There was one line in Aditya Chakrabortty's column yesterday about Jeremy Corbyn's ascent to the leadership of the Labour Party that got me thinking... Moments before his final campaign rally last Thursday, I asked Corbyn how much of a work-in-progress his opposition would be. A lot, came the answer: everything hung on who would join … Continue reading Agile Politics
Category: Politics
In a panel discussion organised by the global pay-wall provider The Times this week, Baroness Lane-Fox of the Interwebs apparently suggested that the UK government should scrap investment into the HS2 programme in favour of high speed internet infrastructure. She's wrong. We need both. And the irony for me is that both of these initiatives … Continue reading Platforms come in many forms
The dust isn't yet settled on the UK's General Election, but one element that is already getting coverage is the gap between opinion polling before the ballot, the exit poll, and what appears to be the final outcome. After weeks of pollsters predicting a result "too close to call", the exit poll published when the … Continue reading Sampling
A frequent refrain in UK election coverage at the moment is that this is the UK's first "Social Media" election. The truth is that five years is an awfully long time in media and technology these days, and the dynamics of communications for this year's ballot are vastly different to the last... The Social Media … Continue reading The (insert Tech buzzword) Election
As part of my work for central government, over the past few weeks I've been immersing myself in the work of Tim O'Reilly and the concepts of Government as a Platform. The concept at its heart is a metaphor. In fact a metaphor of a metaphor which is always a slightly risky approach prone to … Continue reading Platform thinking
In 1993, in the spring of my final year at university, I stood for election to become the President of the Student Union at Loughborough. On election night, with a turn out of around 1,000 votes, I lost by a margin of about seven. I've never stood in a popular ballot since then. I learned … Continue reading Elected
I'm generally not that patriotic. I was born in Northern Ireland in 1970, both of my parents the children of mixed English/Irish background, on one side Catholic on the other Protestant. Before I was three years old Mum and Dad moved back to the South East of England - they'd been in Belfast for a … Continue reading National pride
Every so often I search for myself on Google. This is me keeping tabs on my online identity, and not just vanity. Honest.I've noticed recently that at the bottom of the search results (which are mostly about me, which is a big "Yay!" for my integrated social search optimisation strategy of just blathering a lot) … Continue reading The right to not be forgotten
Coadec Executive Director Guy Levin wrote an interesting piece on Wednesday calling for a clearer view from government about positive disruption in the start-up space. Now I'm sure that government needs to have a view and encourage entrepreneurship, but this is a two-way street. There seems to be an almost "autistic" nature of the … Continue reading An ethical code for disruptive startups
And so the Cabinet reshuffle happens. Farewell "voice of reason" Ken Clarke (although if your idea of "reason" is fag-smoking, Hush Puppy-wearing and jazz-listening, then you need to have a good hard look at yourself). And farewell, too (from the Department for Education) for Michael Gove, architect of some of the most significant changes … Continue reading Changing leaders
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