Robin Wilton's esoterica

"Britain has been tested and not found wanting. This is who we are."

Gordon Brown used his first Labour Conference as Prime Minister to give everyone a pat on the back for surviving all the challenges the first few months of his premiership has thrown at the nation... flooding, terrorist attempts on Glasgow Airport and central London, outbreaks of foot and mouth.

It was that last one, in particular, which prompted a snort of derision. Please first consider the following statements:

1 - Britain currently faces a greater threat of chemical/biological attack than it did, say, 10 years ago. [True/False]

2 - If you ask people what's the first thing about the UK which pops into their head, they will probably say "rainy". [True/False]

3 - The single highest priority for a chemical/biological analysis centre is containment. If it can't do that, it shouldn't be allowed to do anything else. [True/False].

According to the official reports, the recent outbreaks of foot and mouth all have their origins in the state-run labs at Pirbright. The official report said that viral material escaped from the labs because of high rainfall and defective drainage. Five years ago, at a time when public fear over the possibility of terrorist attacks ('dirty bombs', chemical/biological contamination) was being stoked by large-scale public exercises like this, a government review of the labs specifically identified issues with funding, maintenance and the state of the facilities: "not commensurate with what might be expected for work with infectious diseases".

You might be tempted to conclude that the coded message of Gordon's speech was actually this: "Look, I know Tony made a complete arse of everything and left the entire policy landscape strewn with cluster bombs, but thank goodness un-flash Gordon has his hand on the wheel now, eh?".

Well, yes, except that we should also remember that the catastrophic run on the Northern Rock bank happened under the financial and regulatory system over which Mr Brown presided from May 1997. Northern Rock is a publicly-quoted savings bank and mortgage lender. Yesterday's Financial Times noted that its market capitalisation now represents less than 1% of assets.

Oh, well done, old thing... jolly well done.

One of the speeches which made quite an impression on me last Friday was given by Catherine Trautmann, a French MEP (Member of the European Parliament) in the Party of European Socialists (PES).

This is only a highly selective set of quotations, but I haven't found the full text online anywhere yet. They are also not verbatim, as she spoke in French, but they are from notes I took at the time, so should be close to the message, if not the exact wording.

On privacy:

"Privacy needs to be seen as a cross-border policy issue from the outset"

"The EU is defined as a democratic space to the extent that it is underpinned by a desire for respect for privacy"

"Cybercrime, people-trafficking and exploitation cannot [i.e. must not] be used to justify opaque decision-making with regard to privacy rights"

On the asymmetry of the relationship between citizens and government: 

"There is much talk of transparency in e-government, but one must always remember that state transparency and citizen transparency are not the same" [in the sense that requiring transparency of the state in its dealings is reasonable, but requiring transparency of all a citizen's personal dealings is not].

"There is a high degree of asymmetry in most forums (e.g. online debate) even if these are established ostensibly to encourage e-participation" [in other words, even where the citizen is invited to take part, it is not from a position of equal influence].

On e-voting:

"e-voting projects to date have tended not to meet, to a satisfactory extent, all the polling criteria one would hope for in terms of being independent, free, transparent and conducive to greater voter participation".

Now, whether or not one agrees with Ms Trautmann's policy position, I think it's interesting that she was so forthright in expressing views which swing the pendulum so far in favour of citzens' rights to things like

- a genuinely international approach to privacy policy;

- transparency of the working of government, policy-making and voting;

- the balance of power between the voter and the executive.

Even (perhaps particularly) in this week of the UK Labour Party conference, I'd forgotten what it was like to hear an actual Socialist... which is interesting, when you consider that the UK's Labour MEPs are all members of the PES.