Taking Out The Trash

Flat Earth win

Thanks to FleetStreetBlues for the tip that Flat Earth News has won the Bristol Festival of Ideas inaugural book award. Top reading.

President Bartlet declines to run

Martin Sheen, who played the fictional US President Bartlet in The West Wing, has told students at Oxford that he would never run for office.

Sheen, who is well known for his progressive politics, said the thought of spending all his time in meetings was too much.

"Acting is what I do for a living," he said. "Activism is what I do to stay alive."

Having properly launched my campaign to be elected as a councillor in Wiltshire I can empathise with the 'activism' bit. Getting out and talking on the doorstep to residents, addressing public meetings (as I did on Tuesday night) and debating with other people is invigorating. (You can find out more on my Facebook site).

You just hope to carry that enthusiasm through when the smoke has cleared and you find yourself in the council chamber debating the minutiae of policy.

Kerron Cross has nice post on this where he says: "I am simply hooked on the West Wing". The show is like a little cult where fans swap favourite liberal one-liners. Cross picks out a bit where Bartlet takes apart a bigoted talk show host.

However the clip below, for me, is another cracker. Bartlet is up against a folksy southern Republican who, watching it now, comes across as a male version of Sarah Palin. They accidentally meet in private just before a social engagement when this exchange takes place.

I took part in a debate with the other candidates in my ward on Tuesday night. The Lib Dem's had wanted me step aside because I would be splitting the anti-Tory vote. Yet I watched their prospective councillor struggle to even read off a cue card correctly. That was my "Boy, crime, I don't know" moment.

Euro FoI

I'm not experienced in requesting documents from the European Parliament Commission (apologies for the schoolboy error and thanks to Philip Hunt for correcting me - post in haste, repent at leisure).

It's enough trying to winkle out info in this country but there's a useful resource from the NUJ about how to do this.
Hat tip: Tigmoo

PMQs

For the second week running blacklists were raised at Prime Minister's Questions. (And for the second week running the BBC didn't bother to report it).

This time Brown raised it himself which may have been in response to the mass lobby of Parliament which had just taken place (see previous post).

Q8.    [272709] Jim Sheridan (Paisley and Renfrewshire, North) (Lab): My right hon. Friend will be well aware of the difficulties facing employers and employees in the construction industry—problems that have been further compounded by the activities of illegal gangmasters. Will he therefore agree to meet me and other like-minded colleagues to talk through the issues involving illegal gangmasters in the construction industry?

The Prime Minister: I am happy to do so. This issue concerns me and anybody who looks at the performance of the construction industry. We are also, as I said last week, looking at the operation of illegal blacklists in the construction industry, which is an unacceptable practice.

Could McAlpines be the first firm taken to a tribunal over blacklisting?

Update 9.07am: Piece in The Guardian today about a demonstration taking place this morning outside the Olympic site. Interesting quote from one organiser:

"We are targeting the Olympic site because it is the highest profile construction project in the UK," said the spokesman, who asked not to be named for fear that he will be blacklisted (my emphasis) by employers. "Across the country construction workers are concerned they are not getting a fair deal. We will be calling for 100% direct employment on the Olympic site and we don't want to see any agency workers."

More coverage here and in the Morning Star.

Meanwhile union official Michael Dooley has just issued a press release announcing what looks like the first employment tribunal claim arising out of the construction industry blacklisting scandal.

The release says:

A former Bricklayer who was named on the Construction Blacklisted because of his Trade Union activity has made the first claim to the Employment Tribunal. Michael Dooley has last week 27th April 2009 registered a claim against major contractor Sir Robert McAlpine after recently receiving official confirmation of his 16 page Blacklist file

The Tribunal office in South London has accepted his claim and should hear Dooleys case in a matter of months. The case centers on a Documentation that was seized by the governments Information Commissioner when officials raided an office in Droitwich in the West Midlands occupied by the Consulting Association in March 2009.

Director of the Consulting Association was Ian Kerr. Kerr kept files on over 3,000 building workers who where trade union members, this file referred to as a Blacklist was supplied to many major building contractor one of which, it is reported was Sir Robert McAlpine. Contractors paid an annual subscription reported to be £3,000. Requests for information on ‘subject’ was made the Consulting Association’ provided the information at a charge of £2.20p a time.

Dooley lodged the claim as soon as he was aware that his name was on the file, his documentation runs to some 15 pages of information dating back to 1977 and ending in 1999, shortly after he became a Full Time Official of a Trade Union in London.

Dooley said ‘we stood up to bullying subcontractors and fought for decent wages and conditions when it was right to do so.  I heard stories of a Blacklist but it was a situation where either I accepted the unacceptable and keep my head down or say no that not right”

Dooley added ‘ I wanted to make sure that conditions where safe and wages where paid correctly, there is inevitably a conflict with some employers. So I regularly varied my details including my union, my name, National Insurance even my accent, but it is the more sinister information contained on my Blacklist that I am very angry about information of a personal nature, more than just my employment record.  My file contained personal information, some of which must have originated from Government departments and other information that was alarmingly incorrect.

