Tag Archives: Government

Progressiveness and the Tribe

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As a for­mer sup­porter of the Lib­eral Democ­rats, I found my sup­port lean­ing toward Labour due to the Lib Dems’ ongo­ing dis­as­trous coali­tion with the Con­ser­v­a­tive party.  But in truth, the Labour party are just a con­ve­nient polit­i­cal marker for some of my opin­ions on eco­nomic and social pol­icy.  What I really care about, I sup­pose, is progress – chang­ing things that are bro­ken, try­ing new ideas until we dis­cover some­thing that makes the coun­try work better.

But all three main par­ties now label them­selves as “Pro­gres­sive”. (I sup­pose “regres­sive” isn’t much of a vote-winner.)  The minor par­ties mostly have lim­ited agen­das that make it impos­si­ble to sup­port them to the exclu­sion of all oth­ers.  Who, then, do I vote for? The truth is prob­a­bly that none of the UK’s polit­i­cal par­ties are as pro­gres­sive as I would like, but more than that — a politi­cian being pro­gres­sive on my behalf isn’t really what I want at all.

I want to design the future.

Then I want to engi­neer the future.

Then I want to sit back and think “bloody hell, we made that.”

That’s what gets me out of bed and halfway across the county five morn­ings a week, what keeps me sketch­ing inter­faces and gets me through design meet­ings, what keeps me cod­ing and sol­der­ing and get­ting cov­ered in grease and salt-spray.

I’m not pre­tend­ing that I could engi­neer the future of this coun­try by myself, or that I should have any more of a say than the other sixty mil­lion of us, but I’d like to at least have some input besides a sim­ple vote.  As far as I’m aware, there exist only two ways of hav­ing this kind of input — sell your soul for a career in pol­i­tics, or be ignored on e-petitions.

All of this leads me to the con­clu­sion that hav­ing our voice heard and our expe­ri­ence utilised on our own terms is not some­thing that a nation state can offer its cit­i­zens.  Our voices are heard and our expe­ri­ence utilised by our fam­i­lies and friends; at our places of work — tribes of a few hun­dred peo­ple at most — but not on a national scale

Is there some use­ful way for cit­i­zens to help engi­neer their future at the state level, or are we rel­e­gated to hav­ing that kind of influ­ence only in our hundred-strong social tribes?  Are there any coun­tries that are sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter at this than ours, coun­tries that progress with heavy cit­i­zen involve­ment?  Am I dream­ing of an impos­si­ble soci­ety, and most impor­tantly of all, should I go to bed and sleep it off instead of fill­ing the inter­net with my ranting?

When Science met Big Society

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Yesterday’s announce­ment that the Arts and Human­i­ties Research Coun­cil will, on pain of los­ing fund­ing, devote a “sig­nif­i­cant” amount of time to study­ing the notion of “Big Soci­ety” is frankly shock­ing. If it is indeed true, it smacks of incred­i­ble ego­tism on the part of the government.

The government’s money is the people’s money — if we’re not going to leave the job of decid­ing what to research to the actual researchers, why should the government’s whims be involved? If there were a ref­er­en­dum on it now, what pro­por­tion of the tax-paying pub­lic would label the Big Soci­ety as a steam­ing pile of shite that we shouldn’t be throw­ing any more money at?

Con­versely, how many of the government’s other sweep­ing changes — the pro­gramme of cuts (Warn­ing: least impar­tial sum­mary ever) that we are now sub­ject to, for exam­ple — have been the sub­ject of such hopefully-independent research?

A future UKIP gov­ern­ment promises to ban global warm­ing research, and apart from the cli­mate change deniers, I’m con­fi­dent the pub­lic would not sup­port that par­tic­u­lar aspect of gov­ern­men­tal med­dling in research. So why are we putting up with this?

(And on a related note, does any­one else think it’s a lit­tle odd to com­mis­sion research on a pol­icy after com­mit­ting to it?)

tl,dr: Hands off mah sci­ence, government.

“Meh” to AV

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There are four months left before Britain goes to the polls to decide whether to adopt the Alter­na­tive Vote sys­tem, and already the #yes2av and #no2av cam­paigns are hot­ting up on Twit­ter.

Barely a year ago, I would have shouted “yes” with all my might — the Labour incum­bents were more into spin and sur­veil­lance than the redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth, and the oppo­si­tion Con­ser­v­a­tives appealed even less. But AV would have helped the Lib Dems immensely, maybe giv­ing them a shot at power. As the party of the young, in my eyes maybe more a party of the Left than Labour was, I was all for the Lib Dems hav­ing as much of a chance as pos­si­ble to win seats in the House of Commons.

