Andy Coulson’s dark past has once again returned to haunt him, thanks to a New York Times report yesterday.

Following allegations earlier this year that Coulson encouraged phone-hacking during his time at the News of the World, David Cameron announced his belief that everyone should have a second chance.

He even went close to suggesting that Coulson’s resignation from the NotW was a moral one, saying:

“It’s wrong for newspapers to breach people’s privacy with no justification. That is why Andy Coulson resigned as editor of the News of the World two-and-a-half years ago.”

The Press Commission, when investigating the original allegations, complained that

“Throughout we have repeatedly encountered an unwillingness to provide the detailed information that we sought, claims of ignorance or lack of recall, and deliberate obfuscation.”

This time, however, the claims are far more substantial than before, and the prime minister is under pressure to reconsider his choice of Director of Communications and Planning. Tom Watson, the Labour MP, has written to No 10 demanding a full judicial inquiry.

As the New York Times revealed in a 6,000-word report, the previously unproven allegations have been given new life. According to the NYT:

“A dozen former reporters said in interviews that hacking was pervasive at News of the World.”

Coulson is alleged by one source to have ‘actively encouraged’ phone-tapping. This is a serious challenge to Coulson’s claim to a Commons select committee earlier this year that “I have never had any involvement in it at all.”

Left Foot Forward has previously revealed Tory attempts to whitewash Coulson’s record, with Liam Fox wrongly claiming that he was not involved in the succesful tribunal claim of sportswriter Matt Driscoll, who won £800,000 from the paper on the basis of unfair dismissal. Cameron’s media adviser is unlikely to be Nick Clegg’s favourite member of the No 10 staff, as he appears to have been responsible for a smear campaign against the Lib Dem leader in the run up to the election.

Predictably, the NYT’s investigation has been ignored thus far by Rupert Murdoch’s News International media empire: The Sun and The Times websites are yet to cover the story. Even the Washington Post – the NYT’s main rival in America – has ignored the allegations. But, strangely, the BBC has also failed to report them. Beyond the indictment of Coulson, the report also alleged that the Metropolitan Police had colluded with News International to cover up evidence of phone hacking.

As Will Straw reported in June, Coulson continues to use his control over the press to his personal advantage, preventing his £475,000 salary from appearing in a widely-reported list of ‘top civil service fat cats’. It’s unlikely to work this time.

The refusal of the Coalition to endorse a European Union directive to combat the trade in sex slaves and child trafficking shows the weakness of the Liberal Democrat arm of the Government. The law in question is a draft directive on preventing and combating trafficking of human beings, and protecting victims; it is currently being dealt with jointly by the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs committee and the Women Rights and Gender Equality committee.

Although Parliament’s draft report has not been voted on, it is likely to be approved with a large majority.

It would establish common EU standards for the prosecution of traffickers and greater protection for victims, meaning that, for example, women trafficked for the sex trade could not be charged with holding false immigration papers given them by traffickers.

The directive also includes the protection of children from sexual abuse, exploitation and child pornography. The need for EU action is, in part, because many victims are trafficked through Europe. It would also allow suspects to be prosecuted for offences in other member states.

European treaties give the government the option to opt-in or out, but this right was not agreed for directives such as this. On August 4, the Home Office told the BBC that the directive offered no benefits to Britain, hence the decision to opt-out. In another instance, the Home Office spokesperson told the media:

“Human trafficking is a brutal form of organised crime, and combating it is a key priority for the government. The UK already complies with most of what is required by the draft EU directive.”

Working with our neighbouring member states to combat human trafficking was at the heart of a conference held by Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in Sheffield in 2005; Crown Prosecutor Mr Rankin said:

“At meetings such as these with our partners in the criminal justice systems across Europe, we discuss how we can work together to prevent and combat human trafficking through international co-operation, sharing best practice and improving the effectiveness of prosecutions.”

Britain’s record in tackling and convicting human traffickers has been criticised by grouns including Amnesty International, who stated in June that the UK’s new anti-trafficking measures were “not fit for purpose”. They added that the government was “breaching its obligations under the European Convention against Trafficking”.

Klara Skrivankova of Anti-Slavery International said:

“Without international co-operation, the government will lose the battle with the traffickers. By choosing not to opt in to the directive, the government is failing in its efforts to combat this transnational crime.”

New figures also show a failure to increase convictions of criminal gangs who have forced an estimated 2,600 foreign women into prostitution in brothels in England and Wales.

Only five people were convicted of human trafficking for sexual exploitation in the first six months of this year, according to the UK Human Trafficking Centre. This is compared with 33 and 34 in the previous two 12-month periods. A further nine were convicted of other offences, having been arrested on suspicion of trafficking.

Former Europe Minister, Denis MacShane has written to Nick Clegg to urge the ex-European Commission official that:

“Women in particular will be alarmed to learn that the Liberal Democrats are willing to support these efforts to weaken the directive. It is the wrong signal to send to the pimps and traffickers.

“I hope you can persuade the prime minister to drop his opt-out policy on this welcome effort to combat sex-slave trafficking.”

Our guest writer is Jon Cruddas, Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham; here he outlines his reasons for supporting Diana Holland as Labour Party Treasurer.

I don’t remember the last time Labour members were faced with such an array of ballot papers as the ones that will hit doormats this week. The big one is the Leadership of course. In London, I will be casting my vote for Ken to be our Mayoral candidate. We also have NEC elections and a couple of other key committees up too.

The Leadership rightly gets all the attention, but we need to make sure people cast their vote for the position of Party Treasurer too.

The next Treasurer will have a key role on the NEC. They will be vital to pushing the party nationally to think comprehensively about the direction of the party – politically and organisationally – and then put in place the resources to make it all tick.

Despite the valiant efforts of many staff, our party has been allowed to wither in the last 15 years or so. Just as Howard Dean’s 50 State strategy laid the groundwork for the Democratic victory two years ago, this election is crucial to turn that around.

We need someone with the experience and the passion to make it work – that’s why I will be voting for Diana Holland to be the Party’s Treasurer.

