Redwood and his fellow extremists have been making headlines this week, trying to push the Conservative Party back to the right-of-centre position that will guarantee more electoral disappointments. The leader may say one thing, but these guys aren't about to go green when you vote blue any time soon!

The big news today is the taxation plan, including the abolition of the progressive Inheritance Tax. It's a philosophically difficult question - the (in)justice of starting life with a massive, unearned advantage versus the (in)justice of not being able to pass on all of your financial assets to your children. But despite the Daily Mail rhetoric, which would lead you to think that every hard working Brit was handing over their life's work to the evil state, it doesn't affect that many people. By 2010 the threshold will rise to £350,000 and so only hit the wealthiest 6% of estates! But of course they are also after a whole raft of tax cuts, disengenously suggesting that UK businesses suffer from terribly high taxation rates. Nonsense, the UK is certainly not amongst the highest. Even the most extreme neo-liberals rank the UK highly in terms of "economic freedom" (ugh) and state that we have a "moderate corporate tax rate". If you really want to reform the tax system, work on closing the loopholes that ensure the super-rich pay almost nothing, which costs the Treasury far more (between £97bn and £150bn) each year than benefit fraud (less than £1bn).

George Monbiot wrote a great piece on taxation a couple of years ago. The countries in Europe with the highest quality of life, the most equitable distribution of income and good levels of economic competitiveness tend to be those that tax more highly. In the UK our public services lurch from one financial crisis to another; our government tries to cover up attemps to reduce targets on renewable energy generation because they are failing to support the industry with the most simple measure like better feed-in tariffs and more direct funding for technology trials. Higher taxation isn't a magic bullet, but experience from Scandinavia in particular shows that if you invest money and develop a more socialised culture then you will get better results.

Not content with regressive tax cuts, they also want to roll back ten years of moderately progressive legislation on human rights, labour rights and the environment. Redwood wants to double the road building and airport expansion programme even though transport is still causing a rise in the UK's carbon emissions. He's hardly very sensible on the subject (for example "global warming is good" and an approving note on the thoroughly discredited global warming swindle documentary).

I suppose on the bright side it reminds us all why the Tories have been unable to overturn Labour's huge Parliamentary majority. Now if only Labour would act like a Labour government and start seriously tackling some of the social and environmental injustices its leading figures claim to care so much about!

IPCentral's weblog comes second only to my Fox News op-ed feed for the "irritatingly bad journalism" award. I try to read things I know I'll disagree with, not least because really bad articles make me reflect on whether I overlook similar problems amongst writers I happen to agree with. But then I read nonsense like the free software market is a forking mess, or walking to local shops damages planet more than driving by car and really despair.

I suppose the second article is a sign of progress, the Green movement is high profile enough to attract continuous cheap shots from morons who get into papers like The Times (London).

The walking/driving claim is part of a trend given unwelcome oxygen by the Freakonomics book. I quite enjoyed the book, it's useful to apply broad statistical analysis to trends and cast doubt over intuitive truths. But then there's just bad analysis and interpretation.

Does it make more sense to drive to local shops? Sure, if you eat intensively farmed and processed beef to give you the calories for a walk to the shop, and if in the driving scenario you don't do any exercise and so suffer all sorts of health problems. A better conclusion from the comparison is that our food chain has become far too energy intensive, and that we need to analyse the environmental and social impacts of all our activities holistically. A vegan walking to buy local, seasonal organic vegetables would score far better than the meat-eating car driver who goes to the local gym. Forget catchy headlines and the latest big tip in the media. You're better off considering your own ecological footprint and finding your own way to reduce it to a sustainable level, then taking political action where the shared infrastructure push yours up or obstruct effective personal action.

Back to IPCentral, is the free software world turning into a forking mess, nightmare for businesses and home users? Well first of all it isn't, no, the "upwards of 300 Linux distributions" are about as useful an indication as listing the number of pubs in London and concluding that there are too many for residents of one particular urban village. Relevant questions would be: how many high profile distributions are there for business desktops, how much do they cost, are they supported and are they compatible? That leads you to some interesting discussion about the state of free software, rather than a silly wager about the supremacy of "profit motive [versus] religious fanaticism".

Reading the news can be a bit like arguing with a bright 18 year-old. You're confronted by a smart arse who doesn't actually know what they're talking about, but who enjoys provocative remarks that hang on the slightest thread of logic.

Linux.com have run a nice story about the Green Party of England & Wales and our position on free software.

