It's Just Jason

Woolwich: The counter narrative

The unfolding of events in Woolwich today leaves a deep melancholy in my heart. Even now, hours after the event, confirmed facts are desperately hard to come by - aside from the unthinkable horror of an attack upon and killing of a man by two other armed men. It was Churchill who said:

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on

Bernie, the Bahrain Boycott, and Big Business

They say its hard to get a man to understand a thing when his salary depends upon him not understanding it, and there is no better example of this than Bernie Ecclestone’s apparently innocent insistence that life is so good in Bahrain, that there is no problem in hosting Grands Prix there for the foreseeable future. And this despite repeated calls on Formula 1 from Bahraini civil society to boycott Bahrain on account of the country’s brutal suppression of it’s own population.

I should disclose that I love the Grands Prix. I shouldn’t as it represents all kinds of excesses, but it’s been a guilty pleasure of mine since I was a child and I eagerly await the start of every season with the fervour and passion that most blokes reserve for football. And discussing why its not a procession of cars going around a track would take up a whole other post.

But I can’t watch Bahrain. It’s unconscionable.

Unlike Bernie, I can’t square entertainment with repression of human rights. It doesn’t seem like Bernie has thought through his corporate social responsibility policy, but then, this is the same man who donated £1 million to Labour in a move that was completely unrelated to the extension Formula 1 was seeking from looming regulation designed to limit tobacco advertising.

The distasteful hosting of Formula 1 racing in Bahrain, though, is just a part of a wider sporting, business and political malaise in which it seems to have become the norm to accept the unacceptable in the name of shareholder profits.

Sport is being capitalised upon as discrete packages of entertainment sold to broadcast companies which in their turn stand to make or lose huge sums of money out of the arrangement. If we have learnt anything from the recent and ongoing banking crisis, the hacking scandals, and the tax minimisation practices of certain organisations, it is that all thoughts of communal or corporate social responsibilities take second place to profits. Every time.

When we are asked to look at successful individuals and supposed role models - sporting superstars, hot-shot businessmen (it is mostly business men we seem to worship, not much look in for womenfolk in corporate boardrooms) and politicians - and to judge them on the results they get, rather than how they got them, it’s akin to saying that sportsmanship does not matter, that only the result - sporting success, business profit or political domination - counts. Is that really what the UK feels? It seems not when we look at the backlash against organisations that make billions in profit but pay little corporation tax.

Every year that Formula 1 fans make a point of boycotting Bahrain and publicly denouncing that race is another year of sub-optimal performance for the rights holders of Formula 1. It’s another year that team sponsors suffer the ignominy of association with a repressive regime and the effect this will have on their brand image.

Ecclestone will continue to stage Grands Prix in Bahrain so long as it profits him to do so. Whilst as an individual I can’t do too much about the banking crisis, media regulation, or the tax practices of global conglomerates, I can make a point of not watching the Grands Prix.

We each make choices, and in a world where everything is tightly interdependent upon everything else, our choices are our voices. The choice to withhold our custom and goodwill from organisations that engage in irresponsible behaviour is there for all to take.

Fitness to Parent

Being subject to the relentless forward propulsion of the 24 hour newscycle as we all are, it’s easy to forget stories from just 3 weeks ago. But even after the death of Margaret Thatcher and the Boston Marathon bombings, the story of how one man visited psychological and physical abuse upon so many, ending in the burning to death of 6 of his own children still sticks in my gullet, and, to my mind at least, warrants some serious thought, not least by national and local government agencies.

To recap, Phillpott lived with 2 women, through whom he acquired benefit payments directly into his bank account. Philpott, his wife and lover shared a 3 bedroom house with 11 children. Philpott had appeared on national television bragging about his lifestyle. Now, I’ve said before that how other people choose to live their life and express their love is no concern of mine, but in a case with children who I believe are entitled to the highest levels of protection, I have to draw the line.

The risk to any child - physical risk - in the care of Philpott was massively high. Why is there no system in place to effectively protect them?

The insurance industry has got judging risk is down to a fine art. When you apply for car insurance multiple risk factors are taken into account before you get a quote for a premium. How many miles you drive in the car each year. Your past claims history. Your age. Your address. The type of car you drive. And so on.

We accept the risk assessment of insurance companies - backed by evidence based upon the claims history of a huge pool of people - as being a generally good way of judging risk. We can say with confidence that a newly qualified driver at university, regularly driving a souped up Citreon Saxo around town and up and down the motorway to visit mum and dad during holidays, who parks on the road in a high crime area is, on average, more likely to make a car insurance claim than an middle-aged housewife driving a VW Polo TDI who happens to live in a low-crime area and who parks her car in a locked garage.

Yes. There are exceptions to the rule. The housewife may be involved in an accident, and the newly qualified driver may well beat the odds, but the point is that there is a system that assigns appropriate levels of risk, and, on the whole, that risk assessment is supported by historical data and facts.

