Matthew Revell

The Wolverhampton Politics Show starts tonight at 7pm. Here’s how you can listen:

• In Wolverhampton: 101.8 FM
• Elsewhere: Live stream at wcrfm.com (tested on Ubuntu and Windows)
• Podcast: subscribe at www.wolverhamptonpolitics.co.uk

Joining me in the studio for this first show are Labour activist and blogger, Political Penguin, and Conservative candidate for Wolverhampton South West, Paul Uppal.

You can join in:

• Phone: 01902 57 22 57
• Text: 60300, start message with “WCR POLITICS”
• Email: show@wolverhamptonpolitics.co.uk

It’d be great if a couple of people could phone in, as I’ve no idea how many listeners the show will actually get

Morrisons - the UK’s fourth largest supermarket chain - is an odd one.

Reports in the media have long suggested that Ken Morrison - who recently stepped down as Chairman - believed in the supremacy of all things Yorkshire. From the sounds of it, he knew what he liked and liked what he knew. Fair enough.

Perhaps that’s why Morrisons mostly sells pies and really fresh veg. Love the veg, hate the pies and the poor quality own brand range. It probably also explains why the standard format for a Morrisons store features fake market stalls, Oh, and the miserable staff (ha, joke - I’m half Yorkshire and Yorkshire people are proud of how blunt they are, so I’m only living up to my heritage, or something).

So, along with the pies, the crap own brand stuff and the weird Disneyland-style grocery section, Morrisons has a pretty naff logo. Big black typewriter-font M on a yellow oval, on a black square. Nice.

With the announcement of the new chairman came the promise of a new brand identity. The years-old slogan “More reasons to shop at Morrisons” - genius - was out, so was the Tyne and Wear Metro tribute logo.

Well, it seems that the new logo and slogan are creeping into use. In true Yorkshire-fashion, they’re not making a fuss; instead, they’re just gonna pop the new logo on anything they print from now on.

I had high hopes for the new logo. I love to watch a new brand take shape. According to a Morrisons press release the new slogan is:

Fresh for you every day.

To use a chic term: meh. It could be worse but it’s certainly no equivalent to “More reasons to…”

But it’s the logo where Morrisons have really pulled one out of the bag, to use another cliche. Look:

Starting on Friday 27th July I’ll be presenting a new weekly show on WCR FM.

From 7pm to 8pm I’ll cover what’s going on in Wolverhampton politics and also look at the wider political scene from a Wolverhampton perspective. Each week I’ll have a couple of studio guests, interviews, debate and reports from around the city.

I’m going to take a fairly broad view of what counts as politics; it’s not going to be party political yawn-inducing tribalism. Of course, politicians will be on there: Wolverhampton South West MP Rob Marris is a guest on 7th September, for example.

I think Wolverhampton deserves a show that scrutinises the city’s politicians, that has an open debate about different ways of doing things and that represents the broad sweep of opinion and life in the city.

Some names familiar to readers of this website will pop up, too: Jono will be on to talk about free software and Stuart will be talking about digital rights.

If you’re in Wolverhampton, you can get WCR FM on 101.8 FM. Alternatively, you can listen to a live stream from the WCR FM website and I’ll be making the show available as a podcast from www.wolverhamptonpolitics.co.uk

So remember: 7pm - 8pm UK time on 27th July! There’ll be a phone-in each week too - 01902 57 22 57

Wolverhampton City Council collects glass, paper, metal and garden waste in its kerbside recycling collection.

Note: not plastic or cardboard.

A few weeks back, I asked one of Wolverhampton’s Conservative councillors why there was no kerbside collection for plastic and cardboard. Apparently, he told me, the ruling Labour group were planning to introduce it in the next few weeks.

According to The Stirrer, though, we might have a longer wait, citing an additional cost of £500,000 (presumably annually) to fund the service. The reason? Well, The Stirrer makes the suggestion that the cost is linked to Wolverhampton’s municipal incinerator. Plastic burns well and generates lots of electricity, so says the article. Recycle that plastic, rather than send it into the already sweet air of the city, and the council loses money from electricity generation.

