Twitter, or X, and why I'm planning on hanging around for a while yet...

I've watched as a number of my friends and colleagues have given up on Elon Musk's train wreck. And there's no doubt that, for a variety of reasons, it isn't the site it was.

The quality of the advertisements - mostly for unknown companies selling things that I don't want or, occasionally, for scantily clad women - has certainly fallen off, and whilst blocking them gives me a certain degree of grim satisfaction, it is a bit of a nuisance. And the "For you" option seems to specialise in vaguely annoying people who paid for their blue tick status, thus demonstrating that they almost certainly wouldn't have earned it on merit.

I can see why some would find that sufficiently annoying to just throw their hands in the air and walk away. I certainly wouldn't be critical of anyone looking for a new "home".

It perhaps helps that I don't tend to follow anyone who is trying really hard to be edgy. I do follow my friends and acquaintances, and I'm happy to discard those if they become annoying rather than fun, but I've always tended to use it as a means of steering information towards me from sources that I'm interested in, or are useful for my various roles and interests.

That means that the feeds I follow are local government based - partly because of my roles as a Parish Councillor and with the National Association of Local Councillors - or sports based (I follow a range of mostly unsuccessful sports teams) so that I can keep up with their progress (or lack of it) without having to go to a website. I also follow a bunch of Liberal Democrats and a small, highly curated range of politicians from other parties.

What that means is that my "following feed" isn't anywhere near as annoying as the rest of X. That certainly helps to persuade me that it's worth sticking around. Not worth enough for me to pay Elon anything, you understand, but enough to stay, at least whilst the medium exists in a functional form.

But that, I fear, might not be true for very long at the rate things are going...

Experiments with Instagram

Alright, so I’ve written some fine words about social media, which rather means that I ought to practice as I preach. And it dawns on me that I can dredge up something that I had experimented with in the past, i.e. hyper local reporting.

My life is multi-faceted. Whilst I am discouraged from talking about my work, for what are probably good reasons (despite the fact that I am surveyed by my employer each year, asking amongst other things whether or not I am proud to tell people that I work for it), the rest of my public existence is a bit obscure. Many of the things that I do are, in truth, hardly mainstream, but I like to think that most of them are valuable in their way, and contribute to the maintenance of civil society.

So, Instagram, allied to my Facebook and Twitter accounts, offers a means to shed a little light on the life of a Parish Council Chair, for example. It might also allow me to reach out to members regarding my Party activities, which seems like a good thing too.

There are some rules;

• no including other people without their permission, so I won’t be reporting on other people’s activities unless they are a matter of public record
• no release of confidential or secret information

I’ll probably come up with some other rules as I experiment, so the restrictions on the material I publish may expand. We’ll see.

So, if you are on Instagram, look out for me at honladymark (just like my Twitter handle)...

FIRC: thoughts on getting a message out there

It’s now the third year of my three-year term as a member of Federal International Relations Committee, and regular readers will be aware that it hasn’t always entirely gone to plan. I would argue that we haven’t (formally) communicated as well as we might, and having proposed and had accepted a communications plan which didn’t really take off - it did to some extent rely on my enthusiasm as Secretary, and a sense of buy-in which didn’t entirely materialise - I do feel some sense of responsibility.

And so, this week, I have been stirred to think about it again. Ironically, this had nothing to do with events at Federal International Relations Committee itself, but instead has been inspired by the online course that I’m taking, “Diplomacy in the 21st Century”. This week’s module has been about digital diplomacy, with particular reference to the use of social media by diplomats and ministries.

One particularly prominent suggestion is that, for such diplomacy to work, it has to be active, rather than passive. My sense is that FIRC combines two ‘misfortunes’, the first being that the intention to use the Party website for communication with members is doomed by the inability of the Party to maintain a reasonably up to date website due to a lack of human resource.

For example, can you find the minutes of Federal Committee meetings on the website? I can’t. Or identify the members of any Committee other than the Federal Board? Now you might reasonably suggest that such matters are of little import to outsiders, the sort of people who might seek the website to find out what we think, or what we’re campaigning for, and I’m sympathetic to that. What resources there are are certainly best targeted towards activities to help get Liberal Democrats elected.

But, if you want an informed democracy, you need to be able to access information and, if you want to influence the work of the Party, you need to be able to reach decision makers. I would argue that we make that quite hard.

I am, I fear, in danger of digressing though. So, how can FIRC reach out to potentially interested Liberal Democrat members if the Party website isn’t an option? The obvious answer is to create its own social media presence, something that Party committees haven’t done much, if at all. And this offers up a new question - how do you do this, and can it be done to a sufficient standard?

Party committees tend towards a certain age profile, one that is less enthusiastic about social media, and probably less likely to take up video chats, Instagram or any of the other cutting edge media. And yet, if you want to bring in a new generation of activists (and, whisper it quietly, bureaucrats), you have to reach out in a manner that will grab their attention/interest.

