Demos’s Open Left project is unveiled today, first with a series of essays on the Demos blog by the likes of Billy Bragg, Alan Simpson, Polly Toynbee, Phillip Collins and Jon Cruddas [1], and second with an event tonight at the Commonwealth Club. The essays were written in response to a series of questions, including “What is it about your political beliefs that put you on the Left rather than the Right?”, “How would you describe the sort of society you want Britain to be?” and “What one or two changes would make the biggest difference to bringing that about?” It’s headed up by James Purnell (whose own answers to the questions are here), who characterizes it as a three year project “to revive the ideas and direction of the Left at a time of economic and political upheaval”. More essays will be added throughout this week (I’ll link to mine when it goes up). Although one of the commenters correctly observes that the cast of characters is almost exclusively Labour, rather than more broadly left, it is nevertheless a reasonably eclectic group within Labour so far, and I think it’ll be interesting to see Purnell and Collins, for example, in dialogue with Simpson, Cruddas and Toynbee, and more interesting still if the project reaches beyond Labour ranks (I’m not Labour, but I don’t count). Thoughtful CT readers, commenters, and contributors might help further the discussion by going there and commenting.

[1] His wikipedia page suggests that Cruddas visited my department for a while in the 1980’s, in which case he is probably the second most eminent former visitor we’ve had — according to department legend, this guy once shared an office for a whole semester with my retired but excellent colleague Dennis Stampe.

I was talking to a friend in the trade policy world this weekend, who told me that he understands that Canada will indeed be taking a “WTO action”:http://www.cbc.ca/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/2009/05/05/eu-seal-ban-505.html seeking remedy for the EU’s ban on the importation of seal products, imposed because of the perceived cruelty of clubbing baby seals to death so as to get their skins off intact. Apart from the innate merits of the underlying argument (which you can discuss in comments to your heart’s content), this should (unless Stephen Harper loses his job in the meantime and the new government loses interest) really, really have some interesting effects on debates over world trade and globalization. Screw the turtles – when anti-WTO protest groups are able to run full page newspaper ads with adorable baby seal cubs, they’re going to be in a truly excellent position to wage public relations war. All the more so when the Canadian counterposition (that the seals are killed humanely) turns on the legal requirement that the baby seals should have stopped blinking before the hunters start skinning them. Perhaps Stephen Harper should have applied similar attention to the current state of the Doha round – I don’t see it moving around very much at the moment, but it does still blink occasionally. I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be the _coup de grace_ for trade liberalization this decade and the next (which does not, of course, mean that it would be the most important explanatory factor if trade liberalization grinds to a halt, merely one of the significant immediate causes).

This excellent piece by Jonathan Zittrain explains very nicely the potential downsides of how cloud computing is developing these days. (“Cloud” here refers to having all our data reside out there on others’ machines instead of on our own devices.)

A few quotes, but as we like to say, read the whole thing.

The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. Microsoft might want you to run Word and Internet Explorer, but those had better be good products or you’ll switch with a few mouse clicks to OpenOffice or Firefox.

[..]

The iPhone’s outside apps act much more as if they’re in the cloud than on your phone: Apple can decide who gets to write code for your phone and which of those offerings will be allowed to run. The company has used this power in ways that Bill Gates never dreamed of when he was the king of Windows: Apple is reported to have censored e-book apps that contain controversial content, eliminated games with political overtones, and blocked uses for the phone that compete with the company’s products.

[..]

When we vest our activities and identities in one place in the cloud, it takes a lot of dissatisfaction for us to move. And many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.

On a related note, this post seems like an appropriate occasion to link to this great cartoon, which the artist created over 10 months ago.

England “win the second test”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/england/8159247.stm (the first time they’ve beaten the Australians at Lords since 1934), thanks to some awesome bowling from Flintoff, and some very dodgy umpiring. Open thread below.