What a dif­fer­ence a year can make.

The Tories are dec­i­mat­ing the pub­lic sec­tor and some­how still believe that char­ity and the free mar­ket will make it all bet­ter. The Lib Dems are com­plicit and must be on course for break­ing the major­ity of their elec­tion pledges. Labour have a new leader who doesn’t seem to do any­thing apart from offer the occa­sional doom­ful pre­dic­tion about the coalition’s cuts.

The Greens would have me out of a job, UKIP are crazy, the BNP are evil, and I can’t bring myself to run as a Pirate Party can­di­date because I believe in far more than an end to abuse of copyright.

Who would I vote for if a gen­eral elec­tion were called tomor­row? Nobody.

In fact, the cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate has almost brought me full cir­cle on the sub­ject of the Alter­na­tive Vote. Under a sys­tem like AV, smaller par­ties are likely to do bet­ter. But with a three-(major-)party sys­tem, it’s unlikely to be the case that we’ll see a Labour-Pirate or a Conservative-UKIP coali­tion or any­thing inter­est­ing — it’s still going to be Convervative-Lib Dem or Labour-Lib Dem, even with AV. And all that does is con­tinue the last 13 years’ rush for the cen­tre ground.

The Tories are rush­ing for it so fast that they’re alien­at­ing half their party. The Lib Dems, in the­ory, define the cen­tre, and despite elect­ing the younger Miliband, the Labour party has yet to decide if and how it’s going to stop its New Labour love affair with ‘Mid­dle England’.

What we absolutely don’t need, for the sake of the next generation’s inter­est in pol­i­tics, is an unend­ing suc­ces­sion of coali­tions, each one indis­tin­guish­able from the last.

So if it could hap­pen, bring on the Labour-Pirate coali­tion and the Conservative-UKIP coali­tion. Any­thing to keep things inter­est­ing. But if it can’t — and unless the Lib Dems utterly toast their pop­u­lar­ity, it can’t — then let’s have the next gen­er­a­tion of Mag­gie Thatcher and Michael Foot, let’s have some peo­ple with real ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences fight­ing it out in the Commons.

Bring me some­one I can believe in.

Until then, “meh” to AV.

Dystopia Fetishism and the Fall of #Solidarity

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Two weeks ago, I sat in this same warm office, look­ing out at the cold world out­side. And this is what I saw. I saw Lau­rie Penny’s Spi­der Jerusalem-esque piece for the New States­man, cov­er­ing the stu­dent riots, and I saw Wik­ileaks prepar­ing to dump 250,000 clas­si­fied US Embassy cables on the world. It all felt like a sud­den rush towards the hor­rid, glo­ri­ous dystopia that as a British cit­i­zen I am required to fetishise. (c.f. H.G. Wells, George Orwell, John Wyn­d­ham et al.)

One of those retains the abil­ity to stir up more trou­ble. The other, I fear, is now a lost cause.

Being approx­i­mately a social­ist, and hav­ing voted for the Lib­eral Democ­rats as I felt they were the only almost-credible party of the Left, I was almost warmed by the scale of the protests — not only were the Lib Dems’s bro­ken elec­tion promises not being taken lightly, but only six months in to a gov­ern­ment of the centre-Right, we were already see­ing the peo­ple up in arms.

The vio­lence involved in some of those protests, of which I of course do not approve, was referred to in the media at the time as being the actions of a “hard core” of pro­test­ers intent on stir­ring up trou­ble. The reac­tion of the pro­test­ers to that was often along the lines of “no, we all feel that strongly!”.

I won­der if they’ll be say­ing that this morning.

Last night, as it became appar­ent that the protests were inef­fec­tive at con­vinc­ing more than half of the Lib Dems to vote against the pro­posal, some pro­test­ers attacked a car car­ry­ing the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Corn­wall. Nat­u­rally, this made the front page of every news­pa­per in the coun­try (Guardian, Inde­pen­dent, Tele­graph, Mail, Sun, Mir­ror, nice pay­wall there, Times).

The Twit­ter hash­tag #sol­i­dar­ity has been used by the pro­test­ers and their sup­port­ers for a while now — I do hope some of that sol­i­dar­ity remains. But aside from amongst stu­dents, schoolkids and twenty-somethings who still fondly remem­ber their uni­ver­sity days, I sus­pect that sol­i­dar­ity just took a mas­sive hit.