Ironically, a few of my FIRC colleagues are quite active on Twitter, Robert Woodthorpe Browne (@robertbrowne1), our Chair, being one of them. He’s a bit more combative than I am (bureaucrat, see), but entertaining in an occasionally frustrated way (and who can blame him?). Adrian Hyyrylainen-Trett, my successor as Secretary, is prominent on Facebook, albeit that his life is far more glamorous than mine and thus more obviously interesting.

But, for the most part, social media can feel a bit like a ‘contractual obligation’ than a valued communication tool, and if we are to reach out effectively, we need to have a team approach to doing so.

So, here’s a question for my readers. If FIRC had to pick one social media tool to reach out, what would it be, and what should be prioritised? Do let me know in the comments...

Ros in the Lords - Social Media: News

This afternoon, Ros contributed to a debate initiated by crossbench Peer, Beeban Kidron, on social media and the news, perhaps of particular interest given the Government defeat yesterday relating to the Leveson recommendations...

Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)

Until the last decade, media platforms were pretty much locked into a one-size-fits-all broadcast model. Success with advertisers depended on producing content that would appeal to the widest possible audience. The recent development of tablet and smartphone technology has been the game-changer, creating a delivery system available pretty much everywhere, 24 hours a day, along with highly personalised and segmented channels.

We are in a wonderful new world of information, education and communication but, as we have heard, there are also serious downsides that we have to address. In a powerful article in this month’s Washington Monthly an early investor in Facebook, Roger McNamee, describes how the algorithms created by Facebook analyse your responses to what you see and then give you more of the same. He argues that negative and hostile messages provoke the strongest responses and demonstrates how these have been used in the referendum campaign here, as well as in the French, German and US elections. Tristan Harris, formerly of Google, has talked about the public health threat from social networks such as Facebook. He calls it “brain hacking”.

We are legislators and we like to legislate: if you have a hammer, all problems tend to look like nails. Widespread, piecemeal legislative change is not the whole answer here. We need to ensure that our education system builds in an awareness of issues such as privacy and safety online, harassment and bullying, as well as critical analysis of the news. The major platforms must do more to create fake news warnings. Education about how data is used could create more pressure from users for transparency about how their data is used. I do not think most users of social media recognise that they are not customers; they are the product. The terms on which users engage—the permissions—should be rebalanced in their favour. Ideally data should belong to the users, not the platforms, and its use should certainly be time-limited. 

There are some signs that things are beginning to change. An article in this week’s Politico notes that,

“a growing number of internet users are turning to new applications and tools that prevent companies and governments from building up a profile of them”.

This is in its infancy and mostly in the business sector but I believe that more will emerge. Education needs to extend beyond school and should definitely include legislators. We—I include myself in this—are not sufficiently well equipped to make judgments in this area. In New York, a city council member called James Vacca promoted a Bill to provide greater transparency of the algorithms now used to determine how public services are allocated. He has recognised that transparency in this area is a key to modern political accountability. 

There is also the issue of net neutrality, currently provided for by the EU regulation on open internet access. This means that ISPs cannot block or slow down data for competitive or commercial purposes. Post Brexit, we need to ensure that companies selling content and services are not able to reduce consumer choice by abusing that position. 

To end on a positive note, Reuters business news carried a story on Tuesday about how some investors in high tech are becoming increasingly concerned about the addictive aspect of their activities and their impact on children. They are changing their investment patterns accordingly. Pressure on institutional investors to pressurise the digital giants could have a significant impact. That would be especially true for the huge public sector pension funds around the world. 

As I left to come over for this debate, I received an invitation from the Westminster Abbey Institute to a talk about truth in politics and the ethics of negative political messaging in social media. Perhaps we should all go.

Published elsewhere - a (day) editorial thought for a New Year...

This piece was published on Liberal Democrat Voice earlier today, and it drew more attention than I normally do...

One of the unexpected advantages of being the Day Editor on New Year’s Day is that you can, perhaps, make a resolution for the year ahead. And nobody can stop you... 

Mwah, hah, hah, hah...

And it dawns on me that, as the person technically responsible for moderation today, I have the tools at my disposal to actually change a small corner of the Internet, and make it a better place, if only for a little while. Call it “taking a stand for decency”, if you like. Or, as someone is bound to say, “censorship”... (you’re wrong, in the nicest possible way, because this is a liberal, rather than libertarian, website).

So, let’s lay down some ground rules for today. Firstly, treat fellow commenters with respect, even if you don’t agree with them. I am the judge of whether or not you’re showing sufficient respect and, as the Day Editor, my word is law. If you don’t like that, go somewhere else, at least for today. You aren’t being censored, as I have no control over anything you say anywhere else, you’re just being managed.

Secondly, try to make a positive case for whatever it is you believe in. You’re trying to persuade people as to the virtues of your argument, not trying to browbeat them into submission. You probably won’t succeed in the latter here anyway, and all you achieve is to ratchet up the level of unpleasantness. And, frankly, it’s all a bit tedious. As my mother might have asked, “How old are you? Five?”.

