The Faslane naval base on the Clyde is to become home to the UK’s entire nuclear-powered submarine fleet, the BBC understands.

An announcement on the future of the UK’s naval submarines is expected to be made in the House of Commons later.
It is understood that Trafalgar class submarines, currently based in Plymouth, will join the existing Vanguard fleet based at Faslane.
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It’s a total gift to the SNP, who campaign against nuclear weapons being held in Scotland (and use planning powers to block the construction of new nuclear power stations).

This will come back to haunt Labour.

Overall, I view devolution as a success, and I think that the political process has both encouraged and reflected the diverging political environment between Scotland and the UK as a whole. For me, it has meant a more open, honest political process, some big public health wins (such as the public smoking ban), and most importantly, a greater sense of confidence in Scotland. It has also had its faltering, embarrassing moments, and periods of total farce.

I am curious about further powers, something that almost everyone agrees the Parliament needs.

A referendum on independence for Scotland is planned for next autumn. The Scottish National Party presented the referendum bill against unfavourable parliamentary arithmetic in March (and failed), but it’s likely to re-introduce it at some point. One would hope that the effect of the opposition to the bill would be to add additional options (a three-way poll, including a ‘devolution max’ option as well as independence and the status quo) rather than to prevent the whole enterprise altogether.

Consider this an open thread. What does devolution mean to you? Would independence give Scotland the clout it needs? Is ‘devolution max’ or some kind of more entrenched federalism the way to go?

“GCHQ is not developing technology to enable the monitoring of all internet use and phone calls in Britain, or to target everyone in the UK,” the statement said. “Similarly, GCHQ has no ambitions, expectations or plans for a database or databases to store centrally all communications data in Britain.”

Statement A, revised: The UK government are not planning to build a massive surveillance network to capture the traffic data of all internet users.

Just not all of them simultaneously.

Or so they tell us. I feel so reassured :S

UK laws protecting the privacy of people’s communications are inadequate, the European Commission has said. The Commission has launched a legal case against the UK over its implementation of European Union Directives.

The Commission’s investigation was sparked by outrage over trials by BT of a system which monitors web use and tries to match advertising to people’s perceived interests. The trials were done without BT customers’ knowledge or permission.

The Commission has investigated complaints made to it and to police and has found the UK’s laws inadequate in protecting the privacy of communications.

The UK.gov’s reaction to the Phorm fiasco, and its attitude to privacy in general, is best described by the following lolcat:

So I welcome this intervention, and hope that the UK gets slapped around the face and fined an enormous sum of money.

You can read the full article at out-law.com.

Goldacre’s chapter was missing from the original ‘Bad Science’ because of legal action taken against him (under insane UK libel laws) by Rath’s organisation. Goldacre was successful in court due to help from The Guardian to fund his legal defence.

What shocks me is the degree to which decision-makers in South Africa were, and are, taken in by Rath’s nonsense, and the total lack of critical appraisal of his ideas. South Africa was to some extent an innovator in increasing the availability of generic medications during the early part of this decade, something I researched pretty closely in university. It’s stunning to me, then, that the same government officials responsible for those policies were also completely blind to the clear scientific evidence around them that ARVs work and should be prescribed. It’s also amazing that they were unaware, or unwilling to accept, that Rath is a manipulative and sociopathic crackpot.

That is all.

2. Zero desire to give money to Bono.

You see my problem.

Some of them get cut off at the right-hand side by my site design – just click on each to go the original photo page. All copyright their respective authors.

Minesweeper

Terrorist parents

Paranoid?

Boobie-cam

He's dead.

Washing powder

Boy holding bomb

100%

Crusty tosser

You'll shit bricks.

Very clever, British Transport Police.

Not only does your newspaper advert induce total, irrational paranoia (”BABIES and OLD MEN WITH HATS will be EXPLODED into THOUSANDS of SHAMI CHAKRABARTI SHAPED PIECES if we don’t SPY ON EACH OTHER!”).

It also encourages people to be defensive about CCTV cameras. Because as we all know, CCTV is SO incredibly effective. In using electricity.

Come to think of it, what’s that woman in the brown woolen jumper doing? She’s only keeping up the pretence of chatting to the mother sat next to her. She’s actually STUDYING the CCTV camera. STUDYING it! STUDYING IT! Her hands are obscured because she has a NOTE PAD there. Here’s what it probably says (for the avoidance of doubt, she happens to be a Rastafarian jihadist):

10:53am, 26th February 2009. Crummytown high street. Lat: 50.130304004 N Long 4.3384943 E.

In the service of Ja, I have begun investigations of Crummytown High Street. My reconnaissance suggests that optimal hat-wearing-man destructive density may be achieved by placing the explosives next to the broken-down bubblegum machine outside Boots. They may be disguised as a discarded chip-wrapper, stack of Socialist Workers’ Party leaflets or given to a tramp as a sort of ironic present.

Our secondary objective – the slight de-alignment of the childrens’ merry-go-round – would be best achieved by placing an everlasting gobstopper below the rotating mechanism.

