not politics

Unity has kindly drawn attention to quarsan's sterling efforts here, with his usual thoroughness and willingness to get his hands dirty in far right filth.

I've just been to hear Iain Banks give an interesting and humorous talk at the Scottish Office in Brussels. He covered many areas including:

• The path of death for a writer
• Grandad's flight from the cops
• What Iain W Banks would write
• Why one of his books will never be filmed
• How he names his characters
• How he got his passport back

We've got the whole event available as mp3's and photos. Right click and save to download the files.

Part One (mp3, 4 mins 44 secs, 12MB): On writing and introducing the excerpt from The Steep Approach to Garbadale

Part Two (mp3, 14 mins 6 secs, 12.9MB): Reading an excerpt from The Steep Approach to Garbadale

Part Three (mp3, 23 mins 46 secs, 21.7MB): Questions and answer session

Photos of the meeting

Blairwatch will be undergoing maintenance this evening (Friday 11th Jan). Comment and content will still be accessible, but no comments can be added.

Sorry for the short notice, we will be back up and running again by tomorrow.

All is up and running

As many of you know, Rachel North has been the target of a vicious stalker who has plagued her for over a year. This is not just a case of a 'net nutter' or some bloggers having a flame war but an unjustified assault.

Her stalker, Felicity Jane Lowde, has previously been jailed for stalking and harassment and is currently on the run after being found guilty of stalking Rachel.

Rachel is asking for your help - especially readers in London. What we find saddening, is that a lot of Felicity Jane Lowde's stalking has been done on a long list of blogger.com blogs, all containing vicious libel and some really disgusting allegations. The problem is that Google won't take them down claiming it's got nothing to do with them.

Funny that, they don't mind censorship as long as it's for the brutal Chinese government, but libelling a rape victim is OK in their book. What a strange moral universe Google inhabit.

A short commercial break from the increasingly surreal world of politics...

Murmurs of Tension  have put out some demo tunes for you all to savour:

And the artwork is in this new Gallery here...

Enjoy, and feedback always welcome.

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Many of our readers will be aware of Adam Curtis' powerful documentaries, especially "The Power of Nightmares".

Well, he's got a new three part series, "The Trap – What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom?" starts on March 11 - 21:00 on BBC 2

The series examines the breakdown in trust between people and politicians

FixWelcome to Blairwatch Version 2.

Well, what's new?

• There is a new look.
• New Core software.
• Performance has increased ( we hope).
• All users have access to a WYSIWYG editor for adding comments.
• adding links has been simplified.
• Bold / Italic
• Bulleting etc

We would like to have your views / comments on the new look,
Anything you would like changed?

Other than that,  We hope you like the work done.

*NOTE: There is a known problem with the CAPTCHA validation, When you try and add a new comment, It will report that you have entered an invalid code. This is a small bug in that hopefully be fixed soon.

*NOTE 2: There appears to be a problem with adding comments. We are working to get this fix.   Fixed!

Well who'd have thought it? The police investigation into the recent alleged plot to kidnap a Muslim soldier and behead him has been hampered by a series of leaks and briefings. When we posted on the arrest of Lord Levy, there was some speculation as to whether the timing of the raids in Birmingham was a little convenient, particularly after the asinine statement by Frank Field MP who seems to think that the police only have the resources to cover terrorist threats. It looks like some people in the West Midlands police have been thinking along similar lines.

This is not to say that there was no plot. At this stage we have no way of knowing if there was a genuine plot or how close to being carried out it was. After mistakes in the past, it's reasonable to assume that the police did have something concrete to go on before creating such disruption, and we are told the raids happened after a long period of surveillance. But with the Home Secretary so involved in the case and his habit of crying wolf at regular intervals, coupled with his renewed attempt to get support for detaining terrorism suspects for more than 28 days without charge, it's only fair to wonder at the timing of the raids. The "inaccuracies" that are appearing in the media due to unauthorised briefings are bound to add to the suspicion.

Good question, where did it all come from? If the timing of the raids and the "anonymous briefings" was partly a smoke screen to distract us from the cash for honours investigation, how ironic that the news of the raids was somewhat overshadowed by the revelation that Tony Blair was questioned for a second time by the police.

Readers might like to find out a little on how the Sunday Times threatens people and invades their privacy. There is a blog called Girl with a one track mind, whose author discussed her sex life and work in a film studio. She got a book deal and three days later her real name was outed by the Sunday Times who had, amongst other antics, hidden a photographer in her front garden.

In her round up of the year she includes a threatening email from Nicholas Hellen Acting News Editor, Sunday Times, which she reprints, omitting some details.

More of this vermin's charm is in the link above.

Listen guys, you've posted the same thing time after time on Blairwatch. We do not believe the theories based on the evidence you present. We're also concerned that you also appear to get a lot of your 'evidence' from neo-nazi sites.