Thirdly, and this isn’t a rule but merely a suggestion, sarcasm and irony work relatively well when there’s body language to read. Here, there isn’t any. So, why not consider how your witty barb might read sans context before you post it? And, if in doubt, think again.

Unhappy? Get in touch with me via voice@libdemvoice.org. I’m five hours behind you, and whilst I am on holiday (it’s very cold, and thank you for asking), I’ll answer as quickly as I can. Remember, I’m on holiday, so you are not my uppermost priority, but I’m a courteous soul at heart. Oh, and yes, my fellow editorial team members are celebrating New Year as well, so cut us all some slack, if you’d be so kind.

And so, on with the medley... Have fun, and be careful out there...

Twitter: sometimes, you learn the hard way...

I'm not a prolific user of Twitter, I admit. I use it more as a combined news source and means of keeping up with my friends, than as a way of communicating. Occasionally though, I do take a dip in the gasoline-covered waters.

This evening, I made the mistake of responding to something that Iain Dale had retweeted, pointing out that the 'divorce bill' he was referring to was the United Kingdom's share of the costs of commitments entered into jointly by the members of the European Union. Not hugely controversial, I thought. Apparently though, this offered Iain the chance to make a snide response, spotted by his 100,000+ followers.

He's allowed to do that - it's a free world. But he sends me a clear signal that he believes his fame to give him the right to be unnecessarily rude without consequence. And again, he's entitled to that.

However, what he also implies is that any exchange on Twitter will be on his terms. Unfortunately, he's not wholly entitled to that, as the word 'exchange' requires two parties to make it work. In other words, I have to accept his attitude if I want to exchange ideas with him.

Now, as I noted at the beginning, I use Twitter as a combined news source and means of keeping up with my friends. Iain isn't my friend - we've met socially from time to time, and we were a year apart at the University of East Anglia, where he was a prominent member of the Federation of Conservative Students... and I wasn't.

That makes him a potential news source. But, if his attitude is to be rude to people he doesn't agree with, that doesn't make him a valuable news source either, as I would need to seek validation of his opinions from other sources. Life is too short, and there are too many other sources of information that I respect more, regardless of whether or not I agree with them - I'm a devoted Times reader, for example, and the Guardian mostly annoys me.

And so, I'll free up a little bit of bandwidth on my Twitter feed by unfollowing Iain. It's no great loss to me, and no loss at all to him, especially as he doesn't follow me.

But perhaps it's a sign of the times that Brexiteers and Remainers are digging themselves into their respective trenches. And for those of us who are genuinely keen to get the best for our country, whatever that is, it's just another measure that, in the pursuit of ideology for ideology's sake, we become a country that's just that little bit less pleasant for all of us.

Nadia Cenci learns a valuable lesson just too late...

And so, as I suspected, it came to pass that Nadia Cenci's tenure as Leader of the Conservative Group on Ipswich Borough Council came to a sorry end. It didn't take very long, her resignation coming on Monday without much suggestion that it wasn't inevitable.

Her apology was a fulsome one, and whilst only Nadia knows whether or not it was sincere, she might hope that it doesn't necessarily mean the end of any political aspirations she has much beyond being a Borough councillor.

I fear that she is, however, done for in that sense, because the other problem with the internet, beyond the risk of saying something you wouldn't normally put into the public arena, is that it never goes away. Search engines are entirely unforgiving like that and, if she ever puts her name forward for anything, it will be there, and used as a stick to poke her with.

I am also reminded that, only too often, those describing themselves as outspoken are, ultimately, usually found placing their privilege above their principles, as a former Leader of the UK Libertarian Party did a few years back in a particularly sorry example of the genre. When his job was under threat, he rowed back only too rapidly from his often vile attacks on opponents.

Funnily enough, with freedom of speech comes the freedom to accept the consequences, which is why one has an obligation to consider the implications of one's words and actions beforehand. That's because, as Chris Mounsey found out, the consequences don't just necessarily fall upon you, but on those around you - family, friends, work colleagues, for example, who probably weren't consulted first.

In this instance, can Nadia be trusted to look after the interests of the council tenants of Ipswich? Are her views those of her fellow Council Group members? More importantly, what do those council tenants think? They have votes too, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Ipswich Labour activists use this against the Conservatives in the months to come.

An Ipswich Tory has a social media misadventure...

I have to admit, I don't pay as much attention to local politics in Ipswich, our county town, as I might. Whilst I work in the heart of the town, and thus am there five days of each week, I can't say that I have an attachment to it which is anything other than functional. The shopping isn't as good as that of Norwich, or even Bury St Edmunds, and you just sense that it hasn't always been well-served by a County administration that is dominated by people who don't live there.

And, in truth, those of the town's politicians who are on social media often come across as unnecessarily aggressive and confrontational. It's the sort of politics that I was happy to leave behind when I left London nearly a decade ago.

But, bits and pieces of the online debate do cross my timeline, and, on Friday, I noticed that Nadia Cenci, the leader of the Conservative Group on Ipswich Borough Council, had made a comment about the survivors of the Grenfell Tower disaster which was, at best, grossly insensitive and, at worst, downright unpleasant.

