Azerbaijan has just passed a strict anti-protest law clearly in violation of its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. This morning 12 young people were fined a significant amount of money
after Saturday’s protest. I hope they take this all the way to the European Court of Human Rights.

Via – Khadija Ismayilova

Ebulfez Gurbanli-500 AZN (£395)
Babek Hesenov-600 AZN (£472)
Renad Najafov-600 AZN (£472)
Rashad Hasanov-600 AZN (£472)
Zakir Rehmanov-400 AZN (£318)
Vusal Bayramov-500 AZN (£395)
Tural Abbasli – 600 AZN (£472)
Ulvi Hesenli 600 AZN (£472)
Mehemmed Ibrahim 500 AZN (£395)
Isayev Hemid 500 AZN (£395)
Kazimzade Azer 400 AZN (£318)
Elisoy Eltac 300 AZN (£238)

Update (4.45pm), another 8 sentenced:

13. Subhi Hesenov 400,
14. Turgut Gambar 500 azn
15. Abil Huseynov 400 azn
16. Rail Abbasov 300 AZN
17. Turkel Azerturk 600 AZN
18. Ramin Hacili 450 AZN
19. Tezexan Mirelemli 500 AZN
20. Rauf Memmedov 300 AZN
21. Firuz Agayev-300 AZN

1. First download the universal USB installer available from Pen Drive Linux.

2. Then select the variant of Linux you wish to use from the drop-down list

TAILS 0.15 is 853 mb – it’s a distribution ideal for human rights defenders with a TOR-enabled browser included. It also deletes all data stored each time you reboot…

Lubuntu, a lightweight variant of Ubuntu, needs 4 gb to install. But will run on a Pentium III system with as little as 128mb of ram.

3. Set your bios to boot from a USB stick (learn how here). That’s it!

November could take us one step closer to a Liberal Democrat – Labour coalition. The New Statesman reports that Labour could win all three seats being contested on 15 November. Two of the three seats are currently held by Labour, while it is highly possible that Labour could take Corby from the Conservatives.

A Labour gain would move the party just 3 seats short of a governing majority of 326. If Sinn Fein continues to abstain from the Westminster parliament – which according to Michael Crick is under doubt – a Liberal Democrat – Labour coalition is possible with the support of the Green Party, SDLP (the Labour Party’s sister in Northern Ireland), the Alliance MP (the Lib Dem’s sister party) and Plaid Cymru.

The coalition maths is as follows: –

Liberal Democrat – Labour coalition

Labour 259 (258 + Corby win)
Liberal Democrat 57
SDLP 3
Plaid Cymru 2
Alliance 1
Green 1
Total: 323

Against

Conservative 306
Democratic Unionist Party 8
Scottish National Party 6
Total: 320

A razer thin majority, but one that with a water tight coalition agreement and an early election could prove an good interim government. Unfortunately, such a coalition could create a constitutional crisis with the new government having to argue over the legality of the statutory instrument that set the 5 year electoral term. Interesting times…

I’d describe myself as a friend of Progress. I certainly don’t think that the organisation has become “a party within the party”, nor do I think the GMB’s motion at party conference can do anything but hurt Labour.

But Progress does have serious questions to answer on the organisation’s funding. It’s frankly bizarre that Progress called for Open Primaries in selections for parliamentary candidates, yet only in April this year did it publish who funds it. There’s no doubt that Progress is well-funded, to the tune of £368,000 per annum, a clear sign of the vitality of Progress. With this in mind, why does it continue to take donations from groups whose values may contradict those of the Labour party?

Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander has spoken out against human rights violations in Bahrain, and even called for the Formula 1 race there to be cancelled:

Bahrain is not Syria. But that does not mean F1 should collude in presenting to the world an image of an island paradise that is far removed from the violence taking place in the streets and villages just walking distance from the race track.