£500,000 is roughly 1.25% of the council’s annual budget. In a city where - as I understand it - only 10% of households actually pay council tax and the council has long had a reputation for financial incompetence, that’s a lot of money.

I’ll have a dig around to see if I can find out anything more concrete.

Update 27.07.2007: See the comments for Political Penguin’s stats on council tax in Wolverhampton. I’ve been unable to get corroboration for the 10% figure and so please disregard it. I still think it’s an interesting question: should we recycle plastic or burn it for energy?

I wonder how many people will find another reason not to vote Conservative in David Cameron’s recent speech to the music industry. Within the IT industry, probably quite a few.

In summary, Cameron praised the music industry’s technological innovation and went on to suggest that ISPs should prevent illegal file sharing. Both notions are, to most people in the IT industry, nonsense.

I feel a few lines, in particular, are worthy of comment.

“And at a time of technological revolution, you have adapted to changes in consumer behaviour with great ingenuity, launching online and mobile services.

Matching business acumen with creative instinct, you have shown you have the dynamism necessary to succeed in the 21st century.”

Is that the same business acumen that led them to resist technological advances including radio, cassette tape, DAT and recently music downloads and ring tones, only to finally capitulate when they had virtually no other choice? From what I’ve seen, the music industry’s innovation is limited to finding new ways of maintaining the status quo.

“And each year, an estimated 20 billion - that’s right, 20 billion - music files are downloaded illegally.

This alone has cost the music industry as much as £1.1 billion in lost retail sales since 2004.”

The record company staff must have been delighted to hear their own line quoted verbatim back at them. Based on the behaviour of my own friends, I can’t understand why anyone would believe this particular piece of propaganda to be true. People don’t download only music they would have bought anyway; I imagine they’re much less discriminating in what they download for free than what they’d actually pay for.

But whatever, the figures don’t add up. 20 billion files a year, assuming 79p per file at retail adds up to £15.8 billion per year, not 1.1 billion over the past three years. But then I only got grade C at Maths GCSE, so maybe I’m missing something.

“…decriminalising the millions of people in this country for copying their CDs onto music players for personal use…”

Can’t argue with that.

“Some ISPs claim there is nothing they can do to stop illegal downloading of music.

But last month alone, there were eight sites that hosted more than 25,000 illegal downloads.”

And those ISPs are pretty much right. Block those eight sites and another eight sites will appear, or another technology will develop that doesn’t require tracker sites.

“They have already established the Internet Watch Foundation to monitor child abuse and incitement to racial hatred on the internet.

They should be doing the same when it comes to digital piracy.”

I screamed inside when I read this. The casual linking of these three disparate areas of internet activity looks so obvious when you don’t understand the practicalities or potential fall-out. It’s not as simple as blocking ISOHunt or MiniNova.

ISPs fight child porn and hate speech because they are evil. They make an exception for these two particularly nasty activities. File sharing is not evil; it may be illegal and it may harm some people’s business interests but it’s not evil. A party supposedly against state intervention in business and private life shouldn’t take the voluntary blocking of two extreme activities as a cue to hint at the need for the statutory blocking of far less harmful activity.

But it’s not just about the thin end of the wedge. Political Penguin has an easy to understand explanation of why it isn’t just a matter of blocking torrent tracker websites. Imposing, or even just strongly suggesting, that ISPs should filter certain content marks a fundamental change in the role of the British state and it would impose a huge financial burden on … you and me! We’d pay for the ridiculous arms race that would ensue and that the ISPs would lose.

I don’t have answers to file sharing or piracy. I do believe in copyright. I believe that artists deserve payment. I don’t believe in propping up a failing business model, if that’s what it is, by adding an enormous and worthless burden of red tape to another industry.

Update: Prague Tory has left a comment and my reply to that clarifies some of what I’ve written above.

Here it is again, the greatest free software event that has ever graced the face of WORLD Earth (as Ted Jesus Christ God likes to refer to our planet).

LugRadio Live is happening this weekend at the Light House Media Centre, Fryer Street, Wolverhampton; but you didn’t need me to tell you that.