Reaction was instantaneous - it tends to be when there's blood in the water - and hostile too. Nadia defended herself. It was a mistake, she'd meant to refer to the left-wing activists causing trouble, an interpretation which didn't have much to commend it. And then, she was gone. Six years of tweets deleted at a stroke.

Given that in her Twitter bio, she described herself as "outspoken female", it seemed odd that she'd simply bolted for the hills like that. After all, if you are outspoken, you stand by your comments, unless they're factually inaccurate, I'd have thought. Admittedly, 'outspoken' is a word used instead of the more accurate 'rude', 'unpleasant', or even 'callous', and whilst it may not reflect who Nadia really is (and I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, Nadia), I was reminded that, surprisingly often, Twitter is a window into people's souls.

Nadia had a series of choices to make when this incident blew up. First, to apologise or stand by her initial thought. She did neither, instead trying to weasel out of it with the old "it was badly worded and I meant something completely different" routine. It seldom works. And then, once the explanation had failed to convince, a credible apology might have dealt with the matter. Unfortunately, deleting your whole Twitter oeuvre leads the more cynical to wonder what else was there.

And now, the story has reached the Daily Mail at a time when the Conservative Party leadership appear desperate to be loved. You wouldn't be optimistic for Nadia's future, even after her fulsome apology. It may be time for her to do some good works by way of rehabilitation. And maybe reintegrate back into social media society over the coming months... with a little more caution this time, perhaps, Nadia?

In which your correspondent encounters the bizarre and the fanatical...

I'm a pretty reasonable sort of guy, I like to think. Not prone to excess of any kind, willing to consider a reasoned argument, even if I don't necessarily agree with it. Right all of the time? Hardly, indeed, I tend to make a virtue of uncertainty. After all, there are known knowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns, to erratically quote Donald Rumsfeld. Generalisation is unhelpful, even as a handy debating tool.

And so, when someone popped up on Caron Lindsay's Twitter feed today, stating that they had zero respect for Sunni Islam, I felt moved to respond. Alright, I was a mite confrontational, in the way that a slightly irritable bureaucrat can be...

https://twitter.com/honladymark/status/761095985460236293

But let's be honest here, respect is a two way street. No, you don't tolerate violence in the cause of religion, but we have laws to deal with that sort of thing. And, in the same way that I wouldn't say that all UKIP members are racists (some of them might be, but that doesn't mean that they all are), it is hard to credit that the many Sunni that I've worked with, done politics with or otherwise interacted with are out to get me. I did live in inner London for the best part of two decades, after all.

And yet, there are people out there, people with followers, who believe that every following of the Sunni version of Islam is a potential murderer. Either that, or they aren't devout in their faith. And all because they can quote a relatively obscure part of a 1300 year old document, written at a time when might was right and life was generally short and brutal, that suggests that killing your enemies is a good thing. Well, in an environment where killing your neighbours to preserve your access to food and precious resources was advantageous, you can see why a religious text might say that. After all, a deity whose followers survive is more likely to be worshipped than one whose followers don't.

But curiously, we've all moved on a bit since those days. We've found that working together means that instead of burning your resources in conflict, you can pool resources, trade them amongst one another, build relationships based on trust. And followers of the various faiths move with society, albeit usually a few steps behind, adapting the practice of the faith to suit.

I am probably seen as a wet apologist for liberalism by the zealots. I tend to think of myself as someone who believes in keeping the channels of communication open, and in treating my fellow person with a bit of respect. Sadly, the world now offers far more scope for the provocateur, the seeker of scapegoats, through social media. It turns out that these people are not alone, that their echo chamber is a lot bigger than we might hope. And the problem is, they care more. Their passion to build walls, to expel what is different from their communities, to pull up a drawbridge, drives them, and sews the seeds of mistrust in our society.

I hope that our society is better than to fall for that. I fear that it is not...

Taking a deep sigh, and finding something else to do...

Liberal Democracy has been good to me personally. I've met fascinating people, done interesting and, occasionally, useful things, I hope. I met Ros, who has made my life better in a whole bunch of ways. The past week has been deeply dispiriting though.

It would be foolhardy to describe those aspects, on either side of the argument, which have depressed me most and, to be fair, there have been participants on both sides who have led me to wonder whether or not I am the right sort of liberal to be at home here, or perhaps, an acceptable enough liberal.

And yet, one hesitates. I am deeply fond of my Local Party, for all its idiosyncrasies, and I enjoy what I do at a European level. I like to think that, all in all, my contribution is a useful one, and that I serve those who I represent to the best of my ability.

But my confidence is shaken, rather then bolstered, so perhaps it is time to take some time out, particularly from the online debate, which seems to have taken a turn for the rather less pleasant.

Don't mind me, I'll shut the door as I go... 

You have to get up pretty early to answer the mob...

Let's be honest, the thought that someone should fly back from New York, first class no less, to vote in support of slashing tax credits for the poorest working households is pretty reprehensible. And so, unsurprisingly, Andrew Lloyd Webber has taken more than a little flak.

