Two good things about last night’s meeting of the party’s Federal Policy Committee - one from the point of view of Lib Dem policy-making, and one a bit more personal.
The one that should benefit the party’s policy-making is that we had ‘early’ discussions of two areas where FPC will be taking policy papers to autumn conference this year. One of the points about our policy-making process that many, including me in Wasted Rainforests, have made, is that FPC should take much more ownership of the policy papers that it takes to Conference in its name: in the past FPC has only had a full discussion of the final paper at a very late stage, when printing deadlines are looming. So we have changed the process and last night’s meeting was one of the first occasions when we had a full discussion of what you might call a ‘pre-final’ draft of two papers that the world will be seeing in the run up to autumn conference. Not having the pressure of a full final paper and an imminent deadline allowed for some quite full and helpful discussion of the issues. We’d already had discussions of them both with the chairs of the working groups, and it should all help to contribute to more considered and consistent sets of proposals from FPC to Conference.
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I read somewhere recently that the direction the internet is heading is towards everything being free - and I have been discovering recently just how true this is. Nobody anymore pays for an email address, unless they really want to. The most popular browser that people choose to use to surf the web is free - Firefox, which comes from an organisation called Mozilla, which also produces a range of other browsers including a more Mac-friendly version, Camino, as well as a “full internet suite” version, Seamonkey. If you don’t like Firefox you can use Opera, if you don’t like either of them you can use Netscape, and if you particularly want to upload photos to the web you can use Flock. All without parting with a cent.
If you want to set up your own website you can have it hosted for free by most of the free email providers - Yahoo, or Google, say, or even Microsoft (at Livespaces). If you want to create a blog, Google (through Blogger) or wordpress will host it for you for free - or if you prefer wordpress will, as with this blog, let you use their software to host it on your own website.
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A couple of weeks ago I attended an excellent one-day conference at Chatham House, organised by Stephen Quigley for the European Movement to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome. A lot of very eminent people - including Kenneth Clarke, Peter Mandelson, and Charles Kennedy - said mostly the same absolutely right things about the EU’s great successes.
There was much less - though some - discussion of what happens next in the story of Britain’s relationship with Europe. I think there is some chance that the logjam of a British public - and especially a British press - hostile to ”˜Europe’ might be about to start to break. I’ve tried to put my ideas together into an article setting out my view of the situation - which you can now read on my website here.
OK, so where have we ended up? As I write this, 15 British sailors and marines are in the air on their way back from Iran. After all the tough language, alarm about where the standoff was heading, the quiet diplomacy and the murmurings of secret deals, we find ourselves in a situation in which the Iranian government - the people who started this whole thing off - has got two things out of it. Firstly, even if no-one in the west quite accepts at face value Ahmadinejad’s claim that the release is a “gift”, he has managed to create the impression that the Iranian regime is at least reasonably human and prepared to take a humanitarian action in releasing those held. And second, Iran has reminded everyone forcefully that it is a country which expects and needs to be treated with care and respect in that region.
If I were directing Iranian strategy I think I would regard these as pretty good outcomes - reminding western governments that it needs to be taken seriously, while simultaneously making a ”˜soft’ appeal to western publics that it is not so bad after all. In fact it has turned out so well for the Iranian regime - or rather more precisely the very different strands which participate in the governance of Iran - that I find it difficult to believe that this was not, broadly, the outcome they had prepared and planned for right from the start.
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Miscellaneous April 2, 2007
On Friday we went to see again Avenue Q - a great and curiously addictive musical which is quite different to your usual London musical! It rounds off a spring when I have for the first time in a very long time made the most of living in London to enjoy what’s available - other trips have included the Mousetrap (which I’d never seen before), La Boheme (again for the first time, at the ENO), the Gondoliers, the Marriage of Figaro, the very weird and depressing The Lighting Play at the Almeida theatre, Boeing Boeing, a great concert at the Barbican, and the really excellent and thought-provoking Frost/Nixon - and finally a very lively amateur performance of Anything Goes! in Cambridge.