Disqus - Latest Comments for DaveLevy

Re: git - the simple guide - no deep shit!

Dave Levy — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 08:23:54 -0000

Might you update this to handle 2FA?

Re: YouGov | How did 2015 voters cast their ballot at the 2017 general election?

Dave Levy — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 07:06:45 -0000

Does the Sankey diagram showing the change from 2015 - 2017 show where either abstainers or first time voters went? I can't see the black "didn't vote" segement on the left.

Re: Jon Trickett: It’s official: the watchdog is failing to tackle the revolving door between politics, business and the media

Dave Levy — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 01:45:49 -0000

I am shocked to learn that the waiting period of two years has been weakened to a maximum of two years. When did this happen?

The thing missed by the comments and the article is that the promise of jobs potentially corrupts. It's not the decisions they take once they leave office that's the problem.

Re: Coming Soon | The New Organize Experience

Dave Levy — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 05:20:01 -0000

And I came here to find out how to make an RFI about this very topic. Thanks

Re: BT’s Piracy Warning Information is Confusing and Outdated

Dave Levy — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 10:49:54 -0000

It's not looking good for them, the web site explaining more about the alleged infringement is broken and the phone line is putting people in the queue.

Re: Facebook uses RSS for Instant Articles

Dave Levy — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 07:16:46 -0000

Surely it's how they build mass. They have used and dropped SMTP for mail and XMPP for messaging. Once they have a mass they then enclosed them.

Re: YouGov | Comment: Corbyn takes early lead in Labour leadership race

Dave Levy — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 12:50:46 -0000

What would it look like in the gender ratio was 60% Female, 40% Male?

Re: UK IP Chief Wants ISPs to Police Piracy Proactively

Dave Levy — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 09:08:01 -0000

Good reply! I particularly like the fact you call out the speculative invoicers for criticism, which raises the question as to how reliable the content industry are in terms of their allegation of crime...."a totally reliable source..", I don't think so.

Re: Members vs Money – serious questions about Labour’s election plan

Dave Levy — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 04:12:21 -0000

I think Mark is raising the issue that if we plan to fight a #doorstep campaign, we need people to knock on doors. Suddenly, the Leadership have discovered that a programme they think can win the "middle ground" won't or might not motivate the activists. I think he's right to raise it; it's nearly too late but goes to prove that triangulation has reached its end game. The core have somewhere else to go and they're needed to fund and fight the campaign. My advice is to ask us what we want, if they spent as much time listening to the membership as they did asking us for money we'd be in a better position. I hope someone's listening.

Re: How to Create a Custom WordPress Widget

Dave Levy — Wed, 17 Dec 2014 11:26:30 -0000

Works for me too, if one wants to use the include statement in the plugin file, then the code above needs to be surrounded by

Re: We must not make the same mistake with the Greens that we did with the Lib Dems

Dave Levy — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 12:23:39 -0000

The deficit is not £1.4 trn, it’s a tenth of that size.

Re: We must not make the same mistake with the Greens that we did with the Lib Dems

Dave Levy — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 12:21:44 -0000

I have to ask why is it that it some so-called Labour supporters and
spokespersons say we should listen to UKIP and their voters (and be just be a
bit racist) and yet engage in street combat with the Greens. Without a
policy programme that addresses the needs and desires of those we look to
compete for all we have is name calling and the promise (or otherwise) of
victory. It isn't enough.

Re: “Supporters fee” for voting in the London Mayor primary confirmed

Dave Levy — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 12:07:58 -0000

We are unclear of what the commitment will be, and so we are unclear as to what the DP consents will be, but you are right they are not 'joining' Labour as individual members, they will be agreeing that they are supporters; they will be entering a relationship not buying a vote.

Re: “Supporters fee” for voting in the London Mayor primary confirmed

Dave Levy — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 03:17:40 -0000

Most importantly, local parties must be told who's signed up; it mustn't be a secret list held at HQ.

Re: Is now the time for online voting?

Dave Levy — Fri, 08 Aug 2014 02:51:55 -0000

Firstly, where is the evidence that online voting increases turnout? It doesn't exist! The evidence from Estonia is that it makes little difference in turnout, but transfers the weight of participation from the young to the old. Not sure that's what we want?

The evidence from Estonia was partially explored at PICTFOR, the Parliamentary ICT Forum on the 21st July which rarely produces minutes, although I reported on it on my blog.

The questions that the example of Estonia leaves are ones of security vs. transparency, scalability and acceptability.