Yet, one of Progress’s donors is Bell Pottinger, a lobbying firm that has worked on behalf of the government of Bahrain. After 7 died following a police clampdown early in 2011, protesters gathered outside Bell Pottinger’s London office with placards reading ‘You can’t spin the unspinnable’. It made little difference, Bell Pottinger’s Chair Lord Bell told PR Week that he felt under no pressure to resign the account. Subsequently, as the situation worsened the account was frozen. Bahrain isn’t the only authoritarian regime Bell Pottinger has represented in recent years, the roll call includes the Yemen, Sri Lanka and a country I feel strongly about, Belarus. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism:

Bell Pottinger boasted to undercover Bureau journalists that it helped engineer the lifting of an EU travel ban on the man dubbed ‘Europe’s last dictator’. Part of the PR team included former British diplomat Sir David Richmond.

Belarus is known as Europe’s last dictatorship. In recent years, Labour Ministers and MPs including Douglas Alexander and Progress contributor Denis MacShane have condemned the dictatorship in Minsk. Yet, Progress has taken money from an organisation that used to work for that dictatorship. It doesn’t make sense.

Progress also accepted up to £7,500 worth of funding from another lobby group, the European Azerbaijan Society (TEAS). As I outline in the report ‘Azerbaijan’s silenced voices’, TEAS is not an ideal affiliate for any progressive organisation:

The London-based TEAS is one of the slickest and most well-funded lobbying operations anywhere in Europe. The President of TEAS is Taleh Heydarov, the son of Kamaladdin Heydarov, described in a US embassy cable leaked by Wikileaks as possibly ‘more powerful than the president himself… Heydarov controls more visible assets and wealth within the country than the president’

The leaked cable explains how Heydarov built his power network (from his position as Azerbaijan’s Chairman of the State Customs Committee, and his current position as Minister of Emergency Situations) which includes a paramilitary unit with anti-aircraft battery, a unit of building inspectors that can stop any construction project in the country they deem to be “unsafe”, and a family Airbus A319 corporate jet. The Wikileaks cable goes on to outline the structure of the company: “Many of the family’s operations are part of the ‘Gilan’, Qabala’… or ‘United Enterprises International’ family of companies”, which are involved in construction, tourism, banking and have monopoly control of the juice drinks market. All of these companies are registered at the same address as TEAS, and TEAS is described as an “affiliate” of United Enterprises International.

The European Azerbaijan Society and Bell Pottinger are not ideal partners for Progress. In order to win the argument over its role within the Labour party it needs to be clearer about the type of donations it will and will not accept – and draw clearer lines. Labour activists and the unions are right to question the Progress of today. I hope this marks the beginning of reform, not the end.

Update: Progress strategy candidates asked about its future funding

I’ve asked the candidates for Progress’s strategy board the following question: –

“Would you use your role on the strategic board to ensure that all donors match Labour’s values?”

You can read their responses to my question here.

Read also: LOBBYIST REGISTER: WE USED TO IMPRISON FOREIGN AGENTS – NOW WE GIVE THEM SIX-FIGURE SALARIES

Lewisham’s Big Olympic Conversation

Now this looks really fun…. A message from your local council:

What are the people who live in your area really like? What’s important to them, and what are their fears? What might you find out about yourself by talking openly to someone you’ve never met before?

Lewisham residents are being encouraged to find out by coming to the Big Conversation on Wednesday 8 August at 7pm in the theatrical Spiegeltent at the Lewisham Big Screen on Blackheath.

The format is very simple – it’s a conversation over dinner. Guests sit with someone they’ve never met and are served a simple meal along with a ‘menu of conversation.’ The menu offers a choice of questions designed to help them open up and think about their life in new ways. The questions will be based on the Olympic and Paralympic values.

Since January 2011, Lewisham Council has been working with Theodore Zeldin, the philosopher and historian who pioneered conversation dinners. Zeldin will return to Lewisham on 8 August to host the borough’s biggest conversation dinner yet.

