I also suspect that the timing works against this bill. It takes brashness (and not much sense) to propose this bill at this time.
Yes, in the middle of a major international scandal, let's imitate the bad guys. That's a great idea....
Yes, in the middle of a major international scandal, let's imitate the bad guys. That's a great idea....
Lib Dems know they are going to get a hammering in 2015 and they need to start differentiating themselves from the Tories to have any hope at all, but it seems too soon for that at the moment. Thus-far they have proven incapable of taking a stand on anything of significance. Sadly polling probably indicates that this isn't something the public care enough about to make it worth them bringing down the government over, so I can easily see them rolling over in exchange for a few more years sucking on the teat of power. Or perhaps the most cowardly thing of all: making it a free-vote so that enough Lib Dem MPs will vote for it while Lib Dem HQ can claim to oppose it without any risk to the coalition.
It may be decided by UKIP and backbench Tories. If they are against it I can't see Cameron pushing it. Unfortunately a lot of the Tory backbench rebels are also staunch Atlanticists and heavily involved in the defence/security industry (think Liam Fox).
Whatever happens this will be on the books by ~2016 unless there is a significant public backlash.
Perhaps if you yourself are not in the UK then that's why you ask, as I guess foreigners would need to more specifically try harder to keep up to date with our politics than we do here (even with my loose following of current afairs, the papers I read are written with a UK focus, the topical news quizzes I watch on TV are UK focused, etc.)
Having said that, if people are interested in the day to day then the Guardian do a live politics blog most days which will have coverage of speeches, important votes and links to articles and comment pieces in the other papers.
Also if you are a UK citizen and care about politics I think it really is worth your time to actually sit and watch parliament at some point. Preferably try and work out when they will be talking about an issue you care about or have an interest in (I'd advise against Prime Ministers Questions, it's mostly a lot of pre-prepared soundbites and weak jokes with very little answering of questions). It will probably reveal quite a bit about the real positions of backbenchers, the main parties etc beyond what you see in the papers or the soundbites on the TV news. You may find it surprising who you are agreeing with or not. Also there is a lot of theatre and protocol to it which is kind of entertaining at times.
Also, I've found comedic sources can be great. My two are Have I Got News For You (Friday night comedy panel show based around current afairs - doesn't run all year round though) and Private Eye (satirical current afairs weekly magazine - coincidentally edited by one of the permanent team captains on HIGNFY, Ian Hislop). They can be great fun if you know what they are going to cover already, and they can be a great way for people who are less interested, or just less up-to-date, to get a snapshot of news without having to try too hard to get into it.
Objectively, they have achieved some huge wins from their own election pledges, which is no mean feat in a coalition. Probably their biggest success has been raising the tax thresholds in a way that benefits many of the less well-off but working people in the country. And for all the current mess about mass surveillance, you have to remember that compulsory ID cards for everyone were being pushed strongly by the previous administration and have been scrapped since.
The trouble is, the Lib Dems have terrible PR people who haven't played up their strengths to any significant extent at all, so they've just got lost in all the negative stories. They totally mishandled the tuition fees issue (at least, those of their MPs who didn't rebel did) and that cost them dearly, because they lost the credibility they so desperately needed to get things done in government and they've been playing defence ever since. Add in a couple of scandals costing Cabinet-level people their jobs, throw in this Lord Carlile guy that no-one had ever heard of until he became the Lib Dems' chief apologist for anything not really very liberal at all and Vince Cable as possibly the most overtly business-hostile Business Secretary in recorded history, and their top brass is looking more like a bunch of school kids playing at government than senior members of an actual national government. This in turn just plays into probably the Lib Dems' biggest PR problem coming into government, which was convincing people that all those nice-sounding policies they were free to advocate when they had no chance of winning the election could actually work for real.
As a point of interest, we were within a few metaphorical steps of "Papers please" on ID cards and it really was popular revolt that forced the political class to roll it back, so I'm not ruling out that significant public backlash you mentioned against the on-line surveillance. Almost everyone uses Facebook and Google, but a lot of people don't really like them very much, particularly the constant invasions of privacy, and I suspect a lot of people are getting fed up with the US overtly throwing its weight around one way or another too. It's not hard to imagine that this could become an issue with significant weight by election time unless it's all water under the bridge by then, and I don't see any chance of that happening if anyone in government really does try to force through the snooper's charter. Surely international relations are going to have a much higher profile next time than in the past, particularly with the EU debate and the rising profile of UKIP.
