What You Can Get Away With

Nick Barlow's weblog

New job

Jan 29

Posted by Nick in Colchester, Council | 2 Comments

I was going to wait before announcing this, but as it’s in the County Standard today it’s now public knowledge. So, for those of you who don’t read every story in County Standard the news is that I’m going to be joining the Cabinet of Colchester Borough Council – assuming, of course, that Full Council on February 17th approves my nomination.

I’m taking over the Business and Tourism portfolio from my colleague Nigel Offen who’s had to resign from the Cabinet because of ill health. I’ve only got three months in the job before this year’s elections and whether I stay in it after that is down to the voters of Colchester and the makeup of the Council after May 6th, but I’m looking forward to doing it and seeing what can be achieved in those three months, especially in terms of completing the projects that Nigel has started.

There’s still a couple of weeks before I officially take up the post, but my diary’s already filling up with more meetings. It’s looking like quite a steep learning curve, so wish me luck.

Majoritarianism worked so well before

Jan 27

Posted by Nick in Elections, Parliament, Tories | No Comments

Via the Lib Dem Press Office and James Graham on Twitter comes news of an interesting amendment in the House of Commons.

And at the use of the phrase ‘interesting amendment in the House of Commons’, half of you have fallen asleep. The other half are barely keeping awake…and will now slumber too when I announce that it concerns electoral systems.

But if you are still awake and alert, this is interesting – Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski has tabled an amendment to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill that would remove almost all non-First Past The Post elections in the UK. (You can see the amendment here – just scroll down a little to get to Kawczynski’s amendment) In the unlikely event of his amendment becoming law, the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, Northern Ireland Assembly, European Parliament, English mayoral* and Scottish local government elections would all be conducted under First Past The Post – and the Boundary Commissions would suddenly find themselves with a huge amount of extra work drawing up new constituency boundaries outside England.

Leaving aside the huge political firestorm that would be created when the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly discover their voting systems have been changed from above (Kawczynski’s amendment puts the power to approve new boundaries into the hands of the Secretaries of State rather than the First Ministers), think about what the effects would be on Northern Ireland.

What Kawczynski is proposing is for Northern Ireland to return to the era of the gerrymander, when the Unionists were able to use their majority control to rewrite boundaries to suit them and limit the number of nationalists who get elected. Even without any gerrymandering, how much political diversity would there be within the two sides under a FPTP system, when the system would be actively encouraging voters to flock to whichever party had just a slight advantage for their side to avoid splitting the vote and letting someone from the other side in. If the current situation in Stormont is bad, imagine how it would be if there was no meaning electoral opposition within their communities to the DUP and Sinn Fein.

Kawczynski is a backbencher and his amendments don’t seem to be reflecting anyone’s views but his own, but it would be interesting to find out just what David Cameron’s views on his proposals are. Of course, it would be interesting to find out what Cameron’s views are on many issues…

* The Mayor of London (and the London Assembly) might be the only elections spared from Kawczynski’s hammer, as he doesn’t seek to amend the 1999 Greater London Authority Act.

In other news, the White House is now located in Wisconsin

Jan 14

Posted by Nick in Bizarre world, US | No Comments

This is real:

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine” those groups

This is The Onion:

I’d introduce the two of you, but it seems you’ve already met.

(Original link via Stuart Sharpe)

Call and response

Dec 27

Posted by Nick in Music | Comments off

One of my favourite songs is Barry McGuire’s 1965 protest song, Eve of Destruction:

I was interested to discover that a group called The Spokesmen had responded to McGuire (and PF Sloan, who wrote Eve of Destruction) with a song called Dawn of Correction:

As ever, you can see why the original is remembered, while the answer song has faded into obscurity, but it’s an interesting response to Eve of Destruction that doesn’t just berate McGuire and Sloan for daring to protest, but instead requests that they look at the alleged positives of life in the mid-60s – ‘instead of condemning, make some recommendations’. It’s a protest song that the Decent Left could approve to, something could be used as a soundtrack to the Euston Manifesto.