For average hackers in their cubicles, the relation between environmental and free software issues may seem remote but the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) is working to connect the dots. Since adopting a motion in favor of free and open source software (FOSS) in 2005, party members have not only spoken frequently in favor of FOSS, but also on related issues, such as software patents and lockdown technologies in Vista.

The reasoning behind these efforts might surprise, as much as gratify, the average hacker. For now, they also leave the GPEW scrambling to live up to its own ideas.

I'm planning to get to the party conference this September and see how enthusiastic the party faithful are about free software, and copyright/patent issues more generally. If all goes well I'm going to push for better policies, more migration action in the offices and a wider understanding in local parties.

I spend a lot of time at work talking about ecological footprinting, a tool which tells us that Europeans need to reduce our resource consumption by two thirds to avoid ecological collapse.

The great thing about the tool is that it makes complicated issues simple to understand, and by illustrating the areas of our lifestyle that have the largest impact it's also really empowering. Knowing that well over half my ecological footprint is due to choices I make about my food, goods and transport needs means I can make a big difference without needing to persuade my landlord to properly insulate the house. It also provides a scientific basis for telling nations and companies that putting up a few wind turbines and switching to bio-diesel really isn't sustainable. But the drawback comes from this simplicity - isn't it just oversimplifying issues? It's always a worry I have with any political issue, because a bad argument can have really adverse affects, as with the food miles debate.

Last Monday I took part in a detailed two-day workshop on ecological footprinting, which was great because we really got into the science of the tool and its limitations. I feel much happier using the tool now, -- along with other ways of assessing environmental and social impact -- and so wrote up my notes for anyone else who's interested in the topic. I hope they make sense, let me know if they don't!

We put out a press release today laying into Microsoft Vista (digg it!). Quoth the release:

Microsoft's latest operating system, due for release tomorrow, is defective by design, putting Microsoft and the corporate media in control of your computer. Beneath the gloss they have hidden traps that take away important consumer rights, force expensive and environmentally damaging hardware upgrades.

...

Derek Wall, Green Party Male Principal Speaker, said: "So-called 'digital rights management' technology in Vista gives Microsoft the ability to lock you out of your computer. Technology should increase our opportunities to consume media, create our own and share it with others.

"But Vista helps the corporate media take away our consumer rights. Silence in government betrays a shocking complacency in the face of this latest attack on our rights."

...

Consumers, businesses and government bodies should protect their interests by migrating to free software, rather than upgrading to Vista, says Wall."

Coverage on the day before the Vista release is already filtering in. There's a nice article on BBC News that includes Derek's quotes at the bottom. Slowly the idea that upgrades aren't necessarily good, that DRM and new hardware requirements aren't part of a sustainable society, and that the Green Party have a strong position on this issues filters through :)

I've been appointed as the Green Party England & Wales Speaker on Intellectual Property and Free Software (huzzah!)

This means I'll be their spokesperson on the issue -- responding to news stories, writing letters and articles, possibly taking interviews, and generally raising the profile of the party and principal speakers on this important issue.

The good news is that it should be easy to impress, since the party has a good track record on the issues. The Greens led the fight against software patents in Europe by co-organising conferences on our behalf, getting us into the Parliament and giving us a base to work from. As part of the Green-EFA Alliance they're still talking in the EU about the knowledge commons and the problems with TRIPS & the super-pro-IP position adopted by most other mainstream parties.

Back in 2003 Tony Cooper wrote this interesting article about the party's view on IT, which filtered through into policies passed in 2005 committing the party to promoting free software, opposing software patents and seeking an intellectual property regime that preserves the incentive to create whilst maximising public access to information.

So it will be really interesting pushing these issues in the media, and raising awareness of the Green Party's position amongst free software / free culture advocates.

The bad news is that it means I'll have to re-evaluate other work I'm doing, especially since my really cool job is taking up a lot of my time and energy. I'm tempted to drop everything except this new position, my job and the Free Culture Foundation, perhaps helping KDE a little around the big KDE 4.0 release.

I get to meet the party press officers next Tuesday, and the principal speakers in due course, which will be really interesting. Tuesday will be fun, I'm also meeting the chief prosecutor from First Capital (Dis)Connect to discuss my little episode! Right, time to wash up and take a trip to the farm shop...

It looks like I'll be in Dublin from Monday to Wednesday - huzzah! I'll have to remember Sebas' stilton, especially after I criticise his recent blog entry on carbon offsets.