Dear @OfficialALW (Lloyd-Webber), did you really just charge the UK tax payer to fly you back from New York just to vote against #taxcredits

— Samuel Rushworth (@SamJRushworth) October 26, 2015

Now, young Sam isn't just any random voice on the internet, he was the Labour candidate for Blackpool North earlier this year. You'd think that he'd be a little more cautious. But no. He posted that at 10.31 p.m. and it appeared in my timeline because a Liberal Democrat PPC retweeted it.

Being a helpful soul, and still being awake, I pointed out that the House of Lords system for claiming travel expenses wouldn't allow Lord Lloyd-Webber to claim for anything more than the cost of travelling from Heathrow to Westminster.

The response was to demand where he pays tax. Being ever patient, I noted that, since the passing of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 provides that members of the House of Commons (MPs) and House of Lords (Peers) are deemed resident, ordinarily resident and domiciled in the UK for the purposes of income tax, inheritance tax and capital gains tax.

This didn't apparently stop those members of the mob watching, which shouldn't come as much as a surprise, I guess. But I did point out to young Sam that demanding a reply in the middle of the night was hardly reasonable. And, to give him credit, he did get it.

@honladymark @BelindaBG @OfficialALW Take your point

— Samuel Rushworth (@SamJRushworth) October 27, 2015

So, why was I bothering? Well, one day, Sam might be a member of Parliament himself, and the target of an angry internet mob. And, if that day comes, he might understand why I made the point I did.

You see, taking up your internet flaming torch and pitchfork is dead easy. And sometimes, you prove your stupidity by making some innocent person's life a misery. And, whilst Andrew Lloyd Webber may be callous beyond my understanding, he isn't that stupid...

Nicola and Jeremy are both calling for a kinder, gentler politics. Is anyone listening?

A few weeks ago, Jeremy Corbyn called for a kinder, gentler politics, following an outbreak of red on red unpleasantness. Whilst those of us of a Liberal Democrat persuasion have become used to the sometimes inane criticism of a small minority of 'class warriors' amongst Labour ranks, the general tone from the Opposition benches in Parliament, and especially some of their candidates, hardly established a tone conducive to peace, love and understanding. It was instructive to see how some of them felt when the anger was suddenly directed towards them.

Now, as Tim Farron noted in his excellent speech at the East of England Conference on Saturday (and actually, I genuinely enjoyed it), Jeremy Corbyn seems like a thoroughly decent chap. He doesn't seem to abuse his opponents, even as he attacks their policies. Whether or not he can remain as composed given the abuse he is taking from the sometimes rabid media is another question but, so far, so good.

And now, Nicola Sturgeon has seen fit to issue a similar call aimed at some of the more 'enthusiastic' Cybernats, following an outbreak of astonishing unpleasantness following the Scottish rugby team's heartbreaking defeat against Australia. It seemed that, to some of the more extreme Cybernats, you had no right to support Scotland if you didn't support independence, and they were busy abusing any potential victims they could locate. Funny really, as I've always been of the view that sport is a means of bringing nations together...

Now I do understand the passions that nationhood, and the desire to be free, engender. I had a fairly relaxed attitude over the possibility of Scottish independence, given my belief in the self-determination of peoples. However, regardless of the outcome, everybody has to rub along afterwards - a point which seems to be lost on the ultras, whose apparent aim is to drive dissenters out of Scottish politics altogether.

One of the interesting things about Labour and the SNP is their general discipline. Because they are collectivist in a way that liberals and conservatives aren't, they have an ability to stay on message, even if their suspicion of individualism makes their messaging a bit too monotone in nature. It can be impressive to watch, even where you disagree with it, or indeed, are the target. So, one might hope that, if the Leader speaks, the followers may act.

Given the toxicity of modern politics, one can but hope... and remember that none of us should ever lose sight of the fact that our opponents are human too.

[Insert title here]

Glory, glory...

It's been a good(ish) day for the Marketmen, as Needham Market drew 1-1 at home to Hampton and Richmond Borough in the Ryman League's Premier Division.

FT @NeedhamFC 1 Hampton & Richmond Borough 1. Great and deserved point for the Marketmen! They'll be fine with more performances like this

— Will Ridgard (@WillRidgard) October 17, 2015

A home draw, that's not that good, you might think. But they have started the season badly, and are beginning to look a bit more at home - the defence is tightening up, for one thing. Now to start winning a few games...

The extremely unlikely happens every day, apparently...

I rather unwisely put in my nomination paper to be one of my Regional Party's eighteen members of English Council (yes, I know, and despite that, I still applied). And now I find that there is likely to be a contest. In the name of all that is holy, what is this organisation, and what have you done with the Liberal Democrats I knew and loved?


Just another day on the internet...

Let's be honest, you should never assume that because one small element of a larger group goes rogue, the whole organisation is suspect.