The tabloid press was never going to be kind to stu­dent protests, but if they were qui­etly depriv­ing them of col­umn space before, by god they are not any more. The attack on Prince Charles’ car last night was one of the most impres­sive acts of shoot­ing one­self in the foot I have ever seen.

My great­est fear over the whole mat­ter, though, is the effect it has had on the young — the peo­ple whose edu­ca­tion was at stake. What have they learned over the last few weeks?

That break­ing into Mill­bank Tower, that light­ing fires and putting bricks through win­dows, that spray­paint­ing walls and break­ing down doors, that being ket­tled by riot police and attack­ing the Royal Fam­ily, isn’t enough. It’s not changed the minds of more than a dozen peo­ple inside the House of Com­mons, maybe none at all.

So what’s left to do? Give up hope and aban­don what mea­gre trust remains in our politi­cians, hop­ing that by the time the pro­test­ers reach mid­dle age they’re elec­table and their opin­ions haven’t changed? Or protest harder, get ket­tled more viciously, dream­ing of glo­ri­ous rev­o­lu­tion while all around the coun­try turns against them?

Dystopia is a great thing to expe­ri­ence for two hours of a film or two hun­dred pages of a book. But when you have to live in it, two weeks is about the point at which it stops being fun.

Alright Government, Hands Off Our Internet

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And that is an ‘our’ that does not extend to those inside West­min­ster, because with a few notable excep­tions, MPs have shown an almost com­plete lack of under­stand­ing of the inter­net and how it works.

Guess what’s back from the dead? Our old friend, the Inter­cept Mod­erni­sa­tion Plan.

Between this crazy “log every­thing” scheme (in the name of com­bat­ting ter­ror­ism, nat­u­rally) and the barely-debated Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Act, the pre­vi­ous Labour government’s approach to tech­nol­ogy and the inter­net was at best mis­guided. And though I’m gen­er­ally left-leaning, I found some promise in the Tories’ and the Lib Dems’ pro-freedom, anti-surveillance agenda.

This makes it all the more sad that the new gov­ern­ment has gone against its coali­tion agree­ment and cho­sen to res­ur­rect the Inter­cept Mod­erni­sa­tion Plan as part of the Strate­gic Defence and Secu­rity Review. (Hey, at least I got my submarines.)

Let’s rehash some old arguments:

  1. Überdata­bases are expen­sive. Even if the effort of main­tain­ing them is farmed out to ISPs rather than cen­tral gov­ern­ment (and it will), the cost will be enor­mous. The ISPs will protest, and if they end up hav­ing to pass that cost on to their cus­tomers, we will protest too. It’s your Orwellian plot, if you’re going to intro­duce it, at least have the decency to pay for it.
  2. Who has access? That our ISPs can, to some extent, log our com­mu­ni­ca­tions is some­thing we sign up to in our ser­vice agree­ments. Who could ask for these logs under the Inter­cept Mod­erni­sa­tion Plan? Police with a rea­son­able sus­pi­cion, fair enough — it’s no dif­fer­ent from the cir­cum­stances under which they could get a search war­rant for your house. But when it’s all dig­i­tal, how do we ensure that ‘rea­son­able sus­pi­cion’ is never abused? And who else is allowed access? Gov­ern­ment depart­ments? Civil ser­vants? Schools? Hos­pi­tals? None of this is rigidly defined, and it needs to be.
  3. Data Min­ing is Evil. Can the police, or who­ever, request only spe­cific data from spe­cific times, or can they request all your data? All of sev­eral people’s data? At what point does it stop being a proper inves­ti­ga­tion and start being data min­ing for ‘crime prediction’?
  4. Ph34r t3h haxx0rz! The more data you put in one place, the more inter­est­ing a tar­get it is. And in the real world, enough civil ser­vants leave con­fi­den­tial mate­r­ial on trains already — they’re sure to down­load some of this data to a mem­ory stick and lose it somewhere.
  5. Signal-to-Noise Ratio. This is the inter­net. Accord­ing to one esti­mate, 97% of e-mail traf­fic is spam. And most of the rest must be from Zynga. How much of our Twit­ter bull­shit and Live­Jour­nal angst are you going to read? How much crap are you going to go through to find the super-secret ter­ror­ist plans, and at what point does apply­ing Bayesian analy­sis to our web traf­fic start to fall under the “Data Min­ing is Evil” head­ing (pro­tip: really quickly).
  6. Ter­ror­ists are Smarter than You. And so am I. So are most 14-year-old kids. We know all about SSL, PGP, prox­ies, VPN tun­nelling, TOR, IPREDa­tor, dark­nets and all the rest. And god for­bid the ter­ror­ists do their busi­ness in real life, in a base­ment some­where, rather than on Face­book. Because if they do (spoil­ers: they do), this whole plan is a giant money-pit that robs us of our pri­vacy and achieves nothing.