An Employment tribunal may not have the jurisdiction to hear Dooleys claim because of time limits on bringing claims. However if what Dooley said is found to be true that he was refused work on several McAlpine sites after being involved in an industrial dispute on one of their sites it could be embarrassing to McAlpines. The question remaining  will be why was a reputable major contractor involved in the practices which could bring so much disrepute to them and to the industry?

ENDS

When I contacted McAlpines about the original blacklisting story I got a swift and straight  'no comment'. I expect the same here until / if this goes to court.

Update: Story also covered by Contract Journal and Heating and Ventilating Net.

BBC blogging pt 2

Well, 90% of what I said ended up on the cutting room floor mainly because, I think, I spoke a little too rapidly and my sentences were too long.

However, you can read about the BBC West Politics Show on blogging and there is also a links to the iPlayer record of it as well.

My main point was that blogging has become an increasingly popular news source for journalists (because it's quick and easy and confers a veneer of expertise) but for bloggers to get their stories accepted requires the mainstream press to valdiate them. (cf McBride and smeargate).

And too many people are on the wrong side of the digital divide for blogging to be anything other than a useful additional tool for journalists and politicians at the moment.

Bath & Wilts blogging: your starter for 10

BristolKRS posted a great comment to a post of mine from a few days ago bemoaning the limpid blog scene in Bath & Wiltshire compared to Bristol.

I've reposted the comment below in case you missed it.

As for building a better local blog scene or community or whatnot, I think that once you've found other sites locally, the linking up and cross-fertilising comes naturally. The Bristol blog scene is after all as atomised and at times as discrete as any other grouping of people or organisations linked only by geography.

The intersecting interests of the Bristol bloggers (often in relation to the shared aspects of their blogging - a sense of place, and from that, issues such as local government and politics, planning issues, an incorrigible disdain for career politicians at all levels tempered by a willingness to enter into discussion with them, and so on) I think is simply an example of the way strangers on the internet come to interact with each other after the initial dance. Every blog post heralds a negotiation, a negotiation over agreement and disagreement; whether blogger A agreed with blogger B in the past over issue C is neither here nor there once they're onto issue D. The style and grace with which each blogger addresses the issue is as individual as is possible, and will be seasoned with all manner of variables - mood, timing, off-stage and unstated motivations (a family crisis, perhaps, or a lack of time to spend blogging in detail due to problems at work), personal beliefs, political alignment, an open goal for a cheap one-liner...

Of course, all of these things are to a greater or lesser extent applicable in the 'real world' too; it's just that this being a written medium, it lends itself more concretely to form and structure.

Erm, rambling a bit there.

Some practical suggestions for kickstarting a Bath/Wilts blog scene:

# Put together a long list of Bath & Wilts keywords - places, people, issues - and methodically search for blogs writing about them - use the blog-specific Google search, as well as searching individual blog platforms like Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger, LiveJournal etc. Don't forget to search through tags and categories too.

# Use the same keywords to search through the microblogging & tumblelogging platforms and RSS management social networks - Twitter, Jaiku, Blip.fm, FriendFeed, HelloTxt, Plurk, Tumblr etc - this should harvest a few more local or local interest bloggers via their profiles.

# Use a blog reader like NetNewsWireLite (free) to manage subscriptions to all these blogs so you can keep abreast of what's being written without having to methodically visit each one directly.

# Make sure you cross-comment and cross-link in comments on local issues across as many of these blogs as possible (in a way that can't be construed as spam!)

# Maintain a thorough blogroll covering local and local interest blogs, and encourage your fellow bloggers in Bath/Wilts to do the same - and contact your local dead tree media and get them to publish a local blogroll on their website (a la Evening Post: http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/news/Bristol-bloggers/article-769023-detail/article.html )

# Create catchy local memes that grab your fellow bloggers - like TBB's Red Trouser Gate, which, you might say, definitely had legs...

# Blog in a manner which lends itself to crowdsourcing, and invite input from readers and other bloggers.

# Plug other blogs when they're writing good stuff, as well as your own - especially when commenting on big hitter non-local blogs, or forums etc.

# Tag your own blog entries methodically!

I'm sure this is all stuff you're already doing, but maybe not. Best of luck!

Forecasting government action on blacklisting

Tribune this week carries an article by me reading the runes on how the government might proceed over the blacklisting scandal.
If you're a glass-half-empty person then the government is preparing for a long consultation in the hope that the issue will go away/an election will take people's minds off it.
If you're more of a half-full person then the signals from Brown et al are that the necessary legal changes are ready to be made once a few hoops have been jumped through.
My original article to Tribune was more on the empty side but it's come out in the editing as more positive. Well, you pays your money etc etc.

Meanwhile: no sign of my book review on Jason Cowley's The Last Game just yet but the digested read is: "Unmissable for Gooners, unbearable for Liverpool fans and unecessary for all those uninterested in sport."