Politics

  • A confusing spell in Red(e)cliff(e)

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

    One of the oldest districts of Bristol is Redcliffe (or Redcliff. Ed.).

    According to its Wikipedia entry, Redcliffe – the more common spelling – was once part of the manor of Bedminster before its absorption into the city of Bristol in the 13th century.

    However, the spelling of Redcliff(e) has long caused controversy.

    Richard Ricart, a town clerk of Bristol, in his The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar, written between 1480 and 1508 and recording the history of Bristol since the 12th century, refers throughout to Redcliff, although there is also an occasional unusual reference to Redecliff. Both appear in this extract documenting the digging of St. Augustine’s Trench (later renamed St. Augustine’s Reach. Ed.) in 1240:

    This yere was the Trenche y-made and y-caste of the ryvere, fro the Gybbe Tailloure unto the key, by the maanovre of alle the Cominalte, as wele of Redcliff warde as of the Towne of Bristowe. And the same tyme thenhabitaunts of Redecliff were combyned and corporatid with the Town of Bristowe. And as for the grounde of Seynt Austyn’s side of the forseid ryver hit was yeve and grauntid to the Cominaltee of the seid Towne by Sir William a Bradstone then Abbot of Seynt Austyns for certeyn money therfore to hym paide by the seide Cominaltee. As appereth by olde writyng therof made bitwene the forseid Maire and Cominaltee and the seid Abbot and Covent.

    Redcliff these days tends to appear mostly in street names, such as Redcliff Street – the ancient road leading from Bristol Bridge to the former Redcliffe Gate in the city’s medieval walls – whilst Redcliffe is the more common version.

    A couple of quick text searches via Google of Bristol City Council’s website for Redcliff and Redcliffe gives the following results.

    • Redcliff: 1,120 results
    • Redcliffe: 4,020 results

    However, confusion as the spelling of Redcliff(e) has a long history. This is amply illustrated by the painting below by James Johnson entitled Redcliffe Street. It was painted around 1825 and hangs in Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery.

    image of James Johnson's picture of Redcliffe Street, c. 1825
    Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    Kerry McCarthy, MP for Bristol East, has now stepped into this confusing orthographic and municipal muddle via the following tweet dated August 21st.

    Before boundary changes preceding the 2010 election, Redcliff(e) was part of Kerry’s Bristol East constituency.

    It has to be conceded that there is plenty of merit in Kerry’s suggestion, although she maintains she was only ‘moaning in Twitter’.

    Bristol is nevertheless one of those places which changes at a glacial pace and place names in Bristol are frequently named after long-vanished owners/occupiers. For instance, most older inhabitants of the city still refer to the local authority’s headquarters as the Council House (pronounced Counts Louse locally. Ed.), even though one of the first acts of elected Mayor George Ferguson was to rename it with the American-sounding City Hall in a cosmetic exercise.

    Does Kerry’s campaign have any chance of success? Your views are welcome in the comments below.

  • Lombardy to move to open source

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

    flag of LombardyFree software for public sector organisations will become a reality, at least in the Lombardy region, according to Italy’s Today news site. An agenda item submitted by the Five Star Movement, which makes provision for promoting the use of free computer systems in the public sector, has been approved by the regional council.

    “In Europe and in forward-looking Italian organisations, open source has been adopted comprehensively and is useful in saving public funds; in fact it also ensures financial savings due to the possibility of public sector organisations re-using software,” explains the Five Star Movement’s Eugenio Casalino, who presented the agenda item in the regional council.

    In 2012 the Italian government did away with a grant of €40 mn. to provide Italian public sector organisations with Microsoft software.

    Hat tip: Paolo Vecchi.

  • An interpreter with your dim sum, learned counsel?

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    The Law Society Gazette reports today on Capita’s failures to provide interpreters for Cardiff Crown Court.

    image of Cardiff Crown Court
    Cardiff Crown Court. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
    Liu Sun was taken to Cardiff Crown Court on 16th July after being arrested on a warrant in relation to offences of importing prohibited goods. She denies the charges.