So Cameron, Clegg et al, please just let this one die. It was a bad plan to begin with, that’s why you promised not to do it. And before you come up with the next plan to foil online ter­ror­ist col­lab­o­ra­tion, please learn what how the inter­net works and what is and isn’t sen­si­ble to do to it.

Learn Internet

For any­one who’d like to sign another peti­tion against the Inter­cept Mod­erni­sa­tion Plan, the Open Rights Group cam­paign is here.

The Curious Case of the Disappearing Child Benefit

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This morn­ing, the Prime Min­is­ter used his BBC inter­view to let us know why, exactly, his pro­posed changes to the Child Ben­e­fit sys­tem take into account the income of a sin­gle fam­ily mem­ber rather than the house­hold overall.

As loudly bemoaned in the media over the past few days, the Con­ser­v­a­tives plan to scrap Child Ben­e­fit for higher rate tax pay­ers, those earn­ing over £44,000 a year. Because this is tied in to the tax sit­u­a­tion for a sin­gle indi­vid­ual, it leads to wild incon­sis­ten­cies in the fam­ily incomes that are affected. Under the scheme, a two-parent house­hold where one par­ent earns £44,000 and the other does not work would lose their Child Ben­e­fit. How­ever if both par­ents were to work and earn £43,000 each, for a total of £86,000, they would still receive the payments.

As some­one who earns far less than £44,000 and who could still get by with­out Child Ben­e­fit if nec­es­sary, I have no prob­lems with scrap­ping or reduc­ing Child Ben­e­fit for those sub­stan­tially more wealthy than myself. But couldn’t we at least make it fair?

David Cameron’s excuse for this unfair­ness is that to base it on house­hold income rather than indi­vid­ual income would involve a whole new means-testing process, with all the added bureau­cracy and money-wasting that involves.

Has Mr Cameron for­got­ten about Labour’s Child Tax Credit scheme, a bizarrely par­al­lel yet unre­lated pro­gramme under which work­ing par­ents can claim more money. Child Tax Cred­its are means-tested based on house­hold income in just the same way that the Prime Min­is­ter is claim­ing to be too much work. Would it not in fact reduce bureau­cracy and wasted effort if both were to be com­bined into a sin­gle Child Ben­e­fit sys­tem that was means-tested on house­hold income?

But no, appar­ently the deci­sion is set in stone.

How do the Con­ser­v­a­tives plan on try­ing to fix this unfair­ness? Appar­ently, it emerged this after­noon, with a mar­ried cou­ples’ tax break. How­ever, as the rumour heard by the BBC has it, this would only affect cou­ples earn­ing less than the £44,000 thresh­old — the house­hold with one par­ent earn­ing over £44,000 and one stay-at-home par­ent would not stand to ben­e­fit. It’s also reported as being intro­duced “before the 2015 elec­tion”, poten­tially leav­ing a four-year gap between then and now in which the unfair­ness of the Child Ben­e­fit change is not being adressed.

Fur­ther­more, while the pro­posed mar­ried cou­ples’ tax break thank­fully includes civil part­ner­ships, it pre­sum­ably does not include long-term part­ners who choose not to marry. I imag­ine that encour­ag­ing tra­di­tional val­ues such as mar­riage is a vote-winner amongst cer­tain groups of Tory vot­ers, but should the gov­ern­ment not stay well clear of these very pri­vate deci­sions? Should a poor cou­ple who do not want to marry be pres­sured into it, how­ever gen­tly, by their finan­cial situation?

New Labour: Gone, but not Forgotten

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“The era of New Labour has passed,” said Ed Miliband on Sun­day, and boy was I happy to hear that.