This is a free event. Seats will be allocated on the day, so it’s best to arrive early. Guests can bring friends along, but should remember that they will be seated with someone they don’t know.

Theodore Zeldin was awarded France’s Légion d’Honneur in May 2012 in recognition of his many works on French history and habits.

Currently on Adam Curtis’s blog there’s a fantastic BBC documentary on Norman Mailer’s failed bid for the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York City in 1969.

One voter is asked, what does he like about Mailer? His answer reminds us that even at the high water mark of the bi-partisan era of American politics, voters held exactly the same concerns over candidates and political parties.

VOTER: “He’s different. He thinks… He’s willing to argue… He’s not willing to kowtow to the party bosses… We’d had so much of the ordinary politics for New York”

It’s worth watching in full.

Hat tip: @witteringwest

A wonderful portrait by the New Yorker of Britain’s biggest selling quality newspaper, the Daily Mail.

“Some of the paper’s greatest interest arises when Doris hollers back. Harry Simpson, of Northwich, Cheshire, wrote recently:

I’m sick of Melvyn Bragg, Hugh Grant, Joan Bakewell, and Anne Robinson. I’m sick of Vince Cable, the entire Labour Shadow Cabinet, and all the politicians.
I’m sick of squatters and travellers, pop music, the BBC, surveillance cameras, my rotten pension, terrorists, Anglican bishops, and having no money, and I just want to die.
My country, which I loved is ruined. It will never be happy again. It is all self, self, self, moan, moan, moan. I cannot wait to get out and rest in peace.

He had forgotten wind turbines and E.U. bureaucrats.”

The government of the United Kingdom’s annual budget is set during a moment of pure political pantomime. While drinking an alcoholic drink, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (akin to the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury) stands in the chamber of the House of Commons and reads out a list of statistics and figures meant to illustrate his command over the nation’s finances. Under the previous Labour government, Chancellor Gordon Brown’s set speech would be a marathon list of additional public spending. Yet times have changed. The fiscal restraint promised at the beginning of Britain’s Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government has morphed into a budget that would please grassroots Tea Party activists—with huge cuts to welfare to pay for a tax cut for the richest 1 percent of UK earners. The wildest fantasies of the Tea Party movement are being implemented across the Atlantic, in a chilling warning for U.S. progressives.

The British Tea Party?

George Osborne, Britain’s current Chancellor of the Exchequer, leaked almost the entirety of his speech in advance. Even so, the details have been truly shocking. Pensioners, children, and welfare claimants will all be hit to pay for tax breaks for the richest 1 percent. There will be a cut in the top tax rate (on incomes over £150,000, or about $235,000) from 50 percent to 45 percent and big cuts in corporate taxes. Middle-class pensioners will lose nearly $500 a year, and the 18 million people in the UK on some form of welfare (usually lower-income families) will lose $800 each. On average, workers earning $30,000 will lose $300 in welfare, with single parents working up to sixteen hours a week losing a staggering $6,300.

Yet Britain’s millionaire bankers will pocket nearly $70,000 a year each in tax breaks, and the corporate sector will see its tax rate fall from 28 percent to 22 percent by the end of this parliament—18 percent lower than the United States, 16 percent lower than Japan, 12 percent below France, and 8 percent below Germany. This is the total tax rate—there are no state corporate taxes in the UK.

Before the budget, the coalition’s mantra that “we’re all in this together” was found to be wanting. The previous budgets redistributed income away from the poorest 10 percent of the population. They lost out more than any other group—except the very richest. The graph below was produced before the top tax rate was cut from 50 to 45 percent. With the reduction, it’s likely that the poorest are paying the most for the economic crisis.