It is suggested that we leave the letter of responsibility attached high up a lamp-post, so as to avoid dogs peeing on it.

11:02am

I have just noticed that there is a CCTV camera on the street, which did not come up during my initial scans. Better cancel our plans for world domination. Les from the council, who watches the cameras,  will surely stop our attack.

I must go, the woman I’m ‘talking to’ is starting to think I’m not listening. Also, I just saw her dial.. Shit. ABORT!

Report your swarthy-looking neighbour today! Being a Good Citizen demands it!

(Note: Yes, I do know that some people genuinely do want to cause harm to others in nasty ways which we might describe as ‘terrorism’. It happened in my city already, and Scotland is very well used to dealing with extremists. But it’s also true that people are very bad at assessing risk, and since the risk of terrorism affecting any given person is extremely low, countless orders of magnitude lower than being hit by a car on the street or dying in an air crash, we probably shouldn’t get carried away, particularly when the advice given is completely pie in the sky and counterproductive. Adverts like this BTP one play on our fears to encourage an illiberal, fearful attitude that makes the abuse of state power, and the persecution of ‘others’, much more feasible, whether we start out with those intentions or not. It’s also a total distraction from the real questions we should be addressing as a society.)

–Update:

To give, um… ‘credit’ where it’s due, this campaign seems to have originated at the Metropolitan Police, though the true source is probably Jacqui Smith, working from her underground bunker beneath Harrods. The resemblance in tone to her latest hair-brained scheme is unmistakable.

Edinburgh tram mockup

So the long-awaited Edinburgh tram scheme hit major problems over the weekend, when contractor Bilfinger Berger refused to start work laying rails on Princes Street due to the client (TIE Ltd. a council-owned company) not having completed the required preparatory work on time.

There have been unsubstantiated rumours that Bilfinger Berger is looking to gain an extra £80m to offset losses it incurred in a road-building project in Norway. While negotiations continue, the scheduled closure of Princes Street went ahead, leaving a rather lonesome tram mockup (pictured) to imagine the rails its cousins might eventually run on there. 

No matter. In two years, the tram line will be complete. Further, there will be clamouring for more lines to be built as soon as possible. Ridership will be well above expectations, and the skeptics will be converted. It has happened with nearly every modern tram development in recent years, and Edinburgh is the perfect size and layout for a scheme of this sort.

I’d be willing to bet a substantial amount on my predictions.

Well, except for the ‘complete in two years’ part  :)

First you introduce a raft of illiberal, poorly conceived proposals and laws which turn your population into the most watched democratic society on earth.
THEN, one of your own comrades – His Highness David Blunkett MP, the Maharajah of Daily Mail headline driven reactionary policy-making, no less – comes out and suggests that this might be a bad idea!

Schengen also means that the states involved share a common set of visa rules to external applicants, and a common visa issued in one Schengen state is valid in any other.

Needless to say, it makes a lot of sense. It better reflects personal freedoms of movement granted by EU rights, and from a practical point of view, eliminates passport check queues from a great many flights. Recently, Switzerland joined, and although there are some special issues (e.g. the land border with Liechtenstein, and Switzerland’s non-membership of the EU customs zone), it works very well.

Which makes the UK and Ireland’s positions increasingly curious. They are the only EU member states that have permanent exemptions from the border removal measures. Could things be about to change?

“But Britain’s luck may be on the wane. The political and legal problems associated with its half-in, half-out status are growing. Although the country retains its own border controls, its police officers are allowed to follow criminal suspects into the Schengen area if they are on a surveillance mission. It has also been agreed that the UK’s national police computer can connect to the Schengen-area police database. But the Schengen countries object to either Britain or Ireland having access to valuable data on who is refused entry to the Schengen area, or to having a vote on the board of the EU’s border agency since they do not share the pain of maintaining a common EU border. When Britain tried to challenge this in 2008, the European court of justice (ECJ) ruled in favour of the Schengen countries.”

Nothing will likely change until the Labour Party administration in Westminster get off their security power-trip, but nonetheless, there are some interesting observations in this article.

Read more at the Centre for European Reform.

Buchanan Street station area in Cowcaddens, Glasgow

It’s taken around the Cowcaddens area. The area as it’s shown here is totally unrecognisable from its current state: apart from the Hamish Wood and George Moore buildings of what subsequently became Glasgow Caledonian University in the centre-left and the distant high flats, very little of what you see here still exists.

I can’t find a modern photo taken from the same angle, but this shot gives you some idea of how the area immediately between the GCU campus and the towerblock on the left now looks.

This and other gems of past and present documentary at the Urban Glasgow site.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

UBS fined US $780 million and forced to hand over information on potential tax evaders.