We don’t really think about applying risk assessments to people. But we do it all the time. If I see a man in the street armed with a knife, I very likely judge the risk of some form of physical violence to be unacceptably high and will seek to avoid that situation. Similarly, if you apply for a job which involves looking after children, prepare to go through a police check for your previous criminal history. And if you are on the violent and sex offender register, there’s a high probability that you would be considered too high a risk to leave alone with a child.

This stuff isn’t controversial. Adults can judge risk for themselves and take action accordingly. Young children, though, are not normally expected to be great risk assessors, and they are certainly not responsible for accepting responsibility for being left in a high-risk situation. If nothing else, the victims of Jimmy Saville proved this.

I think it’s fair to say that the situation that Philpott’s children were in could reasonably have been considered to represent a high-risk to their well being. Lets look at the facts:

• Philpott had a recent history of physical abuse of his wife having been given a police caution
• Philpott had been convicted stabbing a previous girlfriend and breaking her arm and finger in 1978, a violent crime which alone could probably discount him from jobs involving the care of dependent or vulnerable individuals
• Philpott beat his first wife before leaving her for the girlfriend he later stabbed
• Philpott was on bail at the time he set fire to his own house over a road rage incident that included violence
• Philpott did not have a regular job and the wages of the two women he lived with and all the family benefits were paid directly into his bank account
• The house the children were in was apparently massively over-occupied on a permanent basis

It can’t be beyond the wit of man to devise a risk assessment procedure through which children in an environment controlled by a man with a history and pattern of behaviour like one listed above can be taken to a place outside the direct or indirect control of a person who clearly has issues.

It’s not just violence against humans that could be an indication of risk, there is evidence that links cruelty to animals and cruelty to children and vulnerable adults.

In the vast majority of cases, the best place for any child is with their parents. Whilst we know that most people will not engage in high-risk behaviour, we still need an effective system in place that manages transgressions - especially where there are multiple instances of serious violence.

The Every Child Matters initiative has apparently been in place for a decade, but what good did it do for the children in the care of Philpott? When doctors do wrong, they have to face a Fitness to Practice panel. When drivers make a serious mistake, they lose their licence, or their insurance costs rise. When people abuse animals they can be disqualified from looking after animals. Philpott had a demonstrable history of violence, and yet was permitted to care for children who probably had no concept of the magnitude of malevolence of which he was capable.

As a society we don’t have a problem placing sanctions on people with a demonstrable pattern of irresponsible behaviour, but it seems to me that when it comes to our kids, we’ve still got some work to do to pre-emptively protect children so that they can be removed from harms way before they become victims.

55 Search Engine Optimisation Tips

I recently started getting back into SEO in a serious way. Years ago I used to be elbow deep in SEO but I guess as you move away from development the nitty-gritty of SEO becomes less critical. But lately I had cause to get back involved with SEO for a project and whilst the basics of SEO haven’t changed much, the tools and peripharal techniques have moved on in the past few years.

The plethora of tools that have become available to SEO fanatics since I first started optimising for search engines has exploded, and that’s great, especially if you want to (shock! horror!) actually measure the impact of your efforts. But whilst some of the tools available have changed, the basics - for me at least - have clearly stayed the same.

Attitudes to SEO have always intrigued me and in my experience many organisations seem to spend a hugely disproportionate amount of time agonizing over SEO when compared to the potential payback on other marketing activities.

I’m not saying SEO isn’t important, it is, but it is also unlikely that SEO, even in a global economy increasingly dominated by new media companies, will make or break your company. Think about how you first heard about Hotmail, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, in fact, the vast majority of successful companies that you deal with on a day-to-day basis, and then think about how important SEO was to you discovering that company.

My guess is that SEO didn’t play a huge part in you discovering many companies, but that’s not the same as saying that SEO is useless.

SEO should only ever be a part of an overall marketing mix. Spending a disproportionate amount of time focusing upon on a single aspect of what you do – like SEO – to the exclusion of other things that you should be paying attention to – like social media, like a nicely designed website, like, maybe offering great products and services and making sure your customer is delighted with what you do for them – is not healthy.

That being said, I’ve compiled together some tips. Some of them you might even agree with. Enjoy.

1.    Decide the keywords you want to target, but first research potentially popular alternatives using the Google Keyword Tool.

2.    If you don’t already have a domain name you are tethered to, try and get a domain name which contains at least one of those keywords that you thought up earlier. Don’t sweat it if that’s not possible.

3.    When writing content, write for people first, search engines second.

My gut instinct is to even ignore attempting to optimise blog articles for SEO. It’s too easy to get caught up in the long grass of probably useless technicalities like ‘ratio of keywords to content’ and ‘ratio of HTML to content’. Just write something interesting and compelling. I’ve written my own fair share of out-and-out link bait, but if you are trying to apply a magic SEO-friendly formula to content to garner better SEO rankings, chances are the content - and it’s underlying message - will suffer.