Local Momentum branches have started endorsing calls for deselection. pic.twitter.com/xW3CwhM4lq

— Tyron Wilson (@TyronWilson) October 16, 2015

However, it does act as a useful reminder to all of us that one should really think before you allow anyone to play with social media on your behalf. One for the Colchester branch of 'Momentum' to consider perhaps, now that they have apologised for publishing it.

Mind you, there's a web design firm in Colchester who might have wondered what was going on...

Numbers, numbers everywhere, but not a drop to drink...

44% of UKIP supporters could envisage a situation where they would support a military coup in this country, according to a recent YouGov poll. I wonder what percentage of them could envisage a situation where they emigrated to another country? And what percentage would see the irony?

And finally...

We've had a new letterbox fitted here in darkest Suffolk. Those of you who appreciate these things will be pleased to hear that it is nice and wide, at a comfortable height and easy to use...

Home again. It doesn't seem that much has changed though...

Three weeks away from home, without the never-ending cheerfulness that is the British media, has ended, and a conveniently timed Bank Holiday weekend allows me to catch up on all of those things that pile up in one's absence. E-mail, post, laundry and party-related tasks, for example.

So, I've written a report to my Local Party's Executive Committee for the upcoming meeting in my capacity as Treasurer (we have money - I'm terribly excited!), ordered some books of tickets for the Liberal Democrat Christmas Draw (I won two years ago, so it was well worth it), opened up a bunch of post and paid the bills that were amongst it, and laundry is currently going through its cycles. I feel vaguely virtuous, and a mite more organised than usual.

Apparently, the Labour Party is still trying to elect a new leader, politicians are behaving badly, the weather's been pretty miserable and a bunch of people are doing something that the Daily Mail doesn't like. On social media, people are continuing to insist on behaving like idiots in the face of all the evidence that it doesn't help. In other words, life is as normal.

Here in rural mid-Suffolk though, it all seems like it's a long way away, which allows me the time and space to make a few minor changes to my lifestyle, avoid things that cause me stress and give some thought to a few projects that I have in mind.

In other news, my local Tesco is already promoting Christmas tins of assorted chocolates. Remind me, it is still summer, isn't it?

It's been a slightly unusual day on Planet Bureaucrat...

A few seconds of unexpected fame...

Today saw the Aviva Women's Tour cycle race come through Suffolk, as Stage 1 took the riders from Bury St Edmunds to Aldeburgh. What I hadn't factored for that I would get such a great view from my office window, as the race swirled down Museum Street, then took a rather awkward little right-hander into Princes Street before turning left again at the crossroads below the office.

I was lucky enough to get a good picture with my iPhone, and posted it on Twitter. Within a few minutes, I received a request from the BBC to use the picture and, ten minutes later, there it was, with the text of my tweet, and a photo credit, on the BBC Suffolk website. For the record, I did not receive, nor did I seek, payment for the material...

By mid-afternoon, I was on a train to London, in order to perform my duty as Returning Officer for our Parliamentary Party in the House of Lords. In truth, it isn't terribly complex, with an electorate of exactly one hundred, and there were three candidates for two positions, making my task a pretty straightforward one, but it is nice to be asked, and I like both Ros's colleagues and the team in the Whips Office. Oh, and yes, I did not receive, nor did I seek, payment for my services...

As has already been published elsewhere, Navnit Dholakia and Kate Parminter were the successful candidates, bringing both talent and diversity to our leadership in the Lords. And the fact that Navnit gave me an excellent character reference when I first started seeing Ros makes no difference to how I see him! Kate worked with Ros on the EU Select Sub-Committee D, and has real passion. So, given the quality on our red benches, no pressure on our team on the green ones, I suppose.

I made the 20.00 train home, which was a bonus, as it allowed me to start work on a presentation I have to give on Saturday. There is, it seems, no rest for the bureaucrat...

Far from the campaign trail... is decent politics to be drowned out by the vilest common denominator?

The news that Jack Monroe has quit Twitter due to homophobic abuse is just another depressing event in what has felt like a descent into a world where too many of the voices you hear are unpleasant ones.

And no, I don't want to suggest that people who disagree with me are unpleasant. Yes, some of them are, but they can't be categorised as simply political opponents. But, below the line in virtually every newspaper, there seems to be a never ending stream of vile abuse towards anyone and everyone who dares to put their head above the parapet to espouse a view that they believe in.

But, and let's face it, such people are hardly discouraged from their belief that rudeness and crudeness are perfectly acceptable ways to treat their fellow human beings. Journalists who write snide comments picking on the imperfections of politicians, politicians who lie about their opponents or wilfully misrepresent them, members of the public who express a view that all politicians are 'in it for themselves', regardless of whether they have any evidence or not, all of them debase our political culture.

And it's worse in the case of such politicians and journalists, because they know exactly what they are doing. By encouraging the likes of Guido Fawkes to do their dirty work for them, or by ridiculing anyone who expresses doubt or hesitation, or even does a little free thinking, they send out a clear message that it is open season on the naive, the thoughtful, the non-partisan. No wonder that politicians attempt to control how they are presented - a foolish notion in any event, but perhaps understandable.

