Liberal Provocateur

 .. but of course you could fit all the lib dems who've signed his early day motion in a taxi - because almost all our MPs are so clueless on technology - Lib Dems still out of touch on anything that hints of computergeekywotsit - that's why the conversatives contacted him and he agreed to advise them on open data and stuff.. and why the tories have commissioned a report on open source.. while the lib dems don't even have a working group.

What's especially fucked up is that we have Lynne Featherstone in charge of using interwebnet techo stuff.. but only for electioneering - nobody has responsability for any geeky policy issues from the gazillions of pounds spent on IT by government, software patents, governance of Nominet, data protection, cybercrime, ecommerce regulation, or tackling monopolies like microsoft, RM, etc.

DemocracyClub is a website that matches volunteers to parliamentary constituencie, and sends them requests for help doing small simple jobs for groups like mysociety and The Straight Choice, such as scanning election leaflets and providing information about the area and local politicians or political activity.

I just signed up, as a liberal and a democrat - it seems the right thing to do.

On the Digital Engagement blog they're pushing open data and trying to encourage people to use the data provided already, and hopefully they'll make more available in more standard formats. I'm quite interested in the data provided by the homeoffice on drugs to see if it can provide some insights into the failures of the "war on drugs".

I've also seen news about parking being made free for patients at hospitals (in a few years time), although it doesn't go far enough - all parking at hospitals should be free for inpatients, A&E and disabled outpatients IMHO, as well as free or heavily discounted to all outside peak/visiting hours. This is something my local lib dem party have been campaigning for (they want all parking at the hospital to be free, but I can't see that happening any time soon without some significant compromise).

So Paul Clark MP has decided to do his own heavily politicised campaign site, thinly disguised as a poor imitation of fixmystreet...  I wonder if he is, and hope he isn't, using his Communications Allowance to pay for it.

The UKBA are now piloting genetic tests to determine nationality of people seeking Asylum, because of course your genes will of course change when your grandparents cross an arbitary straight line drawn on a map of africa. 

Scientists describe this as "Flawed" and "Horrifying"... now I don't have a Degree in genetics (just a Batchelors in Computer Systems & Networks, with just about enough stats and maths to follow the average Pop Science magazine article) but even I can see that it's a stupid idea, and that's before I think of the morals of doing it.

Businesslink are spending money advertising the new ID Cards campaign on their website and with google ads, shows that they exist to serve the governing party rather than businesses.

"The Home Office is to spend over £500,000 this year on a marketing campaign for the identity card which features cartoon fingerprints" : News from Kable about the Home Office starting it's "public information campaign" in the north west.

...because of course the government aren't swimming in debt and have cash to throw at all sorts of white elephants.

The last question of the Q&A was an amalgam of 3 questions emailed in on drugs, mine(with a typo introduced) and two others on a similar theme - i.e. prohibition, crime and prescribing heroin to addicts.

And then after merging the 3 questions together they talked about addiction for a couple of minutes, and the need for more evidence before making diamorphine available by prescription.. for a handful of addicts.. cost 15 grand a year (but only because we have a monopoly supplier that charges 7 times more than the dutch pay).

Nobody talked much at all about how prohibition was causing problems, only the lady from the Prison Reform Trust mentioned the problem of criminalisation, and the fact that most addicts turned to drugs because they had other problems - essentially the drug addiction was the symptom of their problems rather than the cause, and how criminalisation makes that worse rather than better.

All in all a very very disappointing response, totally ignoring the 2 questions that asked directly about prohibition and decriminalisation, and Brian injecting random punctuation into my question.

Thanks to the amazing Ryan Cullen for leading me to it, answering my bitching about how hard it is to find any specific piece of information about what actually happened at conference.

.. so how do I find out if I got an answer?

I can't find video, let alone transcript on the Crime Q&A on Monday morning, only 4 hour long broadcasts from BBC parliament that may or may not include the Q&A I'm looking for (which I can't even find a time for beyond "monday morning", let alone the location).

The alternative to 4 hour long BBC videos is wading through dozens of unlabelled 20 minute segments on ustream.. no wonder most of the videos there have less than a dozen views.

This looks like a repeat of last year - if you want to know want to know anything beyond the headlines that the press and bloggers care to share you have to pay out hundreds of quid and waste a week of holiday time away from wife and kids. *sigh*

And this is after a mailshot saying that it was opening up to people who couldn't attend and invited questions - what a half hearted effort.

WTF aren't all the Q&A panels etc transcripted and published on the lib dem website - no wonder the press doesn't go beyond soundbites like Vince Cable's mansion tax and Nick Clegg unilaterally removing a manifesto promise on tuition fees for universities - you can't bloody well find any useful detail or information anywhere.

Sometimes it feels like the name of our party is just a name, as meaningless or even misleading as when East Germany was called "German Democratic Republic"!

If only Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg had the guts to break the westminster taboo and making this an issue.

"adults should be free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state", it's hardly contreversial anymore if the Guardian to The Economist, as well as more than 50% of the public support the end of drug prohibition.

Really - Is "Liberal Democrats" just a name or is it a statement of our principles?