    His Honour Judge Burr adjourned the case until the following day (17th July) as no Mandarin interpreter had been provided by Capita.

    When the case returned to court on 17 July there was still no interpreter, following which the judge – possibly in desperation – asked a defence barrister to trawl Cardiff’s Chinese restaurants to find an interpreter.

    However, after 2 consecutive days of failures, Capita did manage to provide an interpreter when the defendant was brought to court for the third time.

    The same report states that a similar problem had occurred at the same court on 15th July when the case of another Chinese defendant, Liu Guiying, had to be adjourned.

    Capita naturally denies there have been any failures in Cardiff. A Capita spokeswoman is reported to have stated the company “does not have a record of unfulfilled bookings for Cardiff Crown Court that match the name and dates provided,” adding that for the second case – that of Liu Guiying – Capita assigned an interpreter but that the court had made the booking for the wrong time (Capita blaming courts for its own failures is a ruse that’s been used before. Ed.). The spokeswoman also remarked that the interpreter could not make the revised time, as well as stating that Capita “continued to try and source an alternative interpreter up until the day of the booking and kept the court fully informed throughout”.

    Update 30/07/2014: This story was reported on the Daily Mirror’s website yesterday. In the Mirror’s piece, Shadow Justice Minister Andy Slaughter MP is quoted as saying; “This is the latest example of how the criminal justice system under David Cameron has descended into a complete farce.“

  • Street furniture

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Politics

    According to Wikipedia, street furniture is a collective term for objects and pieces of equipment installed on streets and roads for various purposes. It includes benches, traffic barriers, bollards, post boxes, phone boxes, streetlamps, traffic lights, traffic signs, bus stops, tram stops, taxi stands, public lavatories, fountains, watering troughs, memorials, public sculptures, and waste receptacles.

    image of fly-tipped chairs

    The communal refuse bin in the picture above is street furniture, the office chairs lazily left beside it are not; they are fly-tipping.

    Tackling fly-tipping, litter and waste in some parts of Bristol can seem at times like nailing fog to the wall and the fly-tipping shown above has been notified to Bristol City Council via Twitter and complete with the #tidybs5 hashtag (posts passim).

    Besides Twitter, fly-tipping can be reported to the city council by:

    • using the dedicated fly-tipping report form (also has a mobile version that works on smartphones);
    • a third party smartphone app, such as My Council (which is available for both Android and iOS; and
    • telephoning 0117 922 2100.

    The most direct reporting route is using the fly-tipping form as the report is sent directly to the department concerned, whereas the other methods require the report to be forwarded.

  • Document Foundation congratulates UK government

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    ODF file iconThe Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite, is congratulating the UK government for choosing Open Document Format (ODF), in addition to Portable Document Format (PDF) to meet user needs (posts passim).

    “TDF has always been a strong supporter of ODF and a believer in open document standards”, says Thorsten Behrens, TDF Chairman. July 22 will be a date to remember as the culmination of a dream inaugurated when ODF become a ISO standard on November 30 2006. By standardising on ODF and PDF, the UK government is showing the world that it is entirely possible to find a way out of proprietary formats to enhance user freedom”.

    LibreOffice supports both ODF – the suite’s native document format – and PDF (including PDF/A). Furthermore, LibreOffice can handle Hybrid PDF files, which combine the advantages of PDF and ODF by embedding a fully editable ODF document into a PDF without breaking any of the standard characteristics of both formats.

  • UK government opts for open standards

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    ODF file iconGreat news for all lovers of open standards! It’s goodbye to the ubiquitous use of MS Office formats in Whitehall; and what’s more, the government has decided not to sanction the use of Microsoft’s OOXML ‘standard’ despite lobbying by the US software giant and its supporters.

    The open standards selected for sharing and viewing government documents have been announced today by the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude.

    The standards set out the document file formats that are expected to be used by all government bodies. Central government will begin using open formats to ensure that the general public and civil servants can use the applications that best meet their needs when viewing or collaborating on documents.