Her commitment to rebuilding Labour is second to none. Diana’s pitch is to think afresh about how we utilise the skills and resources of the whole Labour Movement.

The solution for the bind that the party finds itself in lies both with our members and our supporters currently outside of the party. Building the party as a movement of labour is a task that requires a lot of hard graft – widening our base is a crucial task. For the role of Treasurer that means deepening the donor pool.

Raising £1million from 40,000 people in £25 increments is harder than getting one rich fella to write a cheque, but we have to do it. And the advantage of that is that we don’t just get the resources we need, we also get 40,000 new people financially and politically invested in what we do. A Party funded by the movement is something more powerful than the sum of the donations.

I have known Diana for years, as a stalwart Labour campaigner, and as a solid Trade Unionist. Her passion for this post lies in making the party a more effective campaigning operation, and she would do that by bringing new ways of thinking to bear. She is ready to tackle the tough issues we face, and play a part in getting the party ready to take on the Tories and the Lib Dems in every area of the country when the Coalition faces the voters’ judgement in the local elections around the corner in 2011.

Members will come first every time with Diana, and I will be voting for her. I hope you will too.

Diane Abbott set out her own vision of civic society in the thoughtful constraints of the type of community in which she lives in a speech titled The “Big Society” is a ‘big con’ at Policy Exchange this morning. There was little mention of the Labour leadership race – other than saying it “has not exactly been Pop-Idol”, adding that the competition had not given the contestants enough of a platform or time to examine big ideas.

Ms Abbott discussed the differences between the Big Society and Labour’s communitarian and cooperative traditions and her experience of the community she lives in and represents in Parliament.

She was quick to distance the future of the Party from New Labour, having criticised Tony Blair yesterday for the timing of the release of his memoirs; she said:

“Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ is probably doomed to join Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ in the graveyard of spurious pseudo-philosophical ideas… to mask their underlying policies.”

Society’s woes cannot be solved by throwing money at them or through the state alone, she said, explaining the mutual responsibility of individuals as well as the state, discussing her experience of growing up in a family and community of immigrants and the problems that a lack of male role models for young men can cause.

She said:

“The state has been able to improve infrastructure, preside over a stratospheric rise in property prices and has brought down unemployment in inner city areas all over the country. Fixing family structures and community relationships has proved more challenging.”

Diane’s presence in the leadership debate throughout the competition has been minimal, in part because of the ‘daily soap opera’ coverage of the Miliband brothers. Throughout, she has been quoted as calling her fellow contestants “geeks in suits” and commenting on money ruling the election. The Guardian recently claimed that Diane had said that David Miliband’s large number of staff (apparently paid for with “old Blairite money”) has outweighed her “two-and-a-half volunteers” and that:

“You do get very, very tired when you are facing those sort of odds….there is no doubt that money is making a huge difference in the election.”

Representatives from around 40 governments meet today in Geneva to consolidate on the discussions held at Copenhagen last year, ahead of November’s Cancun UN Climate Change Conference. Issues likely to be discussed at the two-day informal ministerial meeting include a new global climate fund, the role of the private sector, and the oversight of climate finance.

The meeting is expected to see developed countries elaborate on their exact plans for raising the funding targets agreed in Denmark: producing a fund of $30 billion over the next three years, rising to $100 billion per year by 2020, to help poor countries adapt to climate change.

However, climate change activists remain despondent at the chances of the world’s nations co-operating seriously over the funding.

There is concern over the misleading use of targets, with old money being dressed up as new. Japan, for instance, has pledged $15 billion by 2012. But most of this comes from a previous commitment, agreed in 2008.

Following a week-long meeting in Bonn, Germany, this August, US deputy special climate envoy Jonathan Pershing voiced his concern that negotiations over climate change were stalling.

“I came to Bonn hopeful of a deal in Cancun, but at this point I am very concerned as I have seen some countries walking back from progress made in Copenhagen.”

In theory, it should not be hard to raise the funds. The British economist Nicholas Stern told delegates at Bonn that the working group set up to investigate how the $100bn a year could be raised was making good progress. The problems lie in diplomacy. Developing countries remain suspicious “that rich nations have big mouths, deep pockets and short arms”.

Green campaigners, however, are still critical of the Copenhagen agreements. lena Gerebizza, of Campagna per la Riforma della Banca Mondiale, recently announced that

“The $100 billion figure that many developed countries are discussing is not science-based and has no standing in the international negotiations.”

And although Gordon Shepherd, head of WWF’s Global Climate Initiative, remains hopeful that the Geneva Conference could be “highly influential if they get it right,” the WWF website is notably more circumspect:

“There is little transparency on the delivery of the promised short term funding that has been made available already, and there has been little visible progress towards a framework for delivery on longer term funding commitments.”

Raman Mehta, of ActionAid India, was firm in his insistence that climate change funding to developing countries must not be shackled with conditionality:

“A new global climate fund should be established under the authority of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change with equitable and balanced representation, effective participation of affected communities in all decision-making, direct access to funding by developing countries, and no economic or other policy conditionality.”

“The World Bank and other existing international financial institutions must not have any role in governing, managing, or directing the design of the fund.”

Unfortunately for Mehta, it appears that the World Bank, though not officially invited to Copenhagen, will be attempting to exert influence there.

Green Party leader Caroline Lucas has called on Labour leadership frontrunners David and Ed Miliband to support her amendment to the AV referendum bill on Monday to allow people to choose from a wider range of voting systems – including the additional member system (as used in the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and Greater London Assembly) and the single transferable vote (as used in Northern Ireland).

In an article in this week’s New Statesman, published today, Ms Lucas writes:

Tribalists and pluralists have fundamentally different approaches to conceiving power and doing politics, and very different degrees of openness to other political beliefs and traditions.

The tragedy of Labour’s leadership contest is that not one of the candidates – judging by their positions on political reform – is a true pluralist. Not one of them supports a proportional system of voting.