Not enough people realise that simply writing good content is one of the best SEO ‘tricks’ you can pull.

4.    Unless you have a large team to support you and lots of time to spend, don’t register multiple domains and build apparently separate websites trying to get a spread of keywords.

Of course, huge conglomerates do build multiple sites on multiple domains all the time, but that’s all part of a larger marketing plan. For instance, Sony has a dedicated Playstation site, and a separate dedicated PSVita site. That’s reasonable, and transparent.

Unless you have a lot of resources, building multiple sites on multiple domains will stretch your time and resources to breaking point. Truly authoratative, successful and respectable people and organisations don’t hide behind multiple different fronts; they present a single unified and ethical presence on the web, like Martin Lewis over on http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/

5.    Get a Google Analytics account. Measure what your site does and what effect the changes you make have. Learn from the experience. Repeat as required.

6.    Get a Google Webmaster Tools account to analyse what kinds of things you might want to fix or change on your website. Learn from the experience. Repeat as required.

7.    Get a Google Adwords account. Even if you don’t want to spend money advertising on Google. Use the Keyword Tool to figure out what keywords you should be targeting.

8.    Speed is a ranking signal. One quick way to speed up your site is to use caching. If you use a Content Management System like WordPress, you should be able to find a WordPress caching plugin to help speed your site up. I’m sure there are equivalent cache plugins for Drupal.

9.    If you aren’t able to find a caching solution suitable for your particular CMS flavour, or your sysadmin is anal and won’t install it for some obscure reason, or you are running a larger, enterprise scale website, consider using a Content Delivery Network, like CloudFlare, which offers a free account to get you started, and has some security benefits too.

10.  Optimise your HTML code. Get rid of extreaneous code. Not just in the name of speed, but also in the name of elegant code.

11.  Make sure your HTML code is valid, W3 Validator is probably the best free tool to use, and make sure you check all your site pages, not just the home page.

12.  Optimise your CSS. This will increase your chances of having valid CSS that works across multiple browsers and, if you optimise or reduce CSS code, it could also speed up your site. Luckily, W3C have a free CSS validation service.

13.  Optimise your JavaScript. Sometimes new versions of old scripts are better optimised, so maybe they work faster and across a wider range of browsers.

14.  Remove old scripts/tools. This can be a difficult one. It might be that you have lots of old JavaScript on your site which you used for something or other in the past, but don’t need right now. Remove that old code.

15.  Stop using frames. Just stop it. Yes. Even those natty <iframe> tags. Frames are the spawn of satan.

The search engine robots that come and crawl through your site used to not be able to get past those frame tags and into the content, nowadays they can, but a direct link from a search engine results page into a web page that should be contained within a frame set will be confusing. Plus. frames are just bad design anyway.

Here is an excercise that will highlight how useless frames really are. First. List your top 10 favourite websites. Now, list how many use of those 10 sites use frames. Not many, huh?

16.  Keep Flash to a minimum. By all means have a flash minisite, or a Flash game or interactive element. But don’t go overboard.

I love Flash as much as the next guy, but unless you have a recognised brand or lots of money to spend on advertising, avoid building your entire site in Flash. Sure, Google can index Flash to some extent, but why make it difficult unless you are making a real statement?

17.  Get canonical. Just like in Highlander, there can be only one. One version of your website that is. SEOmoz has a good article on Canonical redirection.

18.  Check your links work with Xenu and/or Screaming Frog. Fix any ‘404 File Not Found’ errors.

19.  Check that there is no duplicate content on your site - this includes multiple pages with the same meta tag content, not just the stuff that people read. Google Webmaster Tools will help with this.

20.  Get a corporate Facebook page. Be active on it.

21.  Get a corporate Google+ page. Be active on it.

22.  Get a corporate LinkedIn page. Be active on it.

23.  Get a corporate Twitter page. Be active on it.

24.  You already know added good content is the best kind of SEO, but do you add it frequently enough? You still need to aim for quality content rather than just slapping up brief pieces clearly designed to improve your SEO rather than being interesting and informative.

25.  Contribute articles to other websites and try and get a short biography of yourself and a link back to your website in your article. This will build your inbound links.

26.  Have a Privacy Policy. You want to be authoritative? Then be responsible.

27.  Have a site map that people can read, because search engines will read it to and if it’s got links to at least your main pages, this will make things easier for the crawlers.

28.  Use deep linking to point people to those hard-to-reach places of your site.

29.  Cull content. Yes. I said it. This doesn’t count for blog posts, which you should leave alone regardless of if they appear to be doing well or not (they are a window into what you are thinking, and should form a consistent historical document). Use your Google Analytics account to figure out which pages are not getting any visitors, or which have high bounce rates then just cull them. Or if you must keep that page, consider changing it. If it’s not adding value, why not? But don’t forget to put a 301 redirect in place if you do delete the page.

