Work Your Proper Hours Day

Today is Work Your Proper Hours Day. In the UK we work longer hours than in the rest of Europe, yet productivity doesn't always follow. In lots of companies (and this is certainly true in my field of IT) there is a certain amount of pressure to work beyond contracted hours despite not being paid for doing so. Sometimes there is pressure from 'on high', but oddly it seems that in most cases the pressure comes from the fact that other people do it. This results in a sort of peer pressure in that people don't want to be seen as slackers, so they stay late too. The company gets used to this and reduces estimates for work based on this free overtime, thus making it impossible to reach targets unless everyone works late.

I don't think that it is reasonable to refuse to work long hours in a professional workplace, but these long hours should be the exception. Employers need reminding of this occassionally, so events like this Work Your Proper Hours Day are important. Make sure you take part! Note that there's also an 'anonymous email' generator on the site where you can send an email to your boss telling him about the day (it doesn't reveal your name!). Make sure you use it!

Freedoms, and lack of them

It has been an interesting few days. Yesterday we learned that parliament has voted in favour of ID cards, despite it being one of the more obviously stupid ideas that the government has ever come up with. ID cards now look increasingly likely unless people actually do something about it.

Elections are the way we get rid of politicians with fascist aspirations of course, but what can we do at a more immediate level? Well I for one am a member of No2ID, and along with many thousands of other people I will refuse to carry an ID card whatever the law says. No2ID have started a fund to pay the legal costs for defending anyone who does this, but hopefully it won't come to that. The point is that if enough people refuse to carry the card the whole thing will become unworkable and the government will have to drop the plans. I won't say any more about it - check out the No2ID site to see for yourself.

In other news, smoking will be banned in enclosed public places from next summer. Smokers have tried to use 'civil liberties' and 'freedom' against this decision, but that is nonsense. I'm afraid that freedom of speech and movement are freedoms, not the ability to go and give other people lung cancer. Smokers are addicts who are too weak to give up and I don't have any sympathy for them - go and pollute your own homes. Hopefully I'll be able to go for a night out without choking on smoke and coming home stinking. All good things. If you want the 'freedom' to smoke near me, then I want to freedom to carry a canister of chlorine gas with me and empty it into every pub I go to. As I enjoy breathing poisonous fumes then it's my 'right' to inflict that on everyone else, according to smokers logic.

Freedom and civil liberties aren't words and phrases to band around willy-nilly. Smoking in public isn't a 'freedom' to defend - smoking itself is a relic of an age where science didn't know that it caused so many illnesses, and the sooner it stops completely the better. There are some real, important and critical freedoms which we're in the process of losing, and we must fight for these. If necessary we must break these laws if they are passed. It's the least we can do to defend freedoms that our ancestors died for.

Current thoughts on the leadership contest

On Friday I went to a meeting with Menzies Campbell to hear what he had to say. He spoke for a bit about his objectives as leader and about the current situation with Hughes and Oaten, then answered some questions. I've not met him before or seen him speak in person and he seems like a nice guy, and he said all the right things about the leadership. However, I don't think any questions came up that I feel I would disagree with him on (there was limited time before he had to dash off to another event).

I think he'd do a good job and is clearly an intelligent and knowledgeable man, but is he what the party needs? Floating voters might be (wrongly) put-off by his age, and we have to take that into account. I also don't know as much as I'd like to about his attitudes to things like privatisation of the Post Office, and from what I've heard he's a bit too keen in private sector involvement in healthcare. Don (our MP) likes him and is backing him as are the majority of the MPs, and in a sense they should 'know best' seeing as they work with all of the candidates. My own straw poll of activists also revealed people being pretty split between the candidates, so there is no obvious front-runner at a local level.

I think I'm still going to vote for Simon Hughes. I would have liked to see the hustings in Plymouth the other day, but the media coverage was appalling - funny how someone being gay receives so much more press than why you should vote for them. Still, if you're liberally inclined (even with a small 'l') the media generally doesn't want to know. Thank God for The Independent!

China

It's interesting how we can overlook this sort of thing if it means we can get cheap T-shirts and consumer electronics. The sad thing is that it's not as if people don't know about the Chinese authorities stamping on democratic movements. If they sell us cheap stuff then hey, they can have our money (even if it's for the skin of executed prisoners for injection into our lips).

What's the solution? I imagine that a total ban on imports would cripple businesses the depend on the near-slave labour available in China, so how about setting a level of duty that rises every month until China does something about its human rights abuses? I'm suggesting we enforce democracy, but we can make trade dependent on their government stopping events like the one in the linked story. If we continue to trade with them without some sort of real pressure then what sort of people does that make us?

Tories reject migrants? Surely not!

OK, so I don't think anyone would be surprised that the Tories don't like Foreigners much. However, they are the friends of industry, so which way do they go on the migrant workers/skills shortage debate? Well, it seems that their xenophobia wins the day when push comes to shove...

Blunkett

Today is one of those days where I feel like singing that song from The Wizard of Oz, "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead". The news that Blunkett has been forced to resign is fantastic isn't it? It also seems very just that the man who is actively campaigning against 'asylum seekers' and immigrants has come unstuck by helping someone through the immigration process. Hmm.. hey David, here's something for you to think about - if we are being 'flooded' with immigrants as you and the Daily Mail suggest, why did you feel the need to get someone in and accelerate the process of doing so? If we are 'flooded' with such people, all of whom are sponging off benefits, why didn't you just select one of those? Could it be because you are actually lying about the whole immigrant thing, or at least exaggerating? Heaven forbid. Anyway, it's interesting that the only people who have anything nice to say about him are the police. I bet they found laws allowing them to lock people up without charge or trial quite useful.

Having said all that, the new Home Secretary Charles Clarke might not be much better. He's almost as authoritarian as Blunkett, although not quite (well, who is?). It doesn't look like he has any plans not to force in compulsory ID cards, but at least he distanced himself from Blunkett's most outrageously Orwellian comments about freedom being 'airy fairy' and so on. We can but hope for a better future.

Surprise surprise, today the Conservatives announced their support for compulsory ID cards. Well we all knew that Howard was a big fan all along of course, seeing as he tried to bring in ID cards himself. Of course back then the Labour party weren't verging on Fascism, so he was rightly challenged. These days the main parties are falling over themselves to see who can take away all of our rights and freedoms fastest of course, so it is natural for the 'opposition' to agree with the government on this. Again.

People need to think very hard, come the general election. Without thinking about it too much they will throw all of our hard-earned freedoms away by voting for one of the main parties, somehow thinking that they are making the sensible choice. I'm afraid that voting Labour or Conservative in the coming election will be a vote for the forces of fear, hatred, denial of rights, and the rise of the far right. The fact that people can't see this is beyond comprehension. Wake up people! Why can't you see what is happening?!

For people who are 'ok' with ID cards because they have 'done nothing wrong'... well, I'm afraid that they are stupid, selfish idiots. There's no other way to say it. It is your duty to protect those in society who are persecuted (as people are in these days without trials and juries). Not to do so is disgusting. We should all bear in mind this quite by the German anti-fascist Martin Niemoller:

"First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."

Conservative and Labour voters, this is the Britain you are building. Shame on you all.