On the question of IT Security, experts are united in that building a secure and transparent system that guarantees anonymity, secrecy, prohibits personation, eliminates coercion & corruption and yet can be scrutinised by candidates and agents, and trusted by voters is exceptionally difficult. Bruce Schneier states it would be the first such system every built. To add to this weight of opinion, the Open Rights Group were asked to convene an expert panel and audit the last Labour Government's experiments with E-Voting in 2007 and the London Mayoral elections in 2008 and state that,

“e-Voting may seem to make politics more accessible, but it in fact damages
citizens’ trust in politicians and the wider democratic system. This is because
e-voting works against electoral security and transparency.

….

‘Black box’ technologies are fundamentally unsuited to democratic elections
because they frustrate confidence in the final result. Simply put, nobody knows
whether the votes cast agree with the declaration.”

The independent IT Security Audit of the Estonian results states that the Estonian system is not secure and they were able to penetrate the system in such a way that votes could be amended.

Transparency also requires that any software code used is 'Free', as in Open and that candidates, agents and electors can read the code.

On the issue of Scalability, there are 1.3m Estonia citizens, Their last parliamentary election consisted of around 500,000 voters, the last parliamentary election in the UK consisted of 27m voters. At the heart of the Estonian system is an electronic identity system, an e-id card if you like. It is highly questionable that such a system can be built for 60m citizens, since the e-ID system would need to include non-voters as well, unless we are moving to Alan B'stard's “No representation without taxation”. Even then building a system that allowed 27m to vote electronically is hard and expensive. Most of the UK Government's projects on this scale, except of course GCHQ's surveillance systems, show the how hard it is.

On acceptability, the proposal by the last Labour Government to create a national id system was opposed by civic society and scrapped by the coalition. The acceptability of postal votes without cause is also questionable. Johnson Situ argues that 83% of postal voters in an unspecified election used their postal votes. In my investigations of the Police and Crime Commissioner election which was limited to Southampton, 49% of the postal ballot papers 'disappeared i.e were issued and not returned. The use of unsupervised ballot papers on this scale raises massive questions of trust. The Commonwealth sent observers to the 2010 General Election and the Council of Europe have also performed audits and the consensus is that the UK system relies too much on trust, particularly around identity assertion and postal vote ballot handling. The former is hard to solve with IT systems, the latter probably easier.

Situ fails to examine the US evidence where campaigners question the probity of the relationships between the system supply chain i.e. the software providers and the electoral authority usually State Government. There are growing campaigns in the US and the Netherlands to prohibit e-voting. I don't think now is the time for the UK to be adopting it.

E-Commerce is no longer safe! The NSA & GCHQ have broken it, why would we put our democracy in their hands, or that of the Russian or Chinese intelligence agencies. The fact we use it is not an argument for e-voting, it's an argument against.

The IT security and architectural arguments are critical to this issue; just because you want to use your iphones and facebook account to vote, doesn't mean that it's a good idea.

Re: After this weekend, we have the policies – now let’s win the election

Dave Levy — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 05:25:42 -0000

Did the NPF agree to lift the cap on Housing Revenue account? AFAIK you are the only source. Major + if true.

Re: TTIP: the NHS will be exempt, but how will the rest of the deal effect us?

Dave Levy — Sun, 13 Jul 2014 04:44:14 -0000

This is spot on.

TTIP is flawed because of Investor State Dispute Resolution. This potentially inhibits a Labour Government from freezing energy prices & re-nationalising the railways to name two things we say we want to do. It threatens food safety standards and privacy rights. There is no public interest upside; look at the evidence from NAFTA.

Promising that the NHS might be excluded is not enough. This must be stopped.

Re: This Is How The UK Piracy Warnings Will Work

Dave Levy — Tue, 20 May 2014 02:52:00 -0000

This is happening because the US Congress and EU Parliament wont pass the laws they want and the French experiment doesn't bode well.. It's interesting that VCAP has no penalties other than being on a list held by the ISP, if deemed legal. These lists can be obtained by court order of course and the scheme legitimises copyright holders as prosecuting authorities in that the ISPs agree to act on the basis of an untested non-court supervised accusation.

The legality of the copyright holder's discovery of alleged infringers is highly questionable and the data retention period of these items is not documented. i.e. while the ISPs may only hold the data for 12 months the copyright holders agents may hold it for considerably longer. It is possible that the discovery technology breaches the ECHR right to privacy even after taking clause two into account; I'd like to see that tested. The location of the storage has not been documented and the prime agent is a US corporation and thus subject to FISA and Patriot Act warrants.

I believe that the DE Act will never become law. The copyright holders don't want to pay for it since the courts said that making the Telcos do so is illegal under the EU single market laws and while British politicians wont put disconnection without a court order into the law.

I hope that the politicians learn that the reason we have parliamentary committee scrutiny is to stop bad law. I am doubtful that it'll happen.