30.  Get a YouTube account. Actively contribute towards it. Yes. This might take some effort.

31.  Optimise your robots.txt file. SEO Book has a good article on robots.txt files.

32.  Have social bookmarking tools on your site to make it easy for people to like your pages and quickly spread the word. Trending on Twitter isn’t exactly SEO in it’s purest form, but getting inbound links from other peoples social media accounts and articles linking to you can only be a Good Thing.

33.  Building quality external links is fine, but make sure to cultivate a wide variety. Don’t keep going back to the same well over and over again. Keep an eye out for interesting new sites, and niche sites that fit what you are trying to do.

34.  Add ‘alt’ tags to your images.

35.  Use heading tags, <h1>, <h2>, and so on. Make sure some keywords are in the headings.

36.  Make sure URLs are crawler friendly. That means not using underscores in directory file names, but using dashes instead. So, not http://www.somedomain.com/some_directory_name, but http://www.somedomain.com/some-directory-name. 

37.  If you used Xenu to check the links on your site, you may well have come across a 404 Page Not Found error or two. If that’s the case, take a look at that 404 error page. Does it do something useful like direct users, or search engine spiders, to useful content in your site? If not, redesign that 404 page.

38.  Don’t use CSS to hide content from the human eye that you expect search engine robots to index. I’ve seen this on a few sites, none of which I grew to respect, or bought from, or ever went back to. If you are trying to game Google, what does that say about you?

39.  Monitor your website, know when it’s gone down. If it’s not available to you, it’s probably not available to Google, or anyone else. Take a look at siteuptime.com, but there are lots of site monitoring services out there.

40.  Your website HTML, CSS and JavaScript might be optimised, and it might pass all the W3 Validation rules, but is it an accessible website? If not, get back to the drawing board.

41.  Submit your site to DMOZ.

42.  Link to authoritative sites from your site. That’s right. Spread the link love. No man, or web site, is an island, and if Google can see you are linking to sites and pages with high authority and popularity, this reflects well on your site. Just don’t go overboard.

43.  Pick your site host carefully. It might cost more to use a respectable host but the pay off is that your site is more likely to stay live and you are less likely to be in a “bad neighbourhood”.

44.  Always sense-check, spell-check and grammer-check your content before it goes live. If you don’t have a team of content writers and editors at your disposal then just write the content. Do something else for a day. Then come back and re-read it with fresh eyes.

45.  Avoid dynamic URLs. The page http://www,somesite.com/page.aspx=1435867904 is less search engine friendly than http://www,somesite.com/contact-us.aspx.

46.  Avoid using the Meta-Refresh tag to re-direct users. This could be construed as a spammy tactic. If your content has genuinely moved then use a 301 redirect rather than the Meta-Refresh tag.

47.  Give files (web pages, images, PDFs) descriptive names, like, my-seo-ideas.pdf, rather than myseoideas.pdf. This is as good for humans as it is for search engines.

48.  Let woorank.com scan your site, it’ll give you a few hints and tips.

49.  Test your site with http://www.webpagetest.org/, it’ll show you where you can improve.

50.  Take a look at your own site, and those of your competitors in spyfu.com it could give you some useful information about keywords and competitors.

51.  Use Open Site Explorer to view your site and compare it to competitors, are they doing something you are not?

52.  Don’t make too many changes all at once. Make a few changes. Monitor and judge the results for a time, then make a few more changes. Making incremental (“little and often”) changes gives you the opportunity to understand better how important certain aspects of your site, and SEO strategy are performing.

53.  Confirm the authors of your website - in particular blog posts - using the rel=”author” tag.

54.  Confirm your organisation as the publisher of your website. It’s not too different from confirming the author.

55.  If someone is offering a sure-fire way to get to the top of search engine results pages, smile politely then take a step back. Then take another. Then another. You get the idea.

There you go. Don’t expect immediate results, keep trying, keep learning, keep updating your site and keep measuring your progress. Contribute usefull stuff to other sites and social media, but don’t dedicate so much time and effort to SEO that other marketing opportunities are lost.

It’s not rocket science. Really.

An Englishman in India

I was recently lucky enough to be sent to India by my employer, and whilst it was definitely work, it was also an experience. What follows is a bit of a stream of consciousness so apologies if I jump from topic to topic, but hey, that’s all part of the Indian experience.

Having been to Kenya with friends in the past I have to say it immediately felt like being in Kenya. It’s a strange mental transition to go from being a white male in the majority in the UK, to becoming a most conspicuous minority in India. It occasionally felt like I was on show whilst I waited for my bus each day, and it sometimes felt like a few people were pretending to be on the phone, but actually taking a HD picture of me to prove that they actually saw an English man at the local bus stop.