I am, I sup­pose, of the New Labour gen­er­a­tion — Tony Blair swept to power in 1997, just as I was turn­ing 12 years old. I stayed up late to watch the votes roll in, more excited by the fact that I was simul­ta­ne­ously maths-geeking with half the pop­u­la­tion than I was knowl­edge­able about how a Labour or Tory win would affect me.

But from about that time, the dawn of my polit­i­cal aware­ness, Labour has been New Labour. Min­ers’ strikes and Poll Tax riots are crea­tures of the his­tory books to me, and trade unions just aren’t things a 12-year-old cares about. Labour, to me, was about the cult of per­son­al­ity and of spin, Mandelson’s scan­dals and Blair’s toothy grin. They were about Mid­dle Eng­land and unpop­u­lar wars and sac­ri­fic­ing our lib­er­ties at every turn for our pro­tec­tion from today’s ter­ror­ist organ­i­sa­tion of choice.

After a while I turned 18, and like the good proto-Socialist that I was, I voted for what I per­ceived as the most Left-leaning party on the bal­lot sheet.

The Lib­eral Democrats.

Five years later, well, that alleigance didn’t work out so well.

But while I’m glad that Labour’s new leader has called the end of the Blairite regime, I’m a lit­tle sad­dened by how quickly the pos­si­bil­ity of a “lurch to the Left” has been dis­missed. Ed Miliband has said that he wants to “rede­fine” the polit­i­cal cen­tre ground, but where does that leave our polit­i­cal landscape?

We have the Con­ser­v­a­tive party, on the centre-right. The Lib Dems, approx­i­mately at the cen­tre. And now Ed Miliband’s Labour, redefin­ing… the centre.

Cen­tre, cen­tre, cen­tre. Should we be brac­ing our­selves for a con­tin­u­ing era of utter dull­ness in pol­i­tics? If we dis­count the tiny Greens, the loony-fringe UKIP and the despi­ca­ble BNP, and if post-New Labour con­tin­ues Blair’s obses­sion with win­ning Mid­dle England’s votes, everyone’s man­i­festos start look­ing sus­pi­ciously similar.

Time to just say “sod it” and run as a can­di­date for the Pirate Party or something?

(Sources for the Mil­liband quotes are the Finan­cial Times’ web­site, which I’m not link­ing to because it’s got Mur­doch cooties.)

Politics, meet Videogames. Everybody Loses.

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On Sun­day, Britain’s Defence Sec­re­tary Liam Fox called for the upcom­ing Medal of Honor game to be banned by retail­ers (BBC). Appar­ently he finds it “hard to believe any cit­i­zen of our coun­try would wish to buy such a thor­oughly un-British game”, which shows quite a remark­able lack of under­stand­ing of the peo­ple he is sup­posed to rep­re­sent. And since when has there been an expec­ta­tion that Amer­i­can games should be “British” anyway?

Appar­ently it is “shock­ing that some­one would think it accept­able to recre­ate the acts of the Tal­iban against British sol­diers”. Well, in real life, maybe. But this is a game, and an 18-rated one at that, so it is played by adults that are fully capa­ble of dis­tin­guish­ing between fic­tion and reality.

And yes, you can play as the Tal­iban. It’s called mul­ti­player. Would Mr Fox pre­fer that the mul­ti­player was Amer­i­cans shoot­ing Amer­i­cans? Because that’s just as morally dubi­ous, and also kind of dumb. No, one team plays the good guys, one team plays the bad guys. That’s the way these things work. I don’t recall politi­cians los­ing their shit about Coun­ter­strike because zomg half the play­ers are being ter­ror­ists! How many games have there been where you can play as a Nazi sol­dier in multiplayer?

I won­der if the Defence Sec­re­tary ever got the chance to play Cops and Rob­bers as a kid, because, you know it’s no dif­fer­ent. One team plays the good guys, one team plays the bad guys, that’s how it works. Cops and Rob­bers doesn’t glo­rify vio­lent crime, just as Medal of Honor doesn’t glo­rify the Afghan insurgency.

So Mr Fox, it would be appre­ci­ated if you could please go back to get­ting our real sol­diers some MRAPs and some more heli­copters and guns that work, and leave the rest of us to enjoy our videogames. Thank you!

My Contribution to Big Society

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Today, Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron launched his ‘Big Soci­ety’ ini­tia­tive, aimed at empow­er­ing local com­mu­ni­ties to fix their own prob­lems. On the sur­face it sounds to me like a nice idea, get­ting neigh­bours to work together to save their post office or whatever.