Re: Ken Livingstone: “Boris is a lazy tosser who just wants to be there”

Dave Levy — Thu, 01 May 2014 13:01:28 -0000

A lazy tosser who just wants to be there...sounds like what we've got today in No 10.

Re: 5 MORE things you need to know about party reform

Dave Levy — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 04:11:41 -0000

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The MPs nomination threshold determines the maximum number of candidates. A 25% threshold would mean a maximum of only three candidates, where as 20% would mean the maximum number that can run is four etc. 25% is far too high, so its good that the threshold is coming down and removing the PLP's weighted vote is good. Also the arithmetic maximum may not be politically feasible. Others will comment on opting out.

Londoners may want to kick up about the imposed primary, for which we've not
heard about transition, short-listing or recall. There are ~40,000 members in London, make your own guess as to how many affiliates and supporters there will be in 17 months time and multiply by £3.

The whole proposal with its focus on candidates and leaders reinforces the dual mandate, with one mandate for policy, and one for leadership. It will force victorious candidates to refer to their base within the Party/Selectorate and not to the agreed Policy. This will lead to a growing diminishing of the influence of the NPF (hard to believe) and Conference and thus of the full fee members, who now have the new opportunity to become associates. The failure to amend the membership and accountabilities of the NEC and the NPF is a missed opportunity which reinforces @Markham Weavill who argues that the Labour Party has yet to prove that its interested in non-members for anything more than their votes.

Re: If the Tories lose the next election, Clegg must go with them

Dave Levy — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 09:52:05 -0000

Genscher's party has gone, they no longer have parliamentary representation and the LibDems gave up this strategy when they ran as left of Labour because of the penny on the income tax and then agreed to support a Tory administration. The LibDems are an alliance of free market economists and social liberals. The free marketeers are in control of their party at the moment. To ally with Labour they'll need to show that they've changed and need to tell the truth about their coalition strategies in advance; thier Social Liberal faction needs to be able to speak on behalf of their party.

Tom's right, not that they need to be punished for changing sides, but that they must tell the truth in their manifesto and must respect the manifesto of their coalition partners and the mandates won. Asking for permission to decide the result is not democracy.

One has to bear in mind that if we had an AV system that allowed the electorate to choose between factions within parties might be fun and increase the power of the vote, maybe even more than party primary elections.

Re: wiki.davelevy.info

Dave Levy — Sun, 28 Jul 2013 07:29:16 -0000

I think this looks better with a comment. So this post has both Disqus and Wordpress comments, it reflects my state of knowledge when I first installed Disqus comments on snipsnap and uses the then, generic code.

If you want to comment by loging in to Disqus, especially if using one of the oauth providers and add a comment, that would be brilliant.

Re: How about “a real voice inside the party” for members, Ed?

Dave Levy — Sun, 28 Jul 2013 06:30:38 -0000

Nice one!

You're spot on about policy. The policy formulation process is neither transparent nor accountable to the individual membership. It wasn't designed to be. I don't see that the reforms have made it more accountable. (I don't know what they are and I look for these things.) It's not really respected by the PLP front bench either; which leads to a lack of respect and value by members themselves.

It needs to be remembered that there are many members of the Labour Party who because of where they live will never participate in the selection of a candidate for public office who'll win. For these people, a commitment to an open accountable policy formulation process is crucial, it's the only way that they can influence the politics of the country which is one of the reasons that people join the Labour Party; to work with like minded people to develop policy, win public office and change society for the better. The direction and commitment of the Party must belong to the
membership; the direction is the programme, policy and public manifestoes; the
commitment is embodied in the people we choose as candidates, who need to be
accountable to the membership and policy and not possess a separate mandate.

This failure of the policy formulation process leaves selection as the only true power that ~£50 per annum buys you; Ed Miliband's speech on cleaning up politics states that he plans to share the power of candidate selection with people who won't sign up to the programme, policy and rules of the Labour Party or possibly in some cases those that can't afford the fees. It's proposed to start in London for the next candidate for Mayor, but already people are discussing using primaries where local Parties are deemed moribund.

If we don't make the policy, and are no longer allowed to select the candidates as we open this process up to primaries, why would people remain members?

Today's debate is about the power of, and reasons for individual membership.

Dave

Re: Labour Party selections shortened to 8 weeks

Dave Levy — Sun, 19 May 2013 07:23:03 -0000

And the NEC elections are so great that you want to repeat them.

Re: Labour Party selections shortened to 8 weeks

Dave Levy — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:08:31 -0000

I don't believe the MEP candidates have the membership list, they are using the Labour Party's or their own systems.