This means that, in the referendum planned for May 2011, we will be offered the “choice” between two flavours of vanilla – first-past-the-post or the Alternative Vote. Real reform is not on the agenda…

As the Labour leadership battle narrows in favour of the Miliband brothers, I challenge them, even at this late stage, to support my amendment, to demonstrate their commitment to both pluralism and democracy.

She says the campaign has been lacking a “credible” [non-Diane] candidate who will prioritise “urgent and ambitious action on global climate change”; who is “committed to tackling inequality”; who “doesn’t rely on conventional political tools and compromises to reach power”; who would “contribute to the diversity of the line-up”; and “who is genuinely committed to pluralism”.

She concludes:

Until Labour moves beyond tribalism, beyond wishing the “extinction” of other political traditions, it remains destined to repeat the mistakes of the past.

At recent Compass conferences, I have discussed the need for a more progressive, pluralist politics, based not on Blair’s suffocating “big tent”, but on a campsite of different parties and movements, sharing common values but maintaining their own identities.

Labour could play an important part in that progressive alliance, but only if it can leave behind its arrogant belief in its own exclusive role. Is there no candidate willing to lead the party in that direction?

• Read Caroline’s article in full here.

The Middle East peace talks will resume today amidst renewed hope of a permanent peace, with President Obama last night urging Israeli and Palestinian leaders not to let the chance of peace “slip away” – warning that “this moment of opportunity may not soon come again”.

Isreali prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said there was a real chance for a “secure and durable” peace, “peace that will end the conflict with the Palestinians once and for all, that will last generations”; President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas said: “We do not want any blood to be shed, one drop of blood, on the part of the Israelis or the Palestinians… We want them to live as neighbors and partners forever. Let us sign an agreement, a final agreement, for peace and put an end to a very long period of struggle forever.”

President Obama said:

“We are but five men. Our dinner this evening will be a small gathering around a single table. Yet when we come together we will not be alone. We will be joined by the generations of those who have gone before and those who will follow.

“Do we have the wisdom and the courage to walk the path of peace?”

Adding:

“The purpose of the talks is clear. These will be direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. These negotiations are intended to resolve all final status issues.

“The goal is a settlement negotiated between the parties that ends the occupation which began in 1967, and results in the emergence of an independent democratic and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with a Jewish state of Israel and its other neighbours

“We are under no illusions. Passions run deep. Each side has legitimate and enduring interests. Years of mistrust will not disappear overnight…

“After all, there’s a reason that the two state solution has eluded previous generations. This is extraordinarily complex and extraordinarily difficult. But we know that the status quo is unsustainable.”

However, fears persisit that peace may remain elusive, with the BBC’s Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen explaining:

“President Obama has started what will be an intensive diplomatic push. He will have been pleased by what seemed to be a warm handshake between the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Even so, Mr Abbas is still insisting that Israel must stop building homes for Jews in the occupied Palestinian territories. Mr Abbas has threatened to walk out of the talks on the settlement issue. It’s not clear where the compromise will come from. Warm words alone won’t do it – but perhaps Mr Netanyahu’s were a start.

“There might not be room for many more failures. The conflict is changing. A religious war is now being grafted on what used to be fundamentally a competition for territory between two national movements.

“You can make deals with nationalists. It’s much harder with people who believe they’re doing God’s work.”

And in The Independent, Rupert Cornwell writes:

“The roll-call of place names associated with such efforts since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991 is long: Madrid, Oslo, Wye, Sharm el-Sheikh, Camp David, Taba and most recently Annapolis. One thing, though, they have in common: failure. And so to Washington, September 2010.

“Just 24 hours after formally winding up the US combat mission in Iraq, Mr Obama yesterday began two days of intensive summitry with separate White House meetings: first with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, then with the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas…

“But Mr Obama’s determination is a two-edged sword. Yes, he is acting much earlier in his presidency than his two predecessors but that carries added risks of its own. Already, this president has clashed more publicly with an Israeli prime minister than any of his predecessors.

“But Mr Obama faces what could be a tricky re-election bid in 2012, in which he will not want to have added the powerful American Israel lobby to the list of his opponents…”

On the day that Tony Blair’s memoirs were released, it all seems a bit quiet. There were no queues; the bookshelves still full of hardbacks with “half price” stickers placed on the front. With Labour party members starting to receive their ballot papers this morning, and with the combat mission in Iraq declared over yesterday, ‘A Journey’ was released in true symbolic style.

There was little speculation as to what would be said – perhaps because there wasn’t much to take us by surprise. There was no deal done – the most we heard was that Mr Blair would kindly be donating all profits to the Royal British Legion.

It was unlike when Peter Mandleson’s book ‘The Third Man’ was published two months, when a deal was done to give The Times the rights to his book, the paper publishing a series of videos of the ‘Dark Lord’ reading extracts in a dimly lit room (said to be worth in the region of £350,000).

Instead, the press, the 24-hour television news stations and radio were forced to wait until 23:30 last night before they could start buzzing at every new, occasionally poorly written snippet released. Political Scrapbook encompassed the mood of the morning in its series of front page headlines.

On Iraq

Mehdi Hasan over at the New Statesman published an early morning critique of Blair’s journey in Iraq. At an equally early hour he told Twitter:

“Just been reading Blair’s chapter on Iraq, online. He is still Bliar. The man tells barefaced porkies like no one else”

A conservative approach

Mark Hoban, Treasury minister, claimed that Blair backs Conservative economic policy. Blair suggests that the Labour government (page 680):

“should have taken a New Labour way out of the economic crisis: kept direct taxes competitive, had a gradual rise in VAT and other indirect taxes to close the deficit, and used the crisis to push further and faster on reform.”

Polly Toynbee asks:

“was Tony Blair always really a closet conservative, or did he convert late in life?”

Also in The Guardian, Michael White takes a more sympathetic approach – considering the idea of Tony the Tory as “a bit glib”.

On Twitter, the more personal parts of Tony’s memoirs caused a stir. Originally tweeted by Fraser Nelson, the Spectator’s Coffee House post appeared put many people off their lunch.