On the street, I made sure to pretend like I knew where I was going, a skill I picked up in Kenya. A purposeful stride and a look of intent was my normal mode of operation, though after a while I did actually know where I was heading, and even started to be recognised by the guys along my normal route.

So. What have I learnt? It may surprise you to know that I actually learnt the entire Indian Highway Code in just 3 short bus trips. Here it is:-

If you are approaching a red traffic light or an intersection with a main road whilst on a secondary road yourself, don’t slow down, it’s really a judgment call if you want to stop or not so you may as well just drive straight out.

Still approaching that red traffic light? HONK YOUR HORN!

Turning left or right? Consider conserving the life of your indicator bulb by HONKING YOUR HORN instead!

Stopping? HONK YOUR HORN!

Starting? HONK YOUR HORN!

Taking someone over (you can overtake or undertake, it’s same same!)? HONK YOUR HORN!

Someone taking over you? HONK YOUR HORN!

Somebody cut you up? There is no concept of ‘right of way’ in India so just HONK YOUR HORN!

Have a new car? Consider putting some dents in it before everyone else does (HONKING YOUR HORN optional on this one).

Wing mirrors are optional extras on most vehicles. Instead of looking left or right HONK YOUR HORN then just turn!

Wing mirrors are optional extras on most vehicles. Instead of looking left or right HONK YOUR HORN then just turn!

Tried to drive in-between 2 HGV’s on a dual carriageway for no good reason but realise you are about to get crushed by them both? HONK YOU HORN!

Are you in no immediate danger and driving in a straight line with no one near you and not even approaching a junction. Just for fun HONK YOUR HORN!

You get the picture.

What have I seen? Well, on one Friday night in Noida, where I was staying, I saw no less than 2 amazing floodlit wedding parades going down the street. When I say floodlit, I mean they had huge floodlights in front and behind the parade (you know the drill, horses pulling a carriage, huge band, glittery clothes, dancing, an amazing site!). At least one of these weddings was being recorded in HD.

What else? Well, what better way to advertise a school than to put up a huge poster with what appears to be the passport pictures of all your pharmacy graduates complete with their exam score and name! If that’s not an incentive to pull your finger out at school, nothing is. Micheal Gove, take note! And yes, the girls were at top of the class. The head girl scored 97%, the closest boy had a paltry 93%. Must do better!

Everybody knows Friday night is pizza night, so I had a Dominoes tonight. The Dominoes menu (actually, all menus) in India is an equal split between ‘veg’ and ‘non-veg’ options. This should be brought over to the UK, along with garlic bread stuffed with cheese and jalepenos.

I always thought Dominoes was a take-away only, but in India, Dominoes is also good for a date night. If you do decide to order a takeaway, the Dominoes in Noida has no less than 17 individual Dominoes branded pizza bikes, not including the ones that were already out delivering (in Reading, you get 1 or 2 pizza bikes per pizza shop). Also, I noticed a street stall called ‘Uncle Chicken’. It was just down the road from ‘Papa Johns’, ‘Granny’s Place’ and ‘Mama’s Kitchen’, which seemed like a happy coincidence. The whole family had the block sewn up.

The company I work for pays for buses to take people to work and back home again, and if you work late you get fed a meal and can take a cab home which the company organises for you. This looks like a pretty good deal. Makes my £340 monthly train ticket seem even more expensive than it is.

Of course, I watched too much TV. Endosperm is apparently a major selling point of McVities biscuits. And there are infomercials on the special dieting power of a certain tea. Lots of soap operas too, I just can’t figure out what’s happening. They do have The Good Wife in India, but they edit words like “bitch” out. And there is no dubbing in Indian voices, it’s all still in the original English voices, but with English subtitles? What is that about????

I also saw what appeared to be the original Bollywood black and white film version of the ‘very very good, one pound fish’ song . I didn’t catch the original song title, but I’ve no doubt that it was the same tune and that the one pound fish man should be paying royalties to someone else. Is nothing original?

And the bum gun? It was actually quite refreshing once you got used to it. I spoke about this bum gun with many Indian friends, one of whom surprised me with the strength of her opinion that the bum gun is more hygienic (I didn’t have an opinion on it at the time!), I can definately see the advantages. Being left handed and unaccustomed to eating food with a single hand, I realised a dew days into my visit that I was potentially offending my hosts and did my best to recover. I felt like I could be giving the impression of being a barbarian, and if I did nobody let on!

A few years ago the UK had a boom in city centre flats and an off-plan feeding frenzy. This is nothing compared to what’s happening in Noida right now. Housing is being thrown up at a rate of knots I saw enough high-rise flats being put up to put the UK construction industry to shame.

