With 30,568 visits in the first six weeks of this blog I hope to persuade a few more of my colleagues to participate. I have tabled a question for answer next Thursday asking how we can inform the public about the work of Parliament. This blog is part of the answer and it gives me and other blogging Lords an opportunity to draw the attention of the House to this initiative.
The statistics are quite important because some Parliamentarians doubt the use of this new tool. When I point out that, on occasions, a post on a blog can get more readers than an article in one of the broadsheet papers they express surprise. In fact it is very difficult to measure full readership in either case but as Lord Norton’s highly successful entries on the structure and history of the Lords show there is a real thirst for more information about Parliament.
Meanwhile the founding members of this blog and the Hansard and House staff who helped set it up are due to have a drinks party on Monday! I wonder if they did the same in the early 19th century when Hansard was first established? http://www.parliament.uk/about/history/hansard.cfm
This is great news. Engagement with the public is so, so important, and you’re all doing a great job in that respect.
Keep up the good work!
Does this mean we are all invited ?! It could be a bit like those ‘MySpace’ parties which have done so much to add to the gaiety of the nation.. – Just let us know the ‘time and place’…
Lord Norton did post a general response about the ‘rights and wrongs’ of ‘interests’ and how to deal with them. But I am still not clear about your views, and that of your party, on the Heathrow issue.
I agree that you have been more transparent about this than I had realised and I apologise if any impression was given that this was ‘underhand’ in any way. And I have some sympathy for your view that jobs may be at risk, or that business will go to Schipol etc.
What I find particularly galling, and this is more of a reflection on the way that the Lords are, quite rightly, seen as having a measure of independence from the Commons is the disconnect between your views and the manifesto commitments of the Labour party.
Many things frustrate me about politics, such as incompetence. But I am afraid that hypocrisy trumps them all. The impression is clearly given that solving climate change is the ‘most important issue of our generation’ and this is ‘even more important than terrorism’ and so on.
There is a massive ‘Public Relations’ bombardment when the Stern Report is issue, and the IPCC manage to get all nations including America to row behind the consensus on man-made global warming.
Far less emphasis is made of the following points.
1/ Airline emissions are currently outside the scope of Kyoto, so even if we hit ‘Kyoto’ targets, they could be ruined by increases in CO2 emissions from flying.
2/ The ‘Government’ [or the Labour party in the Commons, as I see it] is perfectly willing to sacrifice its commitment to reducing climate damaging emissions on the altar of increased flights from Heathrow.
I wouldn’t particularly mind if the Government banged the drum for Heathrow – we could decide whether or not that was a good thing and vote accordingly. But it does make a complete mockery of attempts to manage carbon emissions by the ‘price escalator’ on car fuel.
I appreciate that your views don’t have to be congruent with the Government policy in the that a Minister of the Crown, bound by ‘collective responsibility’ would be. But it rather sticks in the craw that people of your ilk come up with the ‘Aviation is only 3% of emissions’ type argument, knowing full well that the increase which your policies would inevitably see, might result in that increasing to 10-15% if nothing was done to look for sustainable alternatives !
The other question people, rightly, ask is how on earth our refusal to allow a third runway will help if India and China aren’t going to ‘do their bit’. But we are beginning to establish a hard-fought for consensus that even the Indians, Chinese and, yes, the Americans will sign up to a global carbon market.
Lord Soley, I have a lot of respect for you as you are clearly an intelligent, hard-working guy with a lot of integrity – but on this issue you need to wake up and smell the coffee. I recommend you buy James Lovelock’s excellent book ‘The Revenge of Gaia’. Mind you, he thinks ‘carbon trading’ is tinkering at the edges and we are already too late on that.
Which brings me to the final point – Nuclear Power. On that I have to confess I have changed my mind, and might support a stance like yours of standing against the ‘green protesters’ and running counter to ‘conventional wisdom’. I would railroad in plants that Greenpeace don’t want and which might be subject to protests by the same people writing to you about Heathrow !
So maybe my ‘democratic credentials’ are no better than yours – but the needs of the planet may make for some unlikely bedfellows ?
With regard to Hansard there is still much work to do I feel.
The written word is monotonic in nature coloured only by its punctuation. Some say:
When a Law Lord speaks in debate the Hansard recorder is minded that punctuation can make for longer sentences.