    The selected standards, which are compatible with commonly used document applications, are:

    When government departments have adopted these open standards:

    • the general public, businesses and voluntary organisations will no longer need specialist software to open or work with government documents;
    • civil servants will be able to share and work with documents in the same format, reducing problems when shifting between formats;
    • government organisations will be able to choose the most suitable and cost-effective applications, knowing their documents will work for people both within and outside government (does this mean Whitehall will be moving towards using LibreOffice or OpenOffice, both of which are free of charge? Ed.).

    The adoption of open standards comes in the wake of a consultation on open standards (news passim) which attracted over 500 contributions, as well as by talking directly to users.

    The new standards will come into effect straight away for all new procurements subject to the HMG’s Open Standards Principles. The Government Digital Service will work with Whitehall departments to publish guidance and implementation plans.

  • Snowden addresses Hope X

    Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech
    image of Edward Snowden
    Edward Snowden. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who revealed the extent of internet and telecommunications surveillance by the USA’s National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ to the world, made a surprise appearance at the Hope X conference in New York over the weekend.

    In his address, Snowden called upon geeks of the world to develop anti-surveillance technology to prevent governments spying on their citizens, stating: “You, in this room right now, have both the means and the capabilities to help build a better future by encoding our rights into the programs and protocols on which we rely on every day.”

    Snowden also stated that the technology developed needed to be easy to use. “We need non-attributable communications for unattributed internet access that is easy, transparent and reliable,” he said and added that GPG, while effective, was “damn-near unusable” for the average user.

  • DRIP: a drippy response from my MP

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Tech

    image of Stephen Williams MP
    DRIP, DRIP, the erosion of civil liberties – voted for by Stephen Williams MP
    Earlier today I received a response to my email of earlier this week to Bristol West MP Stephen Williams (posts passim) on the repressive Data Retention and Investigatory Powers (DRIP) Bill, which was rushed through both Houses of Parliament in 3 days and received royal assent yesterday.

    Stephen Williams’ response is reproduced in full below.

    The only comments I will make on his email is that like the Home Office propaganda it persistently parrots, it is wholly unsatisfactory and inadequate as a response. It’s full of scarcely credible weasel words, as well as being well stuffed with Liberal Democrat self-promotion, which is never a pretty sight. Finally, I was flabbergasted by Williams’ definition of ’emergency legislation’.

    Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill

    Thank you for getting in touch with me to share your concerns about the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers (DRIP) Bill. Over the course of this email I would like to outline why I voted in favour of the legislation, along with the vast majority of MPs from all three main parties.

    First and foremost, this legislation is about retaining existing powers, not creating new ones. It also contains a significant number of new safeguards, thanks largely to Liberal Democrat pressure and involvement from my colleagues Simon Hughes, the Justice Minister, and Julian Huppert, the Lib Dem Home Office spokesman in the Commons and a former board member of Liberty.

    It is clear that a balance must be struck between protecting civil liberties on the one hand and ensuring the safety of society on the other. Ultimately, I believe that our security forces must have certain powers at their disposal to counter domestic and international threats. However, there must be limits to such powers and the key factors here are regulation and transparency. That is why I am pleased that there are a number of checks and balances included in the DRIP Bill that will ensure tighter control over data retention and increased transparency.

    One of the main reasons why the European Court of Justice (ECJ) struck down the Data Retention Directive was because it contained no adequate safeguards. When we implemented the Directive, we embedded it in to a set of pre-existing laws, which already included a range of safeguards, and ensured that access to stored data had to be necessary, proportionate and for defined purposes. This framework complied with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and we had already applied many of the safeguards that the ECJ was calling for.

    The government’s proposals introduce further safeguards on top of this, the most significant of which is that the legislation is time-limited. It is to expire at the end of 2016 and at this point would need further approval by Parliament to continue.

    Liberal Democrats in government have also secured a further package of checks and balances, including the establishment of a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, further reform of the Intelligence and Security Committee, compulsory annual transparency reports and the restriction of the number of public bodies (such as councils) that are able to approach phone and internet companies for communications data. In addition, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation is to carry out a review of our communications data and interception laws as part of the proposals. I believe that these are all important reforms in order to ensure that the government, or indeed any other body, cannot and does not disproportionately infringe on people’s privacy.