Welfare cuts in Lewisham

The welfare cuts are near fatal to the post-1945 consensus on health care, housing, and benefits for children. In the area I represent, Lewisham in South-East London (a borough with around the population of Stockton, CA), over 9,600 people who rely on rent assistance may have to move homes. People regularly call on me in tears wondering where they will live as their welfare payments are slashed. Public workers who have seen their pay frozen for three years may in certain regions such as the North-East see the freeze extended for another decade until their pay falls below the private sector average. Anger is mounting. Young people tell me they expect last year’s rioting to happen again as youth unemployment stays above 20 percent.

The worry for progressives is that while the majority of Britons are being clobbered to pay for a tax cut for the rich, 58 percent of respondents to a poll before the budget said that the spending cuts were necessary. A significant 36 percent of those polled blamed the previous Labour government for the spending squeeze, not the current government doing the cutting.

In these circumstances, asking corporations and the richest 1 percent to help contribute to Britain’s huge budget deficit is not a big ask. That public polling shows a wariness to do so should send alarm bells ringing in the United States. Democrats need to ask how they can make the case for public spending during the worse crisis since the Great Depression. That case has been lost by progressives in the UK. America has a Tea Party out of power, the British Tea Party is already dismantling the state.

This was originally published by Dissent Magazine on 23 March.

I’ve started contributing to the Guardian, with pieces on the how the government of Belarus is attempting to control the internet, why it shouldn’t be a crime to insult someone, and how Councils are using public money to sue their own residents.

Social media is allowing local government to respond to citizens in a more responsive and accurate manner.
It’s hard to underestimate how much technology can revolutionise the way that public services can be delivered.

One local resident in Lewisham spotted a zebra crossing on Hither Green Lane had one of its light’s covered. Instead of calling me, or writing to me, they tweeted a photo from their mobile of the covered light and asked me to investigate.

Because I had a photo, Council Officers could show this evidence to our highways contractor, Conway. Who in turn, with the address, knew exactly what they needed to fix the problem. Within 3 days the light was fixed.

We can respond even quicker to litter and graffiti thanks to the Love Lewisham application. In 2002, it took two and a half days to clean up reported graffiti, now it takes on average half a day. And graffiti is down by 73 per cent. How? By trusting the public. People don’t want to live in an area blighted by litter, and they’re prepared to tell us when we’re not doing enough. So by giving every citizen with a smartphone the ability to report litter or graffiti to us, we’re able to plot where our teams need to go in a more joined-up way – saving time and energy. And as the smartphone app can also upload a photo of the offending detritus we can deal with the worst stuff first. And people really do seem to like taking responsibility for their home.

But we can also deliver services differently.

Hilary Renwick, our Head of Cultural Services, has told me:

We are acquiring two ‘digital shelves’ from Bloomsbury’s e books collection which include the Arden Shakespeare, specifically the ten plays that are on the GCSE National Curriculum and a collection entitled ‘Our Environment’ comprising ten books including The Hot Topic by Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King. The project is sponsored by Google and run by Public Library Online.”

The Service will be launching a new App for I Phone and Android phones that will enable library card holders to search the library catalogue, reserve a book and interact with their borrower record.

Soon, we will be able to offer more and more of our collection on portable devices. We know that 60% of the workforce of Lewisham has to commute to work in the morning. If we can offer our library services on Kindles, or iPhones, we can ensure our libraries service is more used by more people.

Finally, we need to break open our datasets. We hoard too much information – data that could be used by local residents to challenge the way we run public services. By opening up data we will find ourselves open to serious scrutiny by voters. But – people want to help – and there’s huge added value in getting people to challenge our assertions. We used to spend a significant amount of money on consultants to guide our policy process. We’ve halved this in a year, and we’re going further (as I’ve been pushing in my role as Chair of the Audit Panel). Now, we need to embolden the ‘citizen consultant’ using our data to aid their analysis. In the same way the Freedom of Information Act has opened up local government in a spectacular way – access to data can be challenge us in a far more productive way.

Further reading / resources:

London’s datastore
Nigel Tyrell (Lewisham’s Head of Environment) has a great blog on Love Lewisham
Public data’s Desert Island challenge: which dataset would you pick?