The outer limit

Unfortunately – and rather expectantly – Tony’s comments on Gordon outweighed anything nice he had to say.  At least they did in the reporting. Most attention today has been paid what he had to say on the ‘madenning’ Gordon Brown, who ‘drove him to drink‘ whilst prime minister.

Andy McSmith wrote on the Independent website that the memoir is:

“Less like a “description of a journey” and more like a long memo to Mr Blair’s staff, setting out their boss’s decisions and reasoning.”

• Live blogging on Tony Blair’s book and interview with Andrew Marr, which is broadcast tonight on BBC1 at 7pm, is available at the Guardian with Andrew Sparrow.

Recent announcements of the coalition government’s cuts threaten to significantly worsen the plight of Britain’s poorest and most underprivileged children. New research highlights how the inequitable nature in road safety afflicting children from the poorest parts of the country is set to get worse.

The Road Safety Analysis group found children from the poorest wards in Britain are disproportionately more prone to being the victims of road traffic accidents. They concluded that the riskiest area in the UK is Preston, where one child in every 206 is likely to be involved in a road collision annually.

Kensington and Chelsea is the safest place in the UK, with a risk of only one in 1,158. The national average is one in 427 children is injured or killed in a road accident each year.

Cuts announced by the coalition government to the Road Safety budget – amounting to £38 billion – will only exacerbate the situation and increase the danger on roads and highways in Britain’s poorest neighborhoods. Added to this, the government has also ceased central funding for speed cameras, with the result that councils up and down the country are being forced to majorly scale back or even scrap their speed enforcement measures.

There are 6,000 speed cameras in the UK. The financial sustainability of the system is now at serious risk. This year’s road safety budget is being cut by a shocking 40 per cent. This is made up of a 27 per cent cut to the revenue grant (with £20.6m being taken off a promised £76.7 million) and a 100  per cent cut to the capital grant (£17.2m). Both grants fund the maintenance and improvement of the speed cameras network.

These cuts are a reckless move by the coalition government, which undermines their claims to be following a progressive agenda. All the evidence points to the effectiveness of speed cameras in cutting road safety deaths, with Richard Allsop, professor of transport studies at University College London, stating there have been “substantial reductions” in casualties in the first five years of the roll-out of cameras:

“There is a bit of statistical debate about exactly how many, but the picture of a substantial reduction is quite undisputed and it’s consistent with measured reductions in speed at camera sites.”

Abolishing speed cameras (which in effect the government is doing) will impact upon all parts of Britain, but particularly for those in deprived and disadvantaged areas. Children in poorer areas tend to reside in urban conurbations, and will walk and cycle more often than their affluent peers. Their safety cannot be jeopardised, and society must be firm in opposition to what is one of the coalition government’s most socially regressive actions to date.

To further dismay, it is widely believed that Philip Hammond is set to reject an independent and expert review into reclassifying the permitted drink-driving limit. The review, led by Sir Peter North, proposed as one of its key recommendations that the drink-drive limit be reduced from 80mg per 100ml of blood to 50mg. This is the same limit that applies in France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain.

Other measures included introducing random breath-testing of drivers, taking away the right to have a second breath test conducted at a police station, reducing the limit to 20mg for new drivers, and bringing in a new offence of driving with an illegal substance in the bloodstream that impairs the ability to drive. Collectively, these measures could save as many as 300 lives per year.

The transport secretary has also dismissed the idea of a blanket reduction of the speed limit in built-up areas to 20mph. This is a key measure advocated by Brake, the road safety campaign, to reduce the risk for children who live in urbanised and built-up areas. At the very least, these measures should be debated in parliament.

Road safety has markedly improved in recent years. However, the current government’s early decisions on the issue are set to reverse that trend. The stakes are high, and lives are at risk. Their actions should be vigorously opposed by anyone who aspires to improve road safety, cut deaths, and safeguard children, especially the poorest, from the dangers of Britain’s concrete arteries.

Ken Livingstone has cliamed Londoners are under attack from the Government – with £5,625 worth of spending per Londoner to be cut over the next five years. The former Mayor of London says the Coalition’s drive to eradicate the deficit with the help of Boris Johnson will save £45billion in spending, with many services across the board either scrapped or limited.

Mr Livingstone, who is campaigning to be chosen as Labour’s candidate in the London Mayoral election, today launched the ‘Londoners can’t afford the cuts’ research document – showing the impact of the cuts on Londoners.

These include:

• Cuts to housing benefit allowance could leave up to 425,000 people at risk of losing their homes;

• One hundred thousand children are to miss out on free school meals;

• Cuts of 455 police officers and no guarantee of the future of 630 Neighbourhood Police teams;

• A loss of £1.2bn to local government budgets, among other universal and means-tested benefits.

On launching his campaign, he said:

“Wherever I go in London people tell me how much damage the cuts would do to their lives and the city we live in. That’s why I am launching this campaign today to stand up for Londoners and to defend the investment that delivers vital public services from Sure Start centres to Safer Neighbourhood Police Teams.

“It is vital that Labour’s candidate for Mayor sets out a progressive alternative to the cuts and does not accept the Tories agenda. We need a candidate who can stand up to Boris Johnson and David Cameron.”

Mr Livingstone’s rival for the Labour nomination Oona King, meanwhile, has also joined the debate on the impact of the Coalition’s cuts to London. On her website, she writes:

“We must of course fight the Government’s cuts, protect frontline services and London’s vulnerable, but we also have to focus relentlessly on the future and implementing the changes needed in London to make it a world-beating city for the people who live here, for businesses and those who travel and look to London as a beacon in the world.”

Boris Johnson, however, hit back at recent criticism last week by citing the Government’s decision to go ahead with the £16 billion Crossrail project as proof he was standing up for Londoners; as the Financial Times reports:

The Department for Transport (DfT) has made a high priority of Crossrail because of its economic benefits, the fact that some spending has already taken place – creating stations at Canary Wharf and Tottenham Court Road – and that there is a large degree of private finance in place for the project.