But of course, no-one really knows how it’s going to hap­pen yet, or if there’s any money. And money will be needed. No inde­pen­dent community-built schools are going to spring up if the only peo­ple who can vol­un­teer their time are house­wives and a bunch of unem­ployed sales exec­u­tives. Peo­ple need train­ing, and even after a bit of train­ing, they’ll still not do the job as well as pro­fes­sion­als. Appar­ently the gov­ern­ment can’t afford to pay actual builders to build schools, so is this part of the ‘Big Soci­ety’ plan doing any more than invest­ing in cheap, shoddy infra­struc­ture that will fall to the com­mu­nity to main­tain when it starts falling down?

It all seems based on the idea that no-one’s got much money but we’ve all some­how got a lot of spare time. Which, with unem­ploy­ment threat­en­ing to rise even higher, is pretty much true. Unfor­tu­nately, all the peo­ple in this sit­u­a­tion are spend­ing all their spare time try­ing to get money again, by means of find­ing a job that actu­ally pays them. ‘Big Soci­ety’ doesn’t dish out feel-good points that can be traded in at the food bank.

In an attempt to find some money for train­ing and so that there is some finan­cial incen­tive for these vol­un­teers, Cameron also sug­gests “…announc­ing plans to use dor­mant bank accounts to fund projects.” Wait. Are you nation­al­is­ing our bank accounts? How exactly does he pro­pose to do that, and has any­one else done that in recent his­tory besides Com­mu­nist dic­ta­tors? (Or, more likely, am I com­pletely fail­ing to grasp the actual plan here?)

Any­way, I’m feel­ing pretty good about my con­tri­bu­tion to the Big Soci­ety. With all the web­sites ask­ing what we should cut the hard­est, with Con­ser­v­a­tive and Lib Dem man­i­festos falling by the way­side, and with the gov­ern­ment wash­ing their hands of com­mu­nity projects, I think I’ve found myself some­where to volunteer.

In the deprived cen­tral Lon­don bor­ough of West­min­ster, there are plenty of vol­un­teers work­ing in char­ity shops and soup kitchens — but where we’re really lack­ing, where we really need to come together and save our com­mu­nity, is in the area of policy-making. Since the gov­ern­ment clearly isn’t keen on doing it them­selves, I humbly pro­pose myself as a vol­un­teer here. I could spare a few hours after work each night to down a few pints in the Com­mons bar before head­ing to the Cham­ber and being an angry leftie at peo­ple until the gov­ern­ment realises that we pay tax so that they fund these projects, not us.

Announcing: Westminster Hubble!

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Ladies and gen­tle­men of the blo­gos­phere, I am proud to announce the release of a new web­site. This is what I have been wind­ing up most of my Twit­ter fol­low­ers for the last two months by refer­ring to it only as “Super Secret Project #1″. Its name is West­min­ster Hub­ble.

Westminster Hubble Logo

A joint ven­ture between myself and Chris Cox, West­min­ster Hub­ble helps you stay in touch with your rep­re­sen­ta­tives in Parliament.

Each MP has their own page, which you can nav­i­gate to by search­ing by name, con­stituency or post­code, or by select­ing from a map of the UK or a list of every­body in the data­base. Here’s an exam­ple for one of Westminster’s most tech-savvy, Tom Wat­son.

On each MP’s page, each item of their online pres­ence is listed: their web­site, blog, Twit­ter account, Face­book page, and so on. These are all editable, so that MPs or benev­o­lent users can help keep their page up to date. MP’s pro­files on They­Work­ForYou, the UK Par­lia­ment web­site and the Tele­graph news­pa­per are all auto­mat­i­cally linked to as well, and if they’re on record, the pages also list MPs’ con­stituency addresses and phone numbers.

Each of the online items is rou­tinely checked for updates by West­min­ster Hub­ble, and from them a feed is cre­ated. This feed forms the body of each MP’s page, and is a fil­ter­able list of all that MP’s activ­ity on all the web­sites we know about.

Of course, you can sub­scribe to an RSS feed for an MP too (or even a sin­gle feed for all 650 of them, if you’re that way inclined). Just click the “Sub­scribe” but­ton at the top of any feed.

So if you want a sin­gle feed of your MP’s speeches in Par­lia­ment, blog posts, tweets and YouTube videos, West­min­ster Hub­ble is a new site that will give you just that. If you want a sin­gle page that’ll give you quick access to all their pro­files across the inter­net, we do that too.

Please, spread the word!