I’m watching SF1 news at the moment. The government are clearly more than a little worried about this, with talk of this deal being the only way to save US-Swiss bilateral relations. On the news, it’s being shoved under the general heading of ‘KRISE’ (crisis) along with the rest of the financial news, but this is clearly a mess of Switzerland’s own making, rather than being related to the global recession/credit crisis. And it’s also another powerful reminder, as if one was needed, that the country cannot simultaneously reap the rewards of deep integration into the world economy and maintain isolationist and self-serving national policies.

Vox-pops in tonight’s evening papers in Zürich show a pretty clear majority for retaining the strict bank secrecy laws which put UBS in such a Catch-22 position regarding exposing its wrongdoing in the first place.

I suppose that defending the system is be expected when change is forced in a nation quite as proud and independent as Switzerland. I wonder how long it’ll take before an indigenous political force tries to repeal the laws again.

Scotland on a knife-edge

“SUPPORT FOR independence has hardened in the face of the global recession, despite Labour predictions that the crisis would see more Scots turning to the Union for protection.

The latest TNS System Three survey for the Sunday Herald found support for leaving the union rose three points during the last quarter, while opposition to a separate Scottish state fell to its lowest level since the poll began 18 months ago.

The findings suggest the public has ignored Labour warnings that a breakaway Scotland would be doomed to join Iceland in the “arc of insolvency”.

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The poll was taken after opposition parties initially voted down the SNP government’s budget on February 28. Voters were reportedly unimpressed that MSPs could not agree a budget despite the country suffering the worst recession in decades.

The poll asked 971 adults how they would vote in a referendum on whether the Scottish government should open negotiations with Westminster on independence.

Support for commencing talks on separation was 38%, compared to 35% in October, while opposition was 40%, compared to 43%.”

More

What say you, learned readers?

His humour is hit and miss, sometimes bizarre.

Good luck to him, though. Any more info would be appreciated.

Preview of Ana Hušman's 'Lunch'

I wanted to shout out a fabulous piece of art that I saw last week at a Creative Commons event here in Zürich. I was manning a stall all night so didn’t have the chance to fully enjoy it at the time, but having seen it again thanks to Ramon Cahenzli, I’m very glad that I went to the event.

The director’s name is Ana Hušman, and the piece is a short video called ‘Lunch’. It’s half stop-motion, half full-motion, and all genius (fractions were never my strong point, but in this case I’m right).

It takes the form of a guide to dinner party etiquette, but it’s set in a quasi-1970s world of sideboards, sideburns and sideways glances. It really reminded me – and do bear in mind my Neanderthal-level knowledge of high culture – of the vibe of Wes Anderson movies like The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited, and other studies of social dysfunction. The dialogue sounds like it’s straight out of a stiff-upper-lip British public information film.

Besides the cool aesthetic, the work that must have gone into it is incredible. Be sure to watch until the end for some amazing stop-motion sequences involving crocheting-by-numbers and stripping back the furniture that was used during the dinner party.

The artist is Croatian, and I can’t find too much more information about her. There’s an interview in Croatian here, and another piece of work by her entitled The Market, which gives some impression of her style. But I’d really recommend that you download the torrent of Lunch. It’s licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Croatia, so it’s K for P to download and share.

Another preview:

Preview of Ana Hušman's 'Lunch'

OH WAIT, WE CAN’T REMOVE THEM.

But we can be Very Very Cross with them, which they will not like (see video).

Bring me the head of ‘unwritten constitutions’. They need a bloody good slap.

The Letter of Last Resort

“At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying powerful ICBMs (nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles). In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mail reports, “there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career … and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided.” “

There are a few surprising revelations in the article:

“Suffice it to say that there is a complicated series of checks that the submarine commander must perform to establish the true situation—one of which, curiously, is to determine whether Radio 4 is still broadcasting”

Nice. So at some point, some radio operator is supposed to turn on a radio and, for the first time in their lives, be pleased that ‘The Archers’ is on.

The rest of the article contains an examination of the psychology and morality of Mutually Assured Destruction, and how its remnants live on in this post-Cold War era.

Unlike most instant messaging protocols, XMPP is an open standard. Like e-mail, it is an open system where anyone who has a domain name and a suitable Internet connection can run his own Jabber server and talk to users on other servers. The standard server implementations and many clients are also free and open source software.

From the Wikipedia entry on XMPP

In practice, that means that I can have a Jabber account that’s identical to my email address, and by using server conduits, I talk to friends on AIM and MSN Messenger, without them even knowing that I’m not directly logged in to those services.

I now have four Jabber accounts:

• one self-hosted Jabber server, identical to my primary email address, and links to my MSN Messenger, AIM and Yahoo! accounts through server conduits
• A Gmail account, which also works as a Jabber account
• A work Jabber account
• A Nokia Ovi IM account, just as a trial

Is there any way to unify these?

Given that Jabber is built to mirror the way that email works, is there an equivalent of email forwarding? If this were email, I’d simply have them all forward to one account.

I must retain all my accounts, as I need to be accessible on all the addresses. But I’d like to only have to sign in to one, and have a single contact list containing all my contacts from each account.

Solutions, clever people?