Of the total £15.9bn funding package agreed in 2007, the DfT is only providing £5.5bn with the rest coming from Transport for London and from a business rate. A Treasury source said that there was now ‘no suggestion’ that Crossrail would be axed, although it could still be scaled back.

News that Crossrail is now considered safe from the brutal spending round will be applauded by business groups such as the CBI and London First. It will also prompt relief in City Hall, where mayor Boris Johnson has promised a “Stalingrad defence” of the scheme.

The project is set to carry 72,000 people an hour at peak time between Heathrow and Canary Wharf and from Thames Gateway to the City and West End.

This is a guest cross-post by Tim Davies, originally posted on Political Innovation

The communication revolution that we’ve undergone in recent years has two big impacts:

• It changes what’s possible. It makes creating networks between people across organisations easier; it opens new ways for communication between citizens and state; it gives everyone who wants it a platform for global communication; and it makes it possible to discover local online dialogue.

• It changes citizen expectations of government. When I can follow news from my neighbour’s blog on my phone, why can’t I get updates on local services on the mobile-web?

• When I can e-mail someone across the world and be collaborating on a document in minutes, why is it so hard to have a conversation with the council down the road?

• And when brands and mainstream media are doing interactivity and engagement – why are government departments struggling with it so much?

Right now, government is missing out on significant cost saving and service-enhancing benefits from new forms of communication and collaboration. But the answers are not simply about introducing new technology – they are to be found in intentional culture change: in creating the will and the opportunity for interactive government.

There are three things we need to focus on:

• Culture change. Although there are pockets of interactivity breaking out across the public sector, it’s often counter-cultural and ‘underground’. Most staff feel constrained to work with tools given to them by IT departments, and to focus on official lines more than open conversations. Creating a culture of interactivity needs leadership from the top, and values that everyone can sign up to.

• Removing the barriers. There are literally hundreds of small daily frustrations and barriers that can get in the way of interactive government. It might be the inability of upload a photo to an online forum (interactive government has human faces…), or consent and moderation policies that cover everyone’s backs but don’t allow real voices to be heard. Instead of ignoring these barriers, we need to overcome them – to rethink them within an interactive culture that can make dialogue and change a top priority.

• Solving tough problems. Public service is tough: it has to deal with political, democratic and social pressures that would make most social media start-ups struggle. We need to think hard about how interactive technology and interactive ways of working play out in the tough cases that the public sector deals in every day.

The Interactive Charter is a project to explore how exactly we go about making government into interactive government. It’s got three parts:

• Creating a pledge – The ‘Interactive Charter’ will be a clear statement that any organization (or senior manager within an organization) can sign up to say something along the lines of “I want my organization to get interactivity; and I’ll commit to overcoming the barriers to interactive ways of working”. With a promise and commitment from the top removing the barriers should get a lot easierOf course to just hand down a pledge wouldn’t be very interactive, so we’re drafting it on Mixed Ink.

• Naming the problems…and overcoming them – We’ve already made a start over on the Interactive Charter wiki, but we would love you to join in suggesting practical challenges, and practical solutions, to interactive and digital working in government.

• Putting it into practice – We want to pilot the approach: getting top-level support, and removing the barriers to interactivity from the ground up. Could your organization be part of that?

So, if you’ve got a vision for more interactive government, you can share it by redrafting the current pledge. And if you’ve faced or solved problems around interactive government, help shape the body of knowledge around each of the barriers and their solutions on the wiki. Of course, you could also just drop in comments over on the Political Innovation blog…

About Political Innovation

We’d be very interested to hear any ideas that you have for an essay of your own – we’ll need an email and we’ll want to discuss it with you before it goes on the site. All contributions will be archived on www.politicalinnovation.org – along with details of what we’re looking for from essayists and a bunch of FAQs and a guide to how we hope the whole thing will play out.

I hope you’ll get involved in this as a commenter, participant or maybe even as an essayist. Make sure you don’t miss anything by the blog joining our Google Group, subscribing to RSS feed, getting each post emailed to you and, of course, following us on Twitter – @PICamp – and Facebook.

When bloggers meet, I often find that old allegiances, be they left/right or Unionist/Republican, often dissolve into a different political spilt. Those of us who imagine that we ‘get’ the read-write web against the political colleagues that we have who, we believe, fail to foresee the possibilities or the threats.

I’ve occasionally witnessed left-right-and-centrist bloggers in (non) violent agreement with each other – not about political direction, but about what is possible in harnessing the power of the web.

About how a more effective participative political culture can bring about a range of subtle changes – to reverse the broken politico/media relationship out of some of the cul-de-sacs that it appears to have stuck in.

This week, a few of us have come together to launch a project called ‘Political Innovation’. It is for anyone who has ever asked themselves “why is politics still done like this?”

We have put a call out through our personal networks for initial contributions and we have already had promises of more than ten essays suggesting serious political innovations that are based upon an understanding of what interactive social media and the web can achieve.

All of our proposers have been asked to ensure that their proposed innovation is one that could realistically garner support from all sides of the political spectrum.

The project is being managed in conjunction with political blogs of all hues. So from the right our largest media partner, The Daily Telegraph will carry each essay which will be also be carried on Slugger O’Toole, Left Foot Forward, Lib-Dem Voice and SNP Tactical Voter.

Tweetminster will be helping us publicise each essay more widely and we’ll be doing some podcasting with The House of Comments. Other bloggers are welcome to get involved.

The essays will touch on a range of questions, including:

• A proposed recasting of the whole FOI-based understanding of open government into something more ‘interactive’;

• A pop at the political problems that underlie dysfunctional government procurement;

• A version of ID cards that may suit both supporters and opponents of ‘the database state’;

• A proposal that could create a serious ‘reputational cost’ to politicians, journalists and campaigners who misuse facts and spin;

• A measure to help bloggers get more influence over public policy in their roles as conversation-convenors.