Indeed, I now find myself wondering why anyone thinking of entering into politics would even think twice. Why set yourself up to be abused by the stupid, the evil and the callous when you could live a quiet life, have a decent career and travel entirely under the radar? You and your family get a private life, nobody except your boss expects you to justify yourself and, eventually, you get to enjoy the fruits of your labour without hassle or insult.

There is an obvious problem, I accept. If everyone who has feelings opts out of politics, you leave it to those more fanatical, less caring of what others say or think. One shudders to think of the likely outcome of such a turn of events.

To make matters worse, such behaviour is now targeted at public figures generally. If you are a celebrity, one might at least hope that the financial rewards make up for it (they probably don't), but for those in public life generally, it is another disincentive to serve the wider public. I suspect that the current Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, is avoiding the internet and social media, given her decision on whether to prosecute Greville Janner or not. I don't know whether or not her decision was the right one, but she will have weighed up all of the evidence available before making the decision not to proceed. She will, however, be being abused by people who haven't seen the evidence, and wouldn't care even if they had. And they will be encouraged by the attitude of the Fifth Estate.

No, it's been a deeply depressing General Election campaign, and whilst I know that there are plenty of good, decent people campaigning for what they believe in, nobody is covering that...

Liberal Democrat Voice and moderation - some historical perspective...

As the former Readers' Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, I was obliged to give much thought to the dilemma that faces any debating platform, i.e. how do you create a space which is inclusive yet lively, informative but not aggressive, in the face of accusations of being either overly laissez-faire or unreasonably censorious? My conclusion was that you can never satisfy everyone, so you might as well be true to yourself and as consistent and transparent as you can.

Of course, the dilemma is one that predates the Internet, as this guidance, explicitly defining the formal conditions for fruitful conversation, demonstrates;

During the discussion that followed readings or lectures, members were to avoid arbitrary or ill-considered comments. Critiques should engage in a structured way with the style, method and content of the lecture. They should employ 'the cautious language of reason'. Digressions and interruptions were strictly prohibited. All members were ultimately guaranteed the right to have their say, but they must wait their turn and make remarks as concise as possible. Satirical or mocking remarks and suggestive wordplay were unacceptable.

The fact that the guidance was issued by the 'German societies' which sprang up across Prussia in the mid-eighteenth century, does tell you that discussion moderation has been an issue for some time now and, indeed, that the basic problems are unchanging.

For the Liberal Democrat Voice team, that demonstrates the scale of the moderation challenge. In the early days, moderation was quite relaxed, before tightening up significantly after the expenses scandal in 2009. I admit that, subsequently, I had thought that moderation had become excessive until I became part of the team myself, and began to appreciate the challenges brought about by some of the behaviours exhibited.

But now, I find myself wondering whether or not the current policy finds the team caught between two stools - activist in terms of one-off incidents, yet excessively tolerant in terms of those who consistently derail threads, behave aggressively towards other participants or who seek to distort the apparent support for their position by multiple commenting.

The policy of placing 'difficult' individuals in auto-moderation is, as far as it goes, merely a starting point. It generates more work for the team, work which is trying, to say the least, and irritates those penalised, often causing them to spend time challenging the moderation policy, generating even more work.

It is argued that banning people is illiberal. Banning people because you feel like It is illiberal. But if you establish a set of rules, clearly stated, you are obliged to enforce them, and the punishment is meant to be for those breaking them, not those enforcing them. It is not censorship to deny those who lack respect for the rules of a community a platform - there are plenty of other platforms for them - below the line on most articles in the national newspapers, Guido Fawkes, the list is probably endless.

Whilst the articles on Liberal Democrat Voice retain their interest, the comments below are too often predictable and dominated by what seems like an diminishing number of individuals. I note that my engagement, as well as my participation, has dropped recently, and I wonder if I am alone in that.

But those of us who wish it were better do have a responsibility too. We could engage, adhering to the rules for the 'German societies' outlined above, and see how it goes. After all, we'd miss Liberal Democrat Voice if it were gone, wouldn't we?

Latvia - a country to be proud of

Call me quirky if you will, but I rather liked the video marking the fact that Latvia will hold the Presidency of the European Council for the first half of 2015 - Luxembourg are next - and so, having discovered the follow up, I thought that I ought to bring it to your attention...

#IbackEd... with friends like these, who needs enemies?...

It seems not to be the fashion to indicate a degree of sympathy for one's political opponents these days. Often, such an expression is seen as either weakness or as a thinly-veiled attack. I disagree - my political opponents are people too, with all the same weaknesses, personal foibles and contradictions as the rest of us, politically active or otherwise. It is the reason why I have always been loathe to attack someone for making a mistake in their personal lives (within reason, I draw the line at acts of illegality).

Today, I had one of those experiences which leads you to wonder whether or not there is a future for politics as it is now done too frequently these days. Having woken up and peered myopically at my Twitter feed, I was moved to post

Can't help feeling that having to say #webackEd is a sign that you've got a problem. It's as if loyalty can't be assumed...