Language is a funny thing in India. English is spoken, but it’s a different kind of English which is hard to explain, but one example would be the major brand, Walls, advertising their products as “qwality”. More than just the Indian accent, students of dialect would probably have a field day try to figure out what’s going on in India. Also, I did catch myself developing some very Indian traits, in particular hand movements. It sometimes felt that body language was more important than what was actually being said and I’m sure I was missing social cues transmitted via body language alone.

It pains my Turkish heritage to admit this, but Indian hospitality is second to none. Nothing is too much. This is a country that uses a squad of motorbike couriers in the morning to deliver Danone. Enough said.

India is an amazing country, I’ll definitely be going back for pleasure rather than business.

Finally, you realise that you really haven’t really done anything approaching a day’s work unless you’ve been begging at a set of traffic lights from 8am until 9pm. And for some of that time if you had your 3 or 4 year old daughter, or wife, or mother with you, then maybe you’ve done something approaching hard work.

Tell us what you really think, Rob

Yes. This is a blog about same-sex marriage and Rob Wilson, but before we get to the meat and two veg, some disclosure from me is probably apt.

Being Muslim, I’m acutely aware of the common-or-garden opinion of people of a religious bent, and probably Muslims in particular. The prevailing view - and it might well be correct - is that religious nutters view homosexuals as, as one guy on Twitter put it, ‘abomination’.

I don’t roll like that.

Many religious commentators on this issue seem to be presenting a dichotomy in which those ‘with religion’ present and perceive themselves not only as perfect, but also as arbiters of how those who are either not religious or who do not conform to their interpretation of religious doctrine should live their life. I utterly reject the view that homosexuality is an abomination. Who am I to judge how consenting adults should experience and express love?

So, how others live their personal lives, how they practice religion, how they express love and who they express it to and with is no concern of mine. But how my MP votes affects how my friends, colleagues, and even complete strangers live their lives. It’s my responsibility to protect my friends and neighbours from discrimination, from hatred, from ignorance.

The overwhelming opinion from all different parties - at least across my Twitter feed - seems to be in support of the same sex marriage Bill, voted on tonight. And my gut instinct is to support it, and I know the majority of Liberal Democrats nationally, and in Reading, clearly feel the same.

Rob Wilson, Conservative MP for Reading East has chosen to hide his personal feelings from his constituency. His explanation of why he abstained from voting in favour of same sex marriage gives a litany of what appear to be reasonable points against the same sex marriage bill. But the really telling thing is what he left out of the vanilla press release.

In amongst telling us how many letters and emails he read, and how many people he met, and how he has concerns that the Bill itself wasn’t in the Conservative Manifesto or the Coalition Agreement, Rob deftly neglects to tell us only his own personal opinion on same sex marriage. But his voting record on equal gay rights (as theyworkforyou.com terms it) gives him away, and for a man who hardly ever votes against the party line, abstaining on this issue, at this time, perhaps highlights how strongly he feels.

We judge people by their deeds, not their words, and Rob’s deeds in this area seem to leave a lot to be desired. And that’s before we get the chance ask why he apparently makes time for Twitter based sarcasm.

In abstaining, Rob Wilson placed himself, as some are saying, on the wrong side of history, and his obfuscation from us of his actual personal opinion on this issue is rightly a concern. This is a matter of Human Rights. Of course the same sex marriage legislation isn’t perfect, but it’s a start, and I don’t believe for a moment that every piece of legislation that Rob Wilson actually votes for is perfect. Legislation evolves, and this is a step in the right direction. I’d have thought that Rob Wilson could have got that straight.

How being Muslim is as bad as being a Prince fan

One of the Christmas gifts I was given was a book about Prince, who I’ve been a fan of since hearing Kiss. The book is a great read if you are a fan, though the level of obsession author Matt Thorne displays feels both laudable and slightly worryingly creepy in equal measure.

Reading the book I found myself learning new stuff, recognising things I’d forgotten, but also furiously agreeing and disagreeing with Thorne’s (blatantly biased and fanboy - but that’s OK ‘cos who else would have written that book other than a fan?) analysis on different elements.

And that got me to thinking. If it’s possible to hold such wildly different and yet similar opinions about Prince, the same must be true of most subjects, especially religion. Which got me to thinking how right now, being a Prince fan is not a dissimilar experience from being a Muslim. Honest. Here’s why:

1. It’s not fashionable to be a Prince fan right now. Tell somebody you were just listening to Prince and they’ll scrunch their face up like they just sucked on a lemon, as if to say “Really? You still listen to Prince?” You get the same type of reaction when you tell people you are Muslim, the scrunching of the face, “Really, you are still a Muslim?”
2. Everybody has an opinion about Prince. Even if all they’ve heard is Purple Rain, Sexy MF, and Kiss. People seem to have a strong opinion either way on Prince’s music, without the context of the huge body of work - often contradictory - he has produced. Likewise with Islam. People fixate on certain things, lets say, 9/11, mosque minarets and burkas, with little context of the huge body of - often contradictory - ‘Islamic jurisprudence’ and the examples of non-terrorist blouse-and-skirt wearing Muslims living just down the street.
3. Prince can be misinterpreted. The common mythology around Prince is that he’s a sex obsessed mysoginist, but when you actually listen to his lyrics, (Sexy MF, Kiss, If I Was You’re Girlfriend, When Doves Cry) he’s revealed as a man who fears rejection, who wants his female companions to be his equal, and who is very spiritual in his outlook. Similarly, people can misinterpret Islam, hearing snippets of it here and there - not just from known critics with their own agenda, but also from Muslims who have in their turn made their own interpretations that perhaps don’t accord with how your average Muslim on the street would see it.

