. From El País today, the following:

Let us now visit Villa Certosa, the mysterious Sardinian mansion property of the Milanese tycoon who is currently Prime Minister and rotating president of the G-8, as well as leader of the People of Freedom party, elected by show of hands.

An intriguing report, with photos to boot, can be found here. Even more intriguingly, published in an English which just about bears reading.

So is this what happens more widely in international politics? And if so, should we be worried?

And if we should be worried, what can we do?

When the lining that could be silver is actually slivers of glass

Silver lining? Alastair Campbell is the most optimistic of souls. This is mostly not a cloud with a silver lining but an example of how Parliament may be riddled with slivers of glass, as ancient windows that suddenly throw light on hidden practice disintegrate in the blasts of voter fury - and erstwhile public servants cut and bleed on the shards that now scatter their paths.

Sad times indeed.

Well.

I am sad anyway.

Bloggers4Labour (II)

A welcome return to active blogging appears to be in the offing. This, from Andrew's Twitter feed, reveals all. (Well, not really. But it does seem to indicate something's in the offing.)

"W." (or how evil won)

Really not sure how to label my experience of this film. Just saw it this evening. Set my still sometimes restless and unhappy soul to rest. If only I'd have been able to see this film before I cracked up, I really wouldn't have cracked up. Of that I am sure. Even to hear these words of acknowledgement, of truths hidden, of lies told, of half-baked inventions cooked up between faxes and phonecalls ... all from the mouths of actors and the art of screenwriters; it really didn't matter that this was sucedáneo and not chocolate. Resolution and closure were terrifically mine.

Iraq was oil and winning elections and kicking the integration out of old and new Europe; Iraq was bolstering the American economy at the expense of the euro; Iraq was extraordinary minds making a mess of numbingly ordinary events.

Iraq was all those things.

But - above all - it was a fight between good and evil. The good and evil which inhabits all human hearts.

A fight where evil won.

And where it was Dubya, more than anyone, who found himself on the losing side of that eternal battle.

Oliver Stone's film made me feel sorry in the end. Not for myself (I no longer need to) - but, rather, for what could have (what should have) been.

History never can repeat itself because the people involved are individuals - and individuals only have one life. Anyone who says otherwise is a soulless dictator of the despicable extremes of our political spectrums, only capable of ever understanding the movement of peoples as a clash of ant-like masses solidly stupid in their collectivism - and absolutely indestructible in their rank and valueless anonymity.

May God preserve us from their ilk.

More on how the film was received here.

TOSBack.org

This site deserves a prize and more than one effusive mention. An absolutely brilliant idea. Whilst more about the excellent people behind it can be found here.

Passport High, Emotional Low

How about this? You go in on Monday. You provide your paperwork and a special delivery envelope. You hand over £15. And on Saturday morning at 9.30 am the postman wakes you up with a letter to sign for which contains your brand new passport.

A utopian view of how government should operate? A reality we can only aspire to? No. The service the Spanish consulate in Manchester provides for Spanish subjects.

My wife now has a brand new passport and that's all she had to do to get it.

Compare the above with the British government's fees and service level agreements here. The service she just received would've cost her £97 if it'd been a British passport she'd been renewing rather than a Spanish one. Nationality is a privilege and an honour, it is true; but when it becomes a burden for the majority of a country's citizens is when something is poorly conceptualised at the heart of the relationship between an establishment and its voters.

Thus I am brought back to the subject of the FPTP voting system. Some interesting points made at Liberal Conspiracy this weekend on this very same issue. Meanwhile, Paul has argued that the voting system is an irrelevance. If socialism was engaging with its clientèle as it verily ought to have been doing already, it wouldn't matter what system was used.

There is some degree of truth to this argument - but it still doesn't address the following: if we are truly interested in fairness, we should create a system which fairly represents all shades of opinion at any one time. Elections are a snapshot and we really shouldn't wish to tamper with the frame. Power is a necessary objective in all politicking - whether this be national and parliamentary or local and at grassroots level. But it shouldn't be coveted or achieved at the expense of conceptual probity or statistical accuracy. Every vote must count. Just as much as every month and year.

Perhaps it is wrong of me to focus the argument only around PR. But PR as a baseline could be used to lever engagement with the electorate with a more frequent and staggered timetable of elections; elections and votes of different sorts - local, municipal referendums, mayorals, European - say every six months. A rolling programme of elections in fact, so that elections became part and parcel of the political landscape - a regular litmus test for all politicians, a true point of reference; even a substitute for the hideously tolling bells of specious opinion polls.

In the meantime, and I'm sure you'd agree with me, Spain's relationship with its subjects and the pecuniary burdens of citizenship that it chooses to impose seem a damn sight more joyful, realistic and just than the UK's.

A metaphor, perhaps, for the wider malaise that is striking us all down in such sad times. Never was it so true as now: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In New Labour's attempt to square circles, it actually ended up brutally pigeon-holing us in a set of political and economic structures where a lack of intellectual and social ambition guided us towards the contradictions that now tear us apart.

The Tories do not deserve to win, not yet. But neither do we deserve not to lose.

So it is that I continue to vote Labour out of a desire to recover and re-establish a forum of healthy and creative political debate - but not because I feel, at least for the moment, that there is any chance of me forming part of an organisation that is up to the job of running a country.

Gordon Brown may show resilience in these difficult times and merit our admiration for such resilience but there is a fine dividing line between a socially responsible desire to stay at the helm on the one hand and a selfish stubborness that speaks only of pig-headedness on the other.

I cannot say if that line has been crossed.

I can only say that a country which believes that its passports are worth six times those of its neighbours must have given its soul up to the marketplace far far too long ago.

And - to be honest - that's really quite a shame.

Is Web 2.0 an example of 21st century socialism?

Lessig doesn't think so. More here.

But I do. It's a semantic question, obviously. For me, socialism means employing the collective to defend the individual. Historically, there are many socialisms where this has simply not been the case. Thus, we disagree.

But a 21st century socialism we choose to remake, in the image of a century we all covet and proclaim ours, can break out from its historical straitjacket - can achieve something entirely different.

Web 2.0, crowdsourcing, consumer-producers ... all these concepts sit nicely with the idea of supportive communities which are able to organise themselves. Using open source tools to redefine and remove costs from the equations that large corporations would otherwise burden us with is 21st century socialism at its best.

Let's have more of it.

Amazon's Kindle and how to earn a living as a blogger

A cross-posting from Zebra Red, my repository of all things related to digital publishing and progressive politics. More here on how it may soon be possible to earn a living from blogging via distribution models like Kindle's.

Now how many houses did I think I had?

I first came across this on Next Left and was surprised to see no one else seemed to pick it up. But then we get this beautiful piece of video which has come to my notice via Labour Matters' Twitter feed and I suddenly realise the world is as it should be.

I'm currently struggling to replay it so it's obviously getting the showing it deserves. Should, actually, be a party political broadcast.

Maybe, after all, it is.

"British people are losing their homes. He's just losing track."

Perhaps all we really need is to crowdsource more of our political marketing and strategy-making. The other day I suggested warfare could be open-sourced. So how about doing the same for warfare's surrogate? How about open-sourcing our politics then?