This weekend will be a little strange for me. Having left LugRadio as a full time presenter, I was only involved in the early stages of planning for this LRL. Also, not being on stage during the intro or LugRadio Live and Unleashed will be very odd.
If you’re going to LRL, come find me and say hello. This year, I won’t be insanely busy

Today, The Stirrer published the first piece for my new column. To be honest, it’s little more than a rant in favour of the smoking ban. I can’t say I’m thrilled at the idea of being called “Wolverhampton’s own Tory Boy” but never mind.

If you’re wondering, The Stirrer is a local news website for Birmingham and the Black Country. It’s run by Adrian Goldberg, the chap who used to present BBC WM’s breakfast show. It seems to get quite a good readership and has particularly active forums, where my words are already being torn to shreds Update: after leaving a bit of a gap, I’m going to re-publish each of my Stirrer pieces here. Here’s the first.

At last, smoking has been banned in enclosed public places in England. This is fantastic news for me: I hate tobacco, I hate breathing other people’s smoke, I hate the smell of smoke on my clothes and in my hair.Now, just as I can reasonably expect not to be stabbed in the throat or robbed at gun point, so I can enjoy a pint, or a coffee or whatever else without breathing the toxic fumes from someone else’s long drawn-out suicide.

“Ah, but what about my rights to smoke without interference from the government? This is the nanny state at its worst!”, a smoker might whine, while another wheezes, “If you don’t like smoke, don’t go to pubs.”

I don’t get this at all. What right does anyone have to pollute an enclosed public space with polonium 210, arsenic, hydrogen cyanide and sulphuric acid?

So long as tobacco duty covers the NHS burden of the diseases that smokers inflict on themselves, then I don’t care if an adult wants to smoke, chew or
rectally insert tobacco. My one caveat is that they shouldn’t take me down with them.

The “health and safety gone made” brigade almost can’t believe their luck. A chorus of pre-planned harrumphs has hit blogs, most of course from those aligned to the Conservatives.

Express and Star columnist, Nigel Hastilow exemplifies how silly some of the anti-ban discourse is:  “I am sorely tempted to take up smoking again, in protest.”

Yeah, and maybe I’ll draw all over my face with felt-tip pen because my Dad told me not to when I was five; y’know, in protest.

We Conservatives dislike the idea of new laws and more control for politicians. Laws have unintended consequences, politicians are often too remote. We shouldn’t, though, oppose for the sake of opposition.

Instead, we should ensure that any potential benefits from a change to the status quo are large enough to outweigh any potential negative fall-out.

I believe I should have the right to remain free of the effects of tobacco smoke. Banning smoking in enclosed public spaces helps protect that freedom from the harmful actions of others.

Smokers are, after all, the people who’ve specifically chosen to use tobacco. The ban doesn’t stop them from smoking: it just means I get to enjoy my chosen way of life too

Last night, I tried bluetooth file transfers between a mobile phone and PC for the first time. Never needed to do it before, but today my Motorola PEBL goes back to Virgin Mobile - because it’s broken - and I get a new Nokia 6233 in return.

I was a guest on the most recent LugRadio and the subject of Bluetooth support under Linux came up. The general feeling was that Linux operating systems have poor Bluetooth support. So, I decided to give it a go.

Windows Vista: recognised dongle as soon as I plugged it in, giving me a Bluetooth icon in the status bar. Took longer than it should to find the option to make the computer discoverable. No matter what I did, though, the phone couldn’t find the computer. So, no transfers.

Ubuntu: nothing appeared to happen when I plugged the dongle in. However, when I opened Applications->Accessories->Bluetooth File Sharing I was able to send files to the computer with no problems.

You could argue that Windows Vista was more secure, because it wasn’t immediately discoverable. However, Ubuntu worked for me. Windows Vista didn’t.

I know, this is one case and I didn’t do anything fancy, such as use the phone as a modem. But it is nice to know, from my occasional dabbling with Vista, that it’s most often easier to get my stuff done using Ubuntu.