….and a range of other ideas (let’s not spoil the surprises, eh?!)

The (short) essays will start appearing on all of these sites shortly. We plan to follow this up with open gatherings in Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast, Dublin and London in due course – as long as we can find some local partners there who will help us with the get-togethers.

We’d be very interested to hear any ideas that you have for an essay of your own – we’ll need an email and we’ll want to discuss it with you before it goes on the site. All contributions will be archived on www.politicalinnovation.org – along with details of what we’re looking for from essayists and a bunch of FAQs and a guide to how we hope the whole thing will play out.

I hope you’ll get involved in this as a commenter, participant or maybe even as an essayist. Make sure you don’t miss anything by the blog joining our Google Group, subscribing to RSS feed, getting each post emailed to you and, of course, following us on Twitter – @PICamp – and Facebook.

The Guardian today splashed with the news that the man the paper describes as “the world’s most high profile climate change sceptic”, Bjørn Lomborg, has u-turned and described global warming as “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and called for tens of billions to be spent tackling the problem.

Undoubtedly Lomborg’s flip-flopping came from a realisation his former position was going to be difficult to hold any longer – only underlined by the fact that he is just the latest contrarian voice to change tack.

Left Foot Forward recently highlighted that Britain’s most influential climate denier, the Daily Mail’s science editor Michael Hanlon, just changed tack in response to the breaking off, in Greenland, of an ice chunk three times the size of Manhattan.

Equally, Joe Romm has shown how CNN’s Chad Myers, somebody he describes as “one of America’s most influential global warming skeptics” just u-turned and admitted warming “is caused by man”.

Greenpeace responded to Lomborg’s about-face simply with a snide remark:

“Lomborg’s realisation that the climate is in crisis came a couple of decades too late for him to be taken seriously, but at least it confirms the happy maxim that nobody’s wrong all the time, apart from Melanie Philips.”

Others in the green community were simply bemused. One Grist blogger wrote admiringly of Lomborg’s media savvy:

“Who else could get such attention for adopting a position already held by millions of sensible people?”

But there can be no doubt his change in position can only really be seen as good news since it leaves the climate denial community more marginalized still.

Climate sceptics have faced a series of recent blows, most notably because articles detailing alleged scandals in the climate science community – Amazongate, Africagate and Pachaurigate – all had to be retracted, and apologies published. This in turn followed a series of independent reviews which each exonerated the climate scientists. Even the Washington Post – for a long time home to sceptic views – said in its editorial today:

“The overblown critique of climate science that emerged early this year continues to underwhelm.”

Left Foot Forward understands that Lomborg also resigned some weeks ago from the board of the climate sceptic journal, Energy and Environment, which is edited by the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Benny Peiser. According to a posting on an online discussion forum for deniers, another of the journal’s editors, Boehmer-Christiansen, indicated at the time that Lomborg did not want to be closely associated with sceptics any more.

Lomborg’s announcement came as The Independent reported on its front page that new scientific research suggests the world is facing 3.5 degrees of warming. Science writer, Mark Lynas, explains in the paper that such a level of climate change could mean,

“melting permafrost in Siberia and other high-latitude areas will be releasing millions of tonnes of the extra-powerful greenhouse gas methane, and there will be nothing we can do to stop it…

“the world’s most important and biodiverse tropical forest, the Amazon region, will be burning up and transforming into desert…

“Saharan-type temperatures, well over 50C, will be striking regularly in summertime continental interiors, from the southern United States to the south Asian subcontinent to the Middle East. Around the Mediterranean, forests will be tinder-dry and devastating wildfires an annual occurrence – Australia and California can expect much of the same. Deadly heatwaves, such as that which struck Europe in 2003 and Moscow in 2010, will be a normal summer.”

Our guest author is Lewis Merdler, Communications Assistant for ClientEarth

It may be an understatement to say that the environmental movement is going through a rough patch. In the wake of the Copenhagen summit climate change scepticism shows little sign of going away. This is despite record breaking global temperatures, the collapse of ice sheets, devastating droughts in Russia and an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Pakistan.

The coalition government, after making a pledge of becoming the greenest government ever, has slashed environmental funding, dissolved the Sustainable Development Commission and is potentially reneging on its pledges for clean coal.

Climate protests at the Royal Bank of Scotland’s Edinburgh headquarters have received a backlash from the media, even from typically supportive sections of the press. Now there are calls to reform the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Panel on Climate Change. However, during this tumultuous period where good news seems all too rare, a small but highly significant victory has just been won.

Last week, a group of environmental activist lawyers, ClientEarth, won a landmark case against the government that could open a whole new branch of environmental campaigning in the UK, giving environmentalists at the end of their tether a new and much needed tool to support their cause.

A UN committee has said the UK government must change the rules so that it is possible for ordinary people to challenge the actions of public bodies when environmental protection is at stake. On Thursday the UN’s Aarhus Committee responded to a case brought to it by ClientEarth with a draft finding that the UK government is in breach of the Aarhus Convention, which was ratified by both the UK and the EU in 2005.

One of the key pillars of the convention is to ensure that all EU citizens have access to environmental justice, one of the main barriers to which is the exorbitant cost of bringing a case. Current cost rules in the UK often force unsuccessful claimants to cover their opponents’ legal fees, as well as their own and the court’s costs.

If, for example, you decided to take on the government for issuing a licence to a company to mine minerals in a nature reserve or burn toxic waste in an urban area, and for whatever reason you lost the case, you would have to pay your legal fees and those of the government. A single-day hearing in the UK courts could cost over £100,000. Very few individuals or public interest groups have the resources to risk being landed with a bill of this size even if they think they have a good case.

Worse still, if the case had delayed a company, like BP for example, from drilling for nine months your liability to them could run into millions of pounds. The UK courts are out of line with all other EU countries on the costs citizens face when they fight for their rights. With the committee’s recommendations, this should change. The government is now under pressure to fundamentally reform the way UK courts operate to allow citizens access to environmental justice.