This is only one of the dimensions that the spoken word has to offer. The way the speaker gives inflexion, the expression on their face or even the waving of hands as body language all give meaning and emphasis to what is said.
The American C-Span network:
http://www.c-span.org/about/copyright.asp
Is a paradigm that Hansard might aspire to? One thing needed on Hansard’s web site is a sound recording of what is actually said. A full video multimedia recording would be ideal.
Its not clear to me just who owns the copyright of multimedia recorded by the BBC in Parliament. There is no copyright link prominent on any of their Parliament web pages as is the case for C-Span.
To incorporate multimedia within Hansard would not be without controversy.
I watched and listened to a recent PMQ exchange in the Commons and what Ed Balls MP said is now part of the written record. However, I know what I heard and it is not what is recorded within the pages of Hansard.
This blog is still in its experimental stage. I’m not sure that we will be able to meet all your requests but at some point it will be assessed by Hansard and the Information office of the House and we will see what changes are necessary.
Re Ed Balls: quite so, Senex, we all know weak we heard.
Good to see Lord Soley commenting as ‘Clive Soley’, and perhaps the hint that the six month exercise is but the first stage for this site.
Lord Norton’s recent posts may not have attracted too many comments but sometimes pure information can stand alone.
Still not moderating my posts I see ? Frit ?
Sorry Bedd – I’m struggling to keep up! I was in Geneva for two days with my select Committee taking evidence from the World Health Organisation amongst others.
I don’t think there is a contradiction between airport expansion and a policy dealing with climate change unless you believe that the situation is so serious that we have to halt most forms of transport. It’s like saying we shouldn’t build the high speed rail link because high speed rail produces more carbon than low speed rail.
I am aware of the Gaia theory and it is clearly possible that we are in for massive climate change. It has happened before on a number of occasions in the planets history. The problem is that if you think it is so likely that we must take immediate and drastic action then frankly we have to abandon most of the activities of modern life. Heating homes is far more carbon intensive then flying. Do we make everyone wear jumpers instead of putting the heating on?
The consequences of this type of reaction for the whole world would be catastrophic.
That doesn’t mean we don’t do anything. It does mean we need to find new forms of energy, new ways of doing things and ways of encouraging alternative, less carbon intensive activities. We also need carbon trading in my view.
I am more optimistic than I used to be about solving this problem. It will take clever solutions not attempts to stop people doing things that actually have many benefits and flying is one of those activities – unless you think travel narrows the mind!
Lord Soley,
Thanks for taking the time to reply. It is all very well saying rather facetiously that ‘travel narrows the mind’ – you can afford it and are able to go on ‘jollies’ which the people who will be most affected by climate change cannot. Luckily the prospect of $200 dollar a barrel is going to focus minds on just how important travel really is and what cheaper alternatives there may be.
You also rather cheekily ask whether we should ask people to put on extra jumpers, as heating homes has a higher carbon impact than flying.
This is disingenuous nonsense ! The point is that relatively few people fly, whereas everyone heats their home – so the ‘fliers’ are being disproportionately ‘carbon-wasteful’. And the Government is already, in effect, asking people to put on jumpers by the huge investment in advertisements telling people to turn down thermostats and switch off appliances at the wall.
I have to say that your attitude is disappointingly similar to that of George Bush, who thinks we should do something to tackle climate change, as long as it doesn’t in any way involve making changes to peoples lifestyles or affect the economy in any way – ‘manana’ is the word that springs to mind.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned – Lord Soley, you are flying while the planet is burning..
It seems that in the Commons it is the speaker who authorises the use of Parliamentary video recordings made by BBC Parliament.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2008-05-08a.844.4
Jo Swindon (Shadow Minister, Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs; East Dunbartonshire, Liberal Democrat) asked about modernising the House and Helen Goodman (deputy speaker) gave a revealing reply.
The speaker is concerned that footage may be altered or used to lampoon the house. All of this is in stark contrast to C-Span where the footage is owned by the public for non profit use.
Does the speaker in the Lords authorise video content in a similar way? Can the Lords make representations so that the UK public own the copyright for non profit use just like C-Span?
Ref:
http://www.mysociety.org/2008/06/01/video-recordings-of-the-house-of-commons-on-theyworkforyoucom/