Basically they're a con, especially tree planting schemes :(

There's a very good article in the New Internationalist summarising a lot of the issues. But basically, the calculations are very dodgy, and the effect is to legitimise unnecessary air travel rather than to reduce it, which is what we desperately need to do. There is nothing approaching a scientific consensus on the role of forests in the climate systems, and many tree planting schemes are believed to actually contribute to climate change! SinksWatch monitor this stuff, for those interest in digging deeper.

Anyway, the best thing is not to fly if possible. Your annual sustainable carbon budget is completely blown just by one flight from, say, the UK to Turkey. No electricity heating, day to day travel, food or shopping for you then! If you feel you must fly then try to offset it by investing in a local renewable energy project, or something else that will unambiguously reduce carbon dioxide emissions, or get involved in green activism and help avert a crisis that will dwarf our silly little worries about software :)

My previous entry drew some interesting comments. I wrote about the motion before the Green Party to boycott Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft (which I stress is not policy until it passes, which it may not).

Since then Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has refused to censor Wikipedia, and has called on Google & Yahoo! to justify their supposed constructive engagement. He's even meeting with Chinese officials to press them on the matter. That's good to see.

The attitude of the free software community towards Google is really interesting. On the one hand they produce a little free software (though understandably none of the juicy stuff) and provide some interesting APIs. They run the Summer of Code program that provides funding for lots of student hackers, and they're a sponsor of this year's KDE conference - Akademy. They refused to hand over search records to the Bush administration (though frankly to do otherwise would have been an astonishingly weak and damaging move). Their motto is even that "you can make money without doing evil". So they're good guys, right?

Well there's no need to see the world in such black and white terms. A company can be mostly good but do some terrible things, just as Google are now helping China to censor the internet, and as Yahoo! have assisted the Chinese authorities in arresting journalists. As the GNU Project point out, Microsoft aren't the Great Satan, they do a lot of interesting and valuable work, but they still produce proprietary software, lobby for software patents, extend DRM into our homes, etc. Should we keep quiet about these companies just because they're mostly good? Of course not! Right now are Google "making money without doing evil"? Hardly.

For the KDE Project (for example) to choose to remove Google search functionality from all of its homepages would obviously require a decision by the membership, and would need to take into account the damage it could do to the project in terms of events sponsorship and Summer of Code applications. If an alternative existed, and if it didn't cripple KDE's ability to hold conferences, (two big "if"s) then I'd be in favour of moving away from Google.

The Green Party has no financial worries, and so needs only to find a decent alternative. Why bother? Because if lots of people make a public stand against these immoral practices, bolstered by Amnesty International's Irrepresible.info campaign, then Google comes under a lot of pressure to stop behaving badly. Maybe they'll then push the Chinese government harder, or maybe they'll join Wikipedia and countless others in refusing to bend to the will of an unelected censor.

As for the Green Party fiddling while Rome burns, the party puts most of its energy into the big issues such as climate change, rest assured! When free software projects stop flying hundreds of people all over the globe all year round, then we can start talking about who has the right priorities ;) For the record, I'm going to Akademy this year by bus and ferry.

Something for those who have followed the misdeeds of "don't be evil but help a Goolag" Google, ye olde search merchants Yahoo! and every geek's favourite bogeyman Microsoft. The upcoming conference for the Green Party in England and Wales will consider a motion for the party to boycott these three companies.

Citing the cases linked to above, the motion (p.36 of the agenda) calls for the party to stop using Yahoo! Groups, to remove the Google search facility from all national and local web sites, and to continue a policy of moving away from Microsoft's software towards free software. It will be interesting to see if it passes, and what the final version looks like!

For those unfamiliar with the Green Party's position on these matters, it's worth remembering that the Greens provided a huge amount of support in the fight against software patents in Europe. Across the world various national parties and youth wings run campaigns or have policies dealing with free software, DRM and other "geeky" issues. It makes me proud to be a party member, and it's good to see relatively mainstream parties recognising the importance of these issues! I wonder which other parties are addressing them in a similarly high profile manner?

In a slightly silly New Statesman article, Edward Skidelsky writes: "Environmentalism is, in truth, a conservative ideology. The passion that animates it is one of return, not progress. Its current association with the political left is mere window dressing". Is the trendy neologism - that the Greens are the new home of true-blue conservatives - correct? Not at all, to think so is to completely misunderstand Green political philosophy.