This is a real opportunity for the coalition government to step up to its green rhetoric and make the court system accessible to those who want to make environmental cases in the public interest.

James Thornton, CEO of ClientEarth:

“Access to justice should not be a privileged right for the few.  People who wish to bring cases to the courts about environmental concerns do so in the interests of the public and should not have to run the risk of financial ruin.

“The committee’s recommendations confirm that. This is a stark call to make our system of justice fair and accessible to those protecting the environment.We now look forward to hearing from the government the steps they will take to meet their obligations under international law.”

The committee’s findings are a vital step in the path towards access to justice, but it essential that the journey doesn’t stop here. ClientEarth will continue using legal mechanisms to put pressure on the government to meet the Aarhus obligations.

Empowering citizens is a core theme of Cameron and Clegg’s government. Reforming the court system so ordinary people can take on big business, and even the state itself, is an idea that should sit comfortably in the Big Society agenda. Nick Clegg has talked of a quiet green revolution. Now the environmental movement is empowered to shout louder.

Government plans which could make highly performing secondary schools allocate places to pupils of mixed abilities have been slammed by Tory MEP Roger Helmer. According to Mr Helmer, the children of middle class parents are the most intelligent and should thus go to the best schools.

Helmer wrote:

“Bright parents tend to have bright kids, and able people tend to achieve in life and to gravitate towards the middle classes. Thus a preponderance of middle-class children in good schools is evidence, not of “unfairness”, but of heritable intelligence.

“Schools that over the years build a reputation and achieve good results will attract both the ablest pupils and the best teachers – teachers who want to spend time enthusing children with a love of knowledge, not trying to exercise a semblance of discipline over a bunch of feckless ne’er-do-wells.”

It is not only his views on children that have got him noticed. As Left Foot Forward has reported before, Mr Helmer has a rather unsavory history: criticising charity money going to gypsy children, denying climate change and previously denying that homophobia exists.

In another case of embarrassment to hit the Conservative Party this week, Peterborough MP Stewart Jackson has declared that liberal sex education policy is to blame for recent figures showing an increase in the number of people diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection (STIs).

In a torrent of insults sent via his Twitter account, Stewart Jackson said that the state had “blown £300m on sex education”.

He went on to say:

“Sex education Memo to sad tedious sex obsessed Leftie weirdos – do please tweeting me You’re confusing me with someone who’s interested”

In a statement in the Peterborough Evening Telegraph yesterday, Mr Jackson said:

“I am always keen to hear from my constituents but these people were generally not even from Peterborough and were only interested in making personal attacks.

“It has made me think you can’t engage with people on Twitter. If it continues I may stop using it.”

Perhaps Mr Jackson should have taken a look at the facts, as stated in the Health Protection Agency’s report. The number of people diagnosed with STIs has, in part, increased because of the number of tests and types of tests has gone up in the past year.

Dr Gwenda Hughes, head of the HPA’s STI section said:

“We are doing more testing, such as through the National Chlamydia Screening Programme, and some of the tests we are using for gonorrhoea and herpes are more sensitive, so as a result we are now picking up more infections.”

On holiday in Tuscany. His decision to fly by EasyJet last week, eschewing even priority boarding, strikes notable tones of austerity. This is in sharp contrast to his time spent on a Russian oligarch’s yacht in the summer of 2008. However, just as the visit to Oleg Deripaska’s boat was part of an attempt to secure a £50,000 donation for the Conservatives, this year’s low-profile Italian trip seems to have political motives.

His absence, coinciding with Cameron’s, has propelled Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander into the spotlight during a week of difficult announcements for the government. Liberal Democrats are taking the rap for Tory decisions.

The eve of the holiday was marked by ‘titanic’ rows at a Cabinet away-day between the Chancellor and work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith. Duncan Smith was said to have twice threatened to resign over proposed cuts to his welfare budget.

Relations with defence secretary Liam Fox have also been strained of late, due to disagreements over the funding of Trident. Osborne’s holiday has been well timed to defuse these tensions.

Then came last week’s damning report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which seriously undermined the Chancellor’s earlier claims that the Budget was progressive. Clegg, thrust into the frontline, has been forced to backtrack on his previously voiced veneration of the IFS, and Osborne has so far managed to avoid having to defend his own budget.

Last Friday, Bloomberg gave Ed Balls a chance to respond to the Chancellor’s defence of his budget in a speech given to the news company ten days before. Balls stressed that deficit reduction will not increase consumer confidence, and the historical record of the 1930s and 1980s shows that fiscal retrenchment is likely to bring about economic stagnation.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Even in the days since the [Osborne] Bloomberg speech, we have seen increasing signs of economic slowdown in Britain, and UK consumer confidence, business optimism and mortgage starts are all down.

For all George Osborne’s talk of ‘deficit-deniers’ – where is the real denial in British politics at the moment?

We have a Chancellor who believes that he can slash public spending, raise VAT and cut benefits – he can take billions out of the economy and billions more out of people’s pockets, he can directly cut thousands of public sector jobs and private sector contracts, and none of this will have any impact on unemployment or growth.

Against all the evidence, both contemporary and historical, he argues the private sector will somehow rush to fill the void left by government and consumer spending, and become the driver of jobs and growth.”

Osborne’s response? Sweet nothing.

Next came Danny Alexander’s announcement, in an interview with the Observer, that taxes were unlikely to fall over the course of the Coalition government. The Chancellor’s absence appears to have been especially tactful here, as the news is expected to infuriate the Tory right. As David Blackburn on Spectator blog CoffeeHouse points out, this potentially raises difficult electoral problems for the government:

“The squeezed middle classes pose more of a problem for the coalition. Their benefits and tax credits will be cut, tax on their consumption is rising, tax on the gains of their long-term investments has risen and may rise again and there is to be no relief on their income tax.”

Several contentious cuts have also been announced. The replacement of NHS Direct with a lower-budget and lower-quality alternative comes dangerously close to impacting upon the supposedly ring-fenced health budget. Ed Balls’ playground-building scheme has also been named a victim of the cuts this week: 400 planned facilities are to be dropped.