They try to claim the bottom tax rate change as a huge victory but I don't really buy it. Either coalition or Tory government they would have needed something to counterbalance the top rate tax cut and austerity, those "how does it affect you" articles would have been too politically toxic otherwise. Additionally, other cuts to benefits and services significantly nullify the income tax changes for lower paid people.
I agree that we could see something like what happened with ID cards, and there are at least a couple of Tories (David Davis probably) who will be opposed to internet surveillance and speak out, which will cause trouble for the PM since his ability to control the party is already at breaking point. So I do remain slightly hopeful that this proposal can be blocked - it will certainly be tricky for Cameron to get it through. I'm more worried about Labour coming into power in 2015 and forcing it through before there is much chance for people to get angry about it. It also depends how much media coverage it gets. The BBC can be very very silent on issues when they want (see: the NHS bill), and if the right wing press don't talk about it much a lot of people just won't hear much about it.
Indeed. As I said, I think they've misplayed their hand terribly. Having got into government, instead of using their unexpected influence to further their agenda and show themselves to be worthy of more support in future, they tried to solidify their position by the back door, playing political games with the electoral system. This was a lose-no win situation for them, because the only deals seriously on the table in each case weren't really going to fix the obvious problems with our electoral systems, they were just going to make them slightly less bad. And in reality, the two big parties were never going to let the Lib Dems cement their position in government so easily and were always going to win both of those battles at almost any cost, so it was really a lose-lose proposition from the start. Someone forgot to read Sun Tzu.
I'm more worried about Labour coming into power in 2015 and forcing it through before there is much chance for people to get angry about it.
I'm think that's a very unlikely possibility at the moment. The Labour party seems to be a political non-entity under Miliband, so I find the idea that they will run an effective campaign in the run up to 2015 implausible unless something dramatic changes. I think too many people's memories will be too long for them to fight back this time even if they run a brilliant campaign. Too many bad things clearly happened on their watch under Blair/Brown, and too many of those responsible are still in positions of influence in the party, and there aren't enough believable alternatives to spin their way out of responsibility so soon.
My current bet would be for another hung parliament, with none of the big three parties doing particularly well in terms of popular respect, a modest surge in support for several smaller parties and particularly UKIP, but little really changing in 2015 because the first past the post system will mean the devils you know still take almost all of the seats anyway. What happens with Scottish independence will be a factor by then, too. Ironically, another hung parliament but with more minority votes effectively discarded to get there might lead to renewed calls to fix the election system in the way the Lib Dems haven't managed to push through in this administration, which in turn would move us away from a tendency to swap between two parties every few years and towards more regular coalition or ad-hoc alliance arrangements.
But of course 2015 is an eternity away in political terms, so I might change my expectations after seeing the news tomorrow, and change them many more times before the next general election.
There is a problem in how hackers/geeks/techies portray themselves. You know that this kind of monitoring is bad because if you had the data you could do bad things (but you wouldn't because of ethics). But every app still expects people to hand over the same data and to trust the developer. Expecting people to know which geeks they can trust and which are creepy is a big ask.
1. Spread the word that mass surveillance is already standard practice in one country
2. Wait for public outrage to ensue
3. Stack on more and more revelations (dilute) while mixing in some that are less invasive and make more sense (distract), and outline the huge scale. At this point, the public
a) is starting to get tired reading about all the new revelations (because that's how the public works), b) starts associating at least some form of legitimacy with those programs that make sense to them, which in turn rubs off on the more invasive programs, and c) slowly starts accepting the whole thing due to its massive scale, because what can a single person do to stop something so big?
4. Now, with the public worn down and somewhat in check, launch the same thing in other countries where such a thing would never have been possible before. Start small, don't get too close to the most outrageous stuff - but start building the cornerstone programs.
5. In case some of the really bad programs do get outlawed as an effect of the scandal in the originating country, that won't hurt the long-term goal at all, because the road has now been paved and they can always re-introduce the old, as well as realign and expand the new "legitimized" programs that were only possible because the old ones came out of the shadows.
I'm not normally a conspiracy theorist but I have to admit, the public relations aspect of this is impressive.
I think the current letter is just an attempt to double down on the rhetoric. It's probably prompted by the NSA leaks but not in a "this is our chance to hoodwink them!" kind of way, more "we are loosing the narrative we need to remind them all to be scared".
Irony for the day: There is well-known term for someone who attempts to effect political change by making the general public fear the violent consequences of not acceding.