So there you have it. Being a fan of Prince presents much the same problems as being a Muslim. I guess it’s a personal artistic or theological issue as to how much you care about those problems, to take note of the apprehension of others, and to allow it to inform your opinion.

In the end I suppose we all have to reach our understanding and judgements on based upon our own (artistic and theological) perspectives. But next time you see hook-wielding self-proclaimed hard-line Muslim theologians on TV bent upon applying their own particular version of Sharia ‘law’, just think of Prince and remember that there is another side to the debate.

The disappointing things about Gaza

It’s not the fact that the tiny sliver of land that is Gaza - a place utterly incapable of sustaining or controlling it’s own economy and supporting civilian infrastructure - is under attack that’s disappointing. It is the depressing inevitability of it all as Israel approaches a set of elections in January 2013 at the convergence of a number of events that could change the very nature of the Middle East.

The news that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck a coalition of sorts in what appears to be a desperate bid to hold onto power in the upcoming Israeli elections will have escaped most, coming as it did so close to the conclusion of the US Presidential elections, but the move was important and an indicator of the force (a word used deliberately during the announcement of the coalition) that Israel will use going forward.

The choice of Netanyahu for his coalition partner should ring alarm bells in the mind of anybody with any hopes for lasting peace in the Middle East. That the Israli PM should chose the party of Avigdor Lieberman before the first election ballot is placed tells the world a lot. Lieberman is currently the only foreign minister in the world who does not live in the State for which he is a minister, he prefers instead to live in a settlement that sits in Occupied Palestinian Territory in the West Bank.

The new Israeli coalition is certainly a lurch to the right and recent extra-judicial assassination attacks on leading members of Hamas (a democratically elected group) seem to fulfill previous statements by Lieberman who advocated the death penalty for people who met with Hamas leaders. Lieberman also supports the separation of Israeli Jews from Israeli Arabs, as well as a required oath of loyalty to the “Jewish” State of Israel. An oath of loyalty many have called fascist, but one which, at the very least, is unacceptable to anyone who believes that government of a nation state should be secular, and not favour citizens of one religion over another.

If Netanyahu succeeds in his bid to sew up electoral success, it’s likely that Israel, defended as a beacon of Middle East democracy and liberalism, will pursue drastically less liberal national and foreign policies.

We can perhaps be kind and say that the latest attack on Gaza so soon after the announcement of the joining of Netanyahu and Lieberman in an electoral pact, and yet also so close to January elections is not meant to shore up Government support and project them as ‘strongmen’, we could chalk it up as a coincidence, I suppose. But an attack against Gaza in the same week that the body of Yassar Arafat is being exhumed for investigation into allegations of his poisoning by the State of Israel? Is that also a part of this unfortunate series of seemingly unconnected events? It would be disappointing if a stray Israeli rocket made analysis of Arafat’s body for unusually high levels of polonium-210 impossible, the attacks from Israel will undoubtedly slow the process down.

The most disappointing thing of all in the pummelling of Gaza, though, is not even the asymmetrical nature of the battle, it’s the complicity of the freshly elected US President Barack Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in his first term, and who told us that the best is yet to come in his second term. The Palestinian people have heard promises like that before, and yet still they are denied justice on their own land.

Obama benefited from the extra-judicial assassination of Osama bin Laden, and allows the US to loan billions to Israel in military aid which in turn enables them to use drones to patrol and terrorise Gazan civilians from the air, a technique not entirely unknown to the US military. Netanyahu may have bet the farm on his old friend Mitt Romney becoming the President of the United States of America, even featuring in an advert for his campaign, but so far, Obama has done nothing to curb the excessive use of military force by the State of Israel.

So many things are disappointing about this latest attack on Gaza, it’s difficult to know what to do. But do something we must. Whether it’s supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, or writing to your MP or MEP asking what they are doing to support those Palestinians who want to return to their rightful and legal homes, or simply following what’s happening and educating those around you about the injustice that is happening right now.

On The Political Class

I read an Suzanne Moore article which trickled down my Twitter feed, it was the title that intrigued:

I have not been poor for a long time. When you have been, you never forget

The author seemed to be getting carried away with herself, making sweeping generalisations such as:

“…a pointless debate ensues about “poverty” among a political and media class that has no idea of average earnings, never mind the cost of four toilet rolls.”