    In response to the ECJ ruling, we included a range of measures in the technical regulations that accompany the Bill. These include oversight of data storage by the Information Commissioner, and a more flexible system that will allow for shorter retention periods than 12 months where appropriate. We are confident that these changes will mean that our data retention laws will be compliant with the court ruling and with the European Convention on Human Rights.

    The Liberal Democrats and I care passionately about civil liberties, privacy and the need to limit abusive state surveillance. Since entering government we have resisted, and will continue to resist, anything that might give rise to a “Snooper’s Charter”. While we accept that there is a need for the police and intelligence agencies to have the tools to do their job, we must of course ensure that these tools are very carefully controlled, appropriately used and proportionate to the threat faced. It is a balance.

    Many people have questioned the need for such reforms so promptly. It is true that the UK is not in a state of national emergency but that is not what this legislation is about. Emergency legislation means that the Bill is being brought through on an accelerated timetable, in this case because if we did not act now, internet and phone companies would imminently start deleting data and refusing to service interception warrants. This in effect would harm the ability of our security services to bring criminals to justice and keep us safe.

    I am proud of the Liberal Democrats record in government and, unlike previous administrations, we have done much to support and defend civil liberties. We have scrapped ID cards, ended 28-day detention without charge, curtailed stop and search powers, ended routine child detention for immigration purposes, reformed the libel laws to protect free speech, and much more. If it was down to us we would have made even more progress but these measures, and in this case the several safeguards included in the DRIP Bill, would simply not have happened without us in government.

    I hope that you have found this response useful. Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of further assistance on this matter, or any other.

    Yours sincerely,

    Stephen

    Stephen Williams | MP for Bristol West

  • Debate: should Britain go to war with Germany?

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    On 4th August 1914 Britain declared war on Germany. On August 2nd, Bristol Dockers’ Union held a mass meeting on the dockside to debate whether Britain should go to war. The meeting voted unanimously against war. This was one of many anti-war meetings and demonstrations held across the country.

    The Western Daily Press of 3rd August 1914 carried a report of the original debate, which is shown in the image below.

    WDP report of 3rd August 1914

    The planned commemorations of the outbreak of war will ignore the voices of the many people who spoke out against war a hundred years ago. Rather than people being united in wanting to attack Germany, a debate raged as to whether or not Britain should go to war.

    Remembering The Real World War 1 will be re-staging the Bristol dockers’ debate at 2.00 pm on Saturday 26th July near the Arnolfini on Narrow Quay (map) in Bristol.

    front of flyer

    Everyone is welcome to come along and join in the debate; I shall be participating as an anti-war nautical type! Period costume will be more than welcome, as will flags, banners & placards.

    For more information visit the Remembering the Real WW1 website.

  • #tidyBS5 in the Bristol Post

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    This blog has previously highlighted the problem of fly-tipping in the Easton and Lawrence Hill areas of Bristol (posts passim).

    The move to get more people involved in reporting and combating this menace that blights the inner city took another step forward two days ago when it was featured in the Bristol Post, as shown by the following screenshot.

    Bristol Post article image

    I was contacted by the Post’s Sophie Prideaux and we exchanged emails that went on to form the basis of the article and, as I’m feeling charitable, I’ll even forgive her for changing my surname from plural to singular halfway through the piece. 🙂

    Sophie also contacted my local councillor, Marg Hickman, who’s been a great support from the outset.

    Another purpose of the article was to publicise the #tidyBS5 hashtag, which is being used to highlight the scourge of fly-tipping in the BS5 postal area on social media, such as Twitter.

    As regards Marg’s involvement, the Post states:

    Mrs Hickman, a Labour councillor for Lawrence Hill ward, is urging residents to get behind #tidyBS5, saying it’s an “important initiative to improve the quality of life of residents living in BS5”.

    Read the Post’s report.

Posts navigation