Osborne’s name has actually re-entered the news today, with the leaked announcement that he is to slash Treasury staff numbers by 25% over the next four years. Once more, however, the Chancellor seems unavailable for comment.

Our guest writer is Carl Miller, co-author, The Power of Unreason

Conspiracy theories are often dismissed as the humorous, yet mainly harmless preserve of a lunatic ‘whacky’ fringe. Bizarre they can be, but they are no laughing matter. They are a serious, widespread and influential cultural habit, and in certain social contexts they can be harmful.

In The Power of Unreason, a Demos report released on Sunday, we looked at the role of conspiracy theories in extremist groups, violent ideologies and radical doctrine. We analysed over 50 extremist groups from across the spectrum, and frequently found conspiracies at the heart of their propaganda and ideology.

Conspiracy theories seem to have an important functional value across a wide smorgasbord of extremism, intolerance and violence. They create demonologies – ‘the other’ – that the group defines itself against. They are used to discredit moderating and dissenting voices, and are an important rhetorical device in the legitimization of violence. Moreover, they harm trust in government in ways we don’t yet fully understand.

So, what to do? Obviously government is hamstrung: if it gets involved, it may inadvertently fan the flames of conspiracy theories even further. The best response is to open up, and make sure young people have the skills to tell truth from falsehood. Easier said than done, but some things can help.

First, government, and yes this especially includes the counter-terrorism community, needs to move a little more towards the light of the public domain. Conspiracy theories thrive in the dark. They fill the vacuum that a lack of credible, frank information leaves. Obviously there are limits to what can be published, but the culture of the security services must change.

Putting information into the public domain cannot be seen purely as a threat to security work that might nevertheless have other incidental merits: it actually has an important security function itself. More openness could be achieved through more availability of counter-terrorism trials’ transcripts, explicit, regular and apolitical intelligence announcements, and greater sharing of information at a local level

But more broadly conspiracy theories live on the net. Today, people are bombarded with ‘counter-knowledge’, false information packaged to look like fact. People do not have the critical skills to discriminate between credible truth claims and its many imposters. This needs to change. Much of the government’s Preventing Violent Extremism effort has been met with huge distrust, cynicism, and even open hostility.

Government cannot tell people what to think, but it can promote standards of how to think: what is the source, what is the evidence, how good is the evidence and what credible evidence is being ignored?

The issue of conspiracy theories is an important one for progressives. In an important sense, conspiracy theories are a reaction to structural inequality. Even if the conspiracy the theory purports to uncover is not true, they arise from a felt sense of being controlled by elites. They are indeed very often ‘insurrectionary’ – a tool for pushing against an establishment of peer-reviewed journals, mainstream media, and government spokesmen. In a real sense they are empowering.

We all have a responsibility to speak out against intolerance and bigotry, and also to speak out and confront conspiracy theories when we encounter them. Especially given the difficulty of direct governmental intervention, this is a problem civil society must take by the horns.

Labour leadership candidate Ed Balls will today call for an additional £6 billion to be invested to build 100,000 more affordable homes, arguing that the government should use half of the £12bn windfall to the public finances in recent months to fund the rapid expansion in house building. Mr Balls will say the plan will create hundreds of thousands of private sector jobs, boost economic growth and tackle the urgent shortage of decent affordable housing.

Treasury figures (July 2010) show actual borrowing in 2009/10 of £155bn – £12bn lower than Alistair Darling’s March Budget forecast of £167bn and £20bn lower than the 2009 forecast of £175bn. Together with matched funding from housing associations, National Housing Federation figures suggest £6bn will see an additional 100,000 homes built – generating up to 750,000 jobs.

Mr Balls will unveil his plan alongside former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, shadow housing minister John Healey and shadow employment minister at an event in central London tonight on ‘How Labour should respond to the housing crisis’.

He will argue that instead of raising VAT on the repair, maintenance and improvement of housing to 20 per cent from January, a temporary rate of 5 per cent should be created, cutting costs for households and creating thousands more jobs, insisting that in the short term this could be paid for by part of the remaining £6 billion windfall.

In an article for Labour List yesterday evening, Mr Balls wrote:

“There can be no doubt that the extra homes are needed. With four and a half million on housing waiting lists and two and a half million in overcrowded accommodation, more affordable homes would meet an acute social need.

“Since Alistair Darling’s March Budget – thanks to our economic recovery plan – tax revenues have been higher and spending on welfare and unemployment lower than predicted. The public finances are around £12 billion healthier than forecast at the time of the Budget.

“The coalition wants to use that extra money to pay down the deficit faster. I think that at a time when the economy is still so fragile and other countries are already tipping back into recession, we should instead use that money to boost construction jobs and build new homes.”

Ken Livingstone, meanwhile, has said:

“I very much welcome the proposals Ed Balls has set out to invest in house-building both to build much-need more affordable homes and to stimulate the economy so that we invest our way through this difficult economic situation rather than slashing services and endangering growth.

“In London we need to break the back of the housing shortage but Boris Johnson has watered down measures to guarantee more affordable homes and has been inactive and uninspiring in the face of London’s housing challenge. Government cuts will make this even worse.

“Ed Balls is right to challenge the lazy and damaging consensus the government is seeking to create that we have no choice but to cut services to the bone. Ed’s proposals to stimulate house-building and boost the economy indicate a Labour alternative to the government’s assault on jobs, pay and services is both possible and necessary.”

And commenting about the government’s plans, which were plastered all over Sunday’s papers, for ‘locals’ to be given priority over immigrants when it comes to council housing, former housing minister John Healey said:

“This is pure spin, not fresh policy. Grant Shapps describes the new freedoms I gave councils last year, so they can already choose to give greater priority to people with local family links and those who have waited longest or who need to move to get work.

“There’s a big gap between what this Government says and what it does. Ministers talk of action to deal with housing pressures but they’ve cut investment in new council housing and changed planning rules to make building badly needed new homes much harder.”