A broad-brush caricature if ever there was one. But it reminded me of something else with a thought-provoking title (“Why I’m me and not you”) by Stackee, about how Liberal Democrats in particular are, apparently, ill-equipped to tackle poverty.

…I’ve always said the Lib Dems are the Labour party of the middle class – and that is a compliment, honestly. A party formed of those who want to correct injustices, but have never really lived through them. Who see what they had as something everyone should have; who had no place in the Conservatives because of these beliefs, but also none in Labour as they’d be deemed ‘too posh’.

This is nothing less than a form of political bigotry.

The common theme in these articles appears to be a supposition that The Political Class have not experienced poverty or injustice, so it cannot possibly conceive of the depth and breadth of what it means to be poor in the UK, and is therefore not sufficiently motivated to tackle poverty.

This is like saying a man has no concept of what a woman can feel, and therefore is not qualified to legislate laws that affect women. It ignores the possibility of political activists who have experienced social mobility. It denies the experience of those of us who grew up in deprived areas, who made the most of what education we could get, rode our luck, and took steps to move closer to a comfortable lifestyle.

I’ve written before about how I was raised in a single-parent household. I was brought up by an immigrant to the UK, who had no UK qualifications to her name, but though her life was full of experiences that no woman should have to endure she worked hard, always impressed the importance of education on me, and made sacrifices to make sure I had the basics.

It’s only looking back, aware that I was raised in what has now become one of the most economically deprived areas of the UK, that I realise how good I had it. And yes, of course I want children to have at least what I had because I know that it’s at least a fighting chance in life. I’m not ashamed to believe that.

Liberal Democrat members come from all avenues of life and they collectively represent a wide range of demographics. I know that across the UK there are Liberal Democrat Councillors, MPs, MEPs and activists tackling the real problems in their communities at all levels of government.

Suzanne Moore states:

This not just stagnation on a monetary level, but on a moral one. It is an utter failure to face, head on, what is happening, even though Greece and now Spain are on our doorstep.

But it’s because of what is happening in Greece and Spain - both now at the mercy of financial markets charging them a high rate to borrow money - that we can prove that the UK cannot afford to carry on borrowing even more than we already owe, that would be the real failure.

In Government the Liberal Democrats have lifted hundreds of thousands out of Income Tax altogether, they have restored the link between earnings an pensions, and through the pupil premium they are spending billions on the education of children who need the most help. To say that there is a moral stagnation - on the part of the Liberal Democrats at least - is demonstrably wrong.

Though I can’t say I’m particularly impressed that our Political Class - in all parties - contains a disproportionate number of very wealthy individuals, we should be wary of the idea that people who are part of a particular political grouping have no idea about what life is like on or near the bread line, and lack the empathy or will to tackle poverty.

World War e

If we look at the design of the Spitfire and our pioneering use of Radar, it’s clear that the UK has a habit of pulling technological rabbits out of hats, but there is a field outside plane design and radio detection which arguably equals or perhaps even outweighs the effect either had during World War II, and that will outweigh the strategic geopolitical effect that either will have in the coming decades of peacetime. That field is Computer Science.

It’s true that in the past wars could be fought and won by ranging armies against each other and seeing who had the most brute force, but that’s the least likely threat that the UK faces today. We have allies across the globe with whom we have mutual defence treaties and ‘special relationships’ which ensures that the chances of a full-frontal attack against the UK by a sovereign State are very low. The real threat of a physical attack on the UK comes from non-state terrorist groups. We know that huge armies did not stop IRA attacks on the mainland of the UK, nor did they stop 9/11 or 7/7.

The conflicts of the future are likely to involve a virtual battleground, upon which crypto-boffins will engage in a battle for control of hardware and software system. The Stuxnet and Flame viruses - computer programs designed to infiltrate and render nuclear systems unusable or to harvest data and which many analysts agree could only have been developed and deployed with the funding and support of a State rather than a purely criminal enterprise are pointing the way to the intelligence gathering and wars of tommorrow.

In a world in which everything is controlled by computers, those who take control of computers take control of us all. The limited impact of the failure of IT systems at RBS was a huge inconvenience for RBS customers and those connected with them who did not receive payments or could not send payments. Imagine an attack that focused purely upon UK financial computer systems. Sent over the Internet or from a few agents deploying the right computer code in the right place at the right time. Imagine the effects of crippling our financial system, or even just a few key parts of it. The fallout could likely be as economically damaging as bombing major physical infrastructure.

The decision to reduce the number of physical personnel in our standing army is the right one overall, but it must be balanced with a drive to recruit people with an aptitude for IT systems who can shore up our technological defences against attacks written in software and not announced by the sending of soldiers and military hardware across national borders.