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Waste and recycling collections

Dec 20

Posted by Nick in Colchester, Council, Waste and Recycling | Comments off

I’ve had news from Street Services about what will be collected in the next week. Collections on Friday were cancelled because of the poor weather, but services will operate next week. However, no green waste will be collected, so the next green waste collection will be after Christmas, when natural trees will also be collected.

However, the collection of black sacks and recyclables (plastics this week) will go on as normal, though some streets within the Borough – particularly cul de sacs, roads on slopes and quiet lanes – may be inaccessible to the collection teams because of road and footpath conditions.

Trafigura, again

Dec 16

Posted by Nick in Media, TV | 1 Comment

Via all sorts of places, a video they don’t want you to see on the BBC:

I’m beginning to think that Carter Ruck have changed their purpose to become a performance art collective dedicated to interpretations of the Streisand Effect. Or that they’re a group of Streisand haters who want to see it renamed – perhaps this is a wholly new 21st century phenomenon of corporate culture jamming in an effort to get their name attached to a popular culture phenomenon?

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The Ghost of Shopping Past

Dec 12

Posted by Nick in Planning and Development, US | 1 Comment

Here’s an interesting collection of photos of empty American shops and shopping malls, including the abandoned mall near Chicago where one of the chases in The Blues Brothers was filmed. Interestingly, it had been recently abandoned when the filming took place, and remains unused and undemolished today. (original link via Anton Vowl on Twitter)

For more on the subject, see the Dead Malls website – another of those collections of urban arcana that would probably never have existed without the web – and I’m sure that a couple of the malls they list around Toledo, Ohio are ones I would have visited when I was living there back in the early 90s.

However, seeing the scale and sheer number of dead or dying malls in the US does prompt a theory – that I’m sure will be shot down in comments – about the differences between the US and Britain (and probably much of Europe too). While there are some common features in both retail economies around the abandonment of town and city centres in favour of ‘big box’ retailing on the outskirts – though the US is much further down that path, with downtown shopping districts becoming increasingly rare – the availability of space within the US has enabled a second wave of abandonment to occur, which has led to the dead malls. Because there was the space to build a number of malls, strip malls and all the other types of extra-urban development you see in the US, competition ensured that some of these developments failed to attract sufficient businesses and/or customers to be viable. In Britain there’d be pressure to regenerate a failed area like that because there would be fewer, if any, alternative locations, but in the US, there’s almost always another patch of land in a seemingly better economic position that you can go and develop instead, leaving the old one to rot.

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Is Bob Russell Britain’s best MP?

Dec 9

Posted by Nick in Colchester | Comments off

Obviously, I can’t answer that question because I’m sure you’d call me biased, but he is in the shortlist of 8 MPs for the title, drawn up by the website Yoosk.

If you want to have your say in who wins the award, then go to the Yoosk site, ask questions of the shortlist – which includes Lib Dem MPs Jo Swinson and Lynne Featherstone, amongst others – and then vote for who you think has provided the best answers next week.

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A quick waste reminder

Nov 30

Posted by Nick in Colchester, Council, Waste and Recycling | Comments off

Just a quick reminder for those of you in Colchester that tomorrow we have our first public meetings as part of the waste consultation – 12-2pm and 5-7pm in the Moot Hall. We are planning to video some of it and make it available on the web for people who can’t there to see.

And if you haven’t already, you’ve still got until the end of January to respond to the consultation – see the latest edition of the Courier, or fill out the survey online.

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Victory is mine

Nov 27

Posted by Nick in Books, Life | Comments off

NaNoWriMo 2009 winner iconYes, I did it. With 4 days to spare, I managed to get over the NaNoWriMo finish line, and hit 50,000 words a little after midnight last night. For those of you who care about such things, the 50,000th word was ‘people’.

If you’re interested in what I’ve written, then the work-in-progress can be read here, but the fact that it was splurged at almost 2,000 words a day is very obvious. However, I do like the underlying story, and one of the advantages of going through the NaNoWriMo process is that you end up exploring all the little crevices of the story and the world it’s set in, because sometimes the only way to get to the words you need to keep on target is to release a giant pile of infodump.

So, I’ve kept up my 100% NaNoWriMo success rate – now 2 out of 2 – and all I have to do now is go and finish the actual story. And then rewrite it in a form which makes sense. And then probably rewrite that too…

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