And here is the Lib Dem problem

Radio Four's PM programme this evening.

Mandelson for Labour is talking about spending wisely, not throwing money at problems. Ken Clarke for the Tories is saying whichever party wins the next election they'll need to make cuts and Labour are being dishonest.

Both resonable positions; both sensible forays into the cut-and-thrust of political debate.

So what is the Lib Dem position reported as? Apparently, the Lib Dems attacked both parties for "pre-election positioning"?

What did we expect them to do?

I don't know if the report of the Lib Dem line is accurate or not, but it came across as the party having no opinion on the public spending debate at all and trying to complain that the other parties do.

Not good enough. We can't sit here months before a general election and complain about the other parties saying things. We must be putting forward our solutions, saying why the others are wrong and we're right, presenting our positive solutions.

Why Charlotte's wrong on child protection

Curse those evil politicians wanting to protect our children and vulnerable adults! Comments in some quarters come close to equating the new Independent Safeguarding Authority to the East German Stasi.

For example, Charlotte Gore's post on the ISA was originally titled "Britain is turning into a totalitarian state" (see the URL) and interprets the ISA's guidance as a snooper's and snitcher's charter where rumour, innuendo and the most minor of infractions could see you branded a sex-offender in the eyes of the local community.

Charlotte makes some excellent points, but her attack goes way over the top.

Those who are interested in what will really happen under this new scheme would do well to look at some of the previous controversial legislation we on the civil liberties side of the fence were worried about. Without exception, three things turned out to be true with all those laws.

First, the worst predictions of the effect of the laws and how Britain would become a police state proved very wide of the mark. Second, Government predictions of how terrorism or some other evil would be dealt a stunning blow also proved to be so much nonsense. Finally, the way the laws are actually used, by police forces and other public bodies with limited resources and their own agendas, has surprised pretty much everyone. RIPA and the legislation against extreme pornography are two good examples.

The new scheme run by the ISA is not an attempt by the Government to turn us all into sex offenders and snitches. It's a genuine, if misguided in a typically New Labour way, attempt to deal with a real problem that worries millions of parents around the country.

Child abuse may not be acceptable in the way it was a few decades ago, but it's still out there.

Charlotte highlights the wording of the rules giving the grounds for stopping someone working with children or vulnerable adults but, in doing so, she misses the real problem.

It's not the rules, it's the system.

As the ISA proudly says, this will be the largest system of its kind in the world. Over five years, 11 million of us will be brought onto it. With my permission, an employer or voluntary organisation will be able to check me out online.

You just need to do the maths. 11.3 million over five years works out as 9,000 people a day being put onto the system.

Nine thousand a day. Approximately one person every three seconds.

The idea that experts with gather data effectively and use their judgement to make the right decision on each person is completely laughable. The ISA won't have enough resources.

It will do what always happens in these situations. Corners will be cut, large chunks of data will be imported with little or no checking and decisions based on guesses, rules of thumb and arbitrary thresholds will be the order of the day.

As to the security of the system - I don't know the details, but I would seriously question whether it's possible to secure a database of that size that can be accessed online. Will it really be true that no-one can access my records unless I give them permission? How is that being implemented?

This is the real problem. Not a Stalinist Big Brother State branding us paedos for reading the wrong article in the Metro or being sarcastic; but a well-meaning Government yet again implementing a poorly-thought out system relying on yet another enormous database, with huge amounts of data flowing in and out.

Facebook won't really matter at the Election

An interesting post yesterday from promising young Leeds-based blogger Chris Lovell.

Citing Mark Pack's pop-fact that there are now more Facebook users than voters needed to win a General Election, Chris discusses some of the issues.

"Technology will have a huge effect on the outcome of this election amongst certain groups in the electorate. Mainly the young. Although technology should never replace face-to-face campaigning (something, in my opinion, vital to holding politicians to account) it will no doubt play a large part in the 2010 general election campaign."

Chris is right...up to a point. Certainly technology will have a greater impact on the next General Election than any previous one; but not in the ways many people think.

It won't be Facebook or YouTube, MySpace or Twitter. They might have small effects.

Remember that under our wonderful voting system, elections are decided by a small number of floating voters in marginal constituencies. The most popular political blogs might reach 100,000 people in a month, but nearly all will be committed to one party, or if they are undecided most will live in constituencies where it doesn't matter - safe seats for one of the parties.

How many Facebook users in those marginal seats will, because of what they see on Facebook, change their support?

In truth, the parties are a long way from really harnessing Web 2.0 to win elections. They're dabbling and playing, still trying to work out what works. Their current efforts mostly reach out to relatively small numbers of existing supporters. That's OK - these things don't change overnight and you only get better by experimenting. But it's some way from anyone being swept to power on a wave of Internet-based excitement. (Remember the Libertarian Party's blog-based campaign for the Norwich North by-election? 36 votes).

So how will technology effect the next election?

More local campaigning will have a greater effect. Local blogs and emails are no substitute for leaflets through every door, but they'll reach more people because it's much easier to produce material that interests them.

But the real way techonology will effect the next General Election is behind the scenes. Election software like the Lib Dem's EARS gets ever more sophisticated (don't laugh, EARS users). Each year it becomes cheaper and easier to produce high quality literature and to target it effectively.

To give an example, a decade ago it would have been very expensive, complicated and time consuming to produce a leaflet to go out to thousands of people but customised either for each person or for different areas. Today it's fairly trivial and affordable.

The way the parties will track you, record information about you on their internal databases, and use that data to personalise their contacts with you, along with the ability to produce quality localised literature - these are the real ways technology will impact.