You are welcome to post here on other subjects, but we're bored of the same old story you're spamming us with.

Therefore we will delete any further posts by yourselves on 9/11 and 7/7.

Mooching around my railway-orientated bookmarks, I came up with an interesting document - this purports to be First Capital Connect's security policy for What To Do If You See Some Subversive Photographing Trains:

Well, that should sort out al-Qaeda's trainspotters wing. Well done FCC for pulling their weight on this.

Of course, the actual powers that an ordinary FCC employee has to 'record your details' or even ask you what you're doing, are rather limited, if you don't want to tell them. I feel rather sorry for them being shoved into the front line of the War on Anoraks with such little preparation (what's the official answer when someone questions the 'security reasons' line?).

I do wonder if they ever get the answer 'I'm looking for the best place to plant this large ticking suitcase - ohbuggerwhatagiveaway'. I doubt it somehow, it all rather reminds me of the 'Are You A Nazi War Criminal?' questions you get on US visa waiver forms. I also wonder how far their station security 'duty' extends - tank traps on the disabled ramps, perhaps? No-fly zone over Platform One? Machine gun nests outside the buffet? I think we should be told.

It seems to me that a bunch of enthusiastic, knowledgeable people hanging around stations with cameras are precisely the kind of people you should be welcoming and encouraging to spot any oompus-boompus. Pissing them off and deterring them with nannyish officialdom just seems counterproductive to me.

That's the sad thing about replacing sensible local decision making with centralised over-regulation - by replacing systems that work reasonably well if everyone's reasonable with rigid systems that promote illogical, unreasonable behaviour on both sides, needless conflicts arise, and I'd be very surprised if anyone's actually more secure. Which brings us neatly back to our normally scheduled Blairwatching.

Sources:
Google Groups Thread
Useful Blog Post from the photographers' angle. There are other interesting posts on here.
The official guidelines, which are actually pretty sensible.

There have been many posts on blogs and blogging on blogs by bloggers.
Very few of them have been any where near as good as this one.

Motivations and Beginnings
We started in the run-up to the 2005 UK General Election, although we have been blogging elsewhere for some time. There were two main motivations:

1, We had become disillusioned with politics and the political system, despite being lifelong politics junkies/anoraks (please delete the less offensive term) and were becoming dangerously apathetic. Nevertheless we felt that most people weren't apathetic, but felt excluded. We wanted to communicate and connect with people and fight off our sense of powerlessness and despair.

2, We felt the election was going to provide the nation with a tidal wave of bullshit and someone had to provide an umbrella.

Funding Blairwatch
We have no advertisers or outside support. We're not highly paid, to put it mildly, but we support the site out of our own pocket. The nearest we get to any financial support is that if you sign up with Servage we get two months free hosting.

Who writes for Blairwatch?
Ringverse and quarsan are old friends and were the initial writers. Since then others have joined the core team. There was, and is, no system or procedure in place for joining the writing team, we just saw some consistent and interesting commenters and asked them to join. We've not asked other writers their political leanings or membership and we're not really looking for 'me too' types, but we can offer a space to interesting people who can add something extra.

What do we stand for?
A suprisingly tricky question to answer. There is no 'Blairwatch position' or stance, but what seems to be a common ground of wanting an open accountable government, electoral reform and so forth.

How do we make decisions?
Well, it has been said that we do have highly evolved evasive skills when it comes to decision time. Essentially there are few occasions where we have to make any. Each contributor is free to write on the subject of their choice and whenever they want.

When we have had to think about something, or make a decision, we send round an email to all contributors and ask for comments. So far we've found a consensus easy to obtain. We may have strong opinions but we're not obsessives or dogmatic and internal discussion has been pleasantly conducted.

Our Standards
Our success has made us think about what we write and how we write it. We try to work to serious journalistic standards, ie we check sources, research items and have a range of confidential contacts who act as unofficial advisors.

The Mainstream Media and Us
We don't see ourselves as being opposed to the established media and we have worked with them on stories, providing background material, interviews etc. We are trying to gain experience and understand how they work, even though some can be reluctant to give credit ; )

In the longer term we see blogs and progressive media working together.

The Future
Clearly Tony's on his way out but we will continue. Our job is not done and we would argue in a healthy democracy our job will need to continue. In a broken democracy it would be negligent for us to pack up shop when there's a new occupant in Downing St.

Brownwatch? Johnsonwatch? Cameronwatch?
We will have to have a think about the name, but I, personally, am in favour of keeping the name Blairwatch for two reasons:

1, People already know the name
2, We can change the strap line from Blairwatch - Cronicling the decline of the New Labour project to Blairwatch - A proud part of Tony's legacy.

Other Blairwatch contributors may feel differently - that Blairwatch would be outdated - and we could change names. We'll have a think and let you know the outcome.

Whoever is in power, we will be watching them. Thanks to bloggers, the surveillence society can work both ways.