— Mark Valladares (@honladymark) November 9, 2014

It is, if you like, the "doth protest too much" school of sloganising. I understand the reasoning behind it, certainly I do, but in an increasingly cynical world, an orchestrated defence of the leader which appears to fly in the face of the polling evidence looks like just that, an orchestrated and not spontaneous display of on-message social media. The public don't really buy it.

And Ed Miliband is exactly the same person he was when the Labour Party elected him as their leader four years ago. Is he a bad leader, are the policies wrong, or do the media just hate him because he isn't what they want him to be? Whilst I disagree with his solutions to our nation's problems - I'm a liberal, he isn't, so that should really go without saying - he is expressing opinions that are shared by a respectable proportion of the population. But I really couldn't say that he is a bad leader - I don't know how good a leader he is allowed to be, either by his own Party, or by the media. I do get the impression that large swathes of our national media don't like him - they do seem to delight in finding opportunities to belittle him.

And I got a reply from someone using the Twitter name @killingbritain, who seemed to think that an appropriate response to my thought was to refer to a local government by-election in Nottingham where the Liberal Democrat candidate was beaten by the 'Bus Pass Elvis' candidate. An interesting response, I thought, entirely irrelevant to the point being made, but simply a cheap attack on an unknown political opponent.

I wasn't impressed - if someone anonymous thinks that David Cameron is killing Britain, I would suggest that they need to get out more, frankly - but politely replied, generating more irrelevant, cheap invective in response, a point I again politely alluded too. The response was to suggest that, if I felt attacked by someone on Twitter, there was an established reporting mechanism. So I reported him. After all, he or she (but probably he) wanted the attention...

I tend to think that such pointless aggression on the part of an anonymous partisan is the very sort of behaviour that puts the vast majority of people off the notion of involvement in politics. After all, who needs to put up with such stuff when there are many other things to do which involve less aggravation and probably higher levels of personal satisfaction?

But then, people like @killingbritain probably don't want anyone to play in their playground who doesn't slavishly agree with them. It might be easier, but I think that they'll find it a bit sterile... and perhaps a bit lonely one day...

Is this why the Leader's Office doesn't get it?

The recent debate over rumoured proposals to snoop on private internet traffic has been something of an eye-opener for many internet savvy Liberal Democrats. The report sparked a great deal of anger amongst the online community, all of which led to a hurriedly organised conference call between a group of Liberal Democrat bloggers, two Special Advisors in Nick Clegg's Private Office, and Matthew Hanney, Nick's political advisor on Tuesday evening, organised by the Liberal Democrat blogosphere's resident Auntie, Helen Duffett.

It was, it is fair to say, a rather difficult conversation, and it would be hard to describe it as a wholly successful meeting of minds.

There was a decided sense that the Leader's Office doesn't 'get' it, that they are too close to the heart of government to see why those of us with the opportunity to apply some perspective or, in some cases, expertise, are so aerated about the issue of internet monitoring. It would appear the Leader's Office suffers from a failure to connect to the wider Party.

If it's any consolation, it has been ever thus. David Steel was pretty much loathed by the radical wing of the Liberal Party (the feeling was almost entirely mutual), whilst Paddy Ashdown's leadership was punctuated by interesting 'out of the blue' policy announcements which did at least have the effect of ensuring that you listened to his leader's speech. Charles Kennedy never really engaged with activists, and Ming Campbell's understanding of how the Party really worked tended to ensure that he was respected but never really loved.

But whereas in the past it wasn't important because we weren't in government, and the absence of social media made organising a co-ordinated response was difficult (how outraged can you get if you don't know how outraged everybody else is?), both of these have now changed.

And that, perhaps is the key to the sense of dislocation between 'us' and 'them'. One presumes that the Special Advisors know more than we do about the detail of government - what is being discussed, at what level, and at what stage of development it is at. That knowledge is a blessing... and a curse. It is a blessing, because they can see beyond the newspaper headlines, but a curse because they therefore don't necessarily see what the impact of those newspaper headlines is on the rest of us.

However, that doesn't mean that they're right, and that the rest of us are wrong. We have to remember that a small group of people are tasked with attempting to keep track of the entire gamut of government business, whilst we can focus on the things that interest us. They are also outnumbered by evil Tories, with their own agenda (which isn't ours, lest we forget).

But the fact that we are watching, as an online community, changes the way that politics should be done at the centre. Unfortunately, the centre is suffering from time lag. In the same way that government was slow to understand the impact that freedom of information would have on its work, and that coalition would have on decision making, so it is with the ability of opposition groups to convey their message and influence the media agenda.

As Nick kept saying, we need a new politics. Ironically, that's not just because it is right, but it's because the old one is now transparently broken. And our mission, should we wish to take it on, is to help in those efforts to change the way that policy is made in this country, to break down the walls of silence and deception that impact on our body politic, and to shine a light upon those shadowy media moguls, lobbyists and apparatchiks whose influence is so strong over those who govern us.

It isn't easy, and it won't be quick. But, in the long run, it will reduce the scope for the sort of gulf that causes disharmony amongst us...