The media is very much obsessed with the Wikileaks story at the moment, but there are other things going on of a similar nature. Here are a couple you may find interesting.

It sounds like the US government put pressure on Amazon to deny hosting space to Wikileaks, but that’s by no means the only Internet censorship that is going on. Homeland Security has got it into their heads that their job is not to protect the USA from terrorism, but to protect American media companies from copyright infringement. So they have been busily seizing various domain names that the big media companies claim include copyrighted material. Being Homeland Security, they do this without any proof beyond what the media companies tell them, and apparently without seeing the need for a trial. In true poodle fashion they even made the announcement from Disney HQ.

Meanwhile Interpol is apparently chasing round after Julian Assange, but they may soon have a bigger fish to catch. The Houston Chronicle reports on an investigation by the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission into an $180m bribery scandal. The Nigerians say they will be issuing warrants for the arrest of senior managers from a number of major companies. One of the companies that they are interested in is Halliburton, and one of the people they want to stand trial for corruption is its former CEO, a chap called Dick Cheney.

Mark Van Name’s latest SF novel, Children No More [buy isbn=”9781439133651″], deals with the difficult subject of child soldiers. What’s more, Mark has decided to donate 100% of the profits from the hardcover version of the book to a charity, Falling Whistles, that works to rehabilitate child soldiers who have fought in the current war in the Congo. I quote from their website:

The Democratic Republic of Congo is home to the world’s largest and most deadly war. During the past 10 years, roughly 6 million people have died, and nearly 1,500 people continue to lose their lives daily. Sexual violence is more rampant here than anywhere else in the world, and thousands of children are involved in the war.

I’m very pleased to see more attention being paid to this issue. And if you are interested in such things I can also recommend Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s superb novel, Effendi, which looks at water wars further north in Africa, and Nnedi Okorafor’s equally superb Who Fears Death, set in the Sudan.

So, we have a government. What’s more we have a new and different sort of government. Truly, we live in interesting times.

For those of you who may be interested, the text of the agreement between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats is available here.

Many of my left wing friends were spitting blood on Twitter today, characterizing it as a total surrender on the part of the LibDems. I tend not to follow extreme right-wing people, but if I did I’m sure they’d be complaining about a complete surrender by Cameron. Delaying the inheritance tax cut, moving forward on PR, no rolling back on Europe, loads of stuff on climate change: Norman Tebbit will be fit to burst.

So, politics has happened. There has been give and take. You win some, you lose some. I’m very happy about the scrapping of the ID card scheme, and about the end to the detention of children in immigration camps. I may yet benefit from the tax cuts aimed at the less well off rather than the super-rich as the Tories originally planned. Then again, having Theresa May as minister for Women and Equality pretty much guarantees there there will be no progress on women’s rights or LGBT rights for a while. I am crossing my fingers that Clegg & co manage to avoid any retreat.

As for Labour, they go into the great outer darkness secure in the knowledge that they will be able to complain mightily about everything the government does. The Guardian quotes a very perceptive American commentator, Daniel Larison:

As perverse as it seems, kicking out Labour may be the biggest favor British voters have ever done for the party, as they will now have the luxury of opposition to engage in constant rejectionism and demagoguery over the spending cuts that their excesses while in government have made necessary. It will probably work and they might be back in government in five years…

While I don’t think Gordon Brown is anywhere near as culpable for the current mess as Dubya, he has certainly kept things looking rosy in the hope of winning an election and thereby left a rather worse mess for his successors to tidy up. Goodness knows what Gordon would have done had he won, but avoiding any cuts by squeezing the rich, which is what Labour will now claim they would have done, was not very likely.

Overall, however, I find myself agreeing with Nick Harkaway. He quotes several policy areas on which Labour negotiators reportedly refused to budge. These included keeping the ID card scheme, not being serious about PR, and refusing to fund additional renewable generation. I find that very depressing.

It is all fun and games here in the UK. On the one hand we have the right wing of the Conservatives telling Cameron that he should have no truck with the Liberal Democrats, and if he could just force a new election immediately and fight it on a much more right wing platform then he’d sweep to victory. On the other hand we have Labour supporters telling Clegg that he should have nothing to do with the Tories and should force a new election immediately in which Labour would sweep to victory and promise to implement PR.

The Tory right sort of has a point, in that another election would probably result in an outright Tory victory. However, the one thing that could prevent that is their fighting it on a much more right wing platform. After all, if people voted for Labour or the Liberal Democrats this time, how would being even more right wing persuade them to change their minds? I note also that the Tory candidates who were caught being homophobic during the campaign did very badly, and the BNP pretty much got slaughtered at the polls. Despite the current paranoia about immigration, hardline right wing policies are not an easy sell here.

As for Labour, if they genuinely believed in electoral reform, surely they would have done something about it the 13 years they have had in power with a massive majority. Deathbed conversions are generally not very convincing. I can understand why people want another election quickly, because a Tory government, even moderated by Clegg, is something to be feared, but at the same time I don’t think Labour or the LibDems have a hope in hell of doing better in the polls until they have given Cameron a chance to show his true colors.

Meanwhile the odd amusing dirty trick is showing up. Yesterday The Observer did its best to torpedo the Cameron-Clegg talks by highlighting a hardline Tory memo about Europe. As it turns out, the memo was prepared before the election, not as part of the negotiating process which has been surprisingly leak free. I’d be prepared to bet that the memo was sent to The Observer by Tory hardliners, and The Observer used it because they are following the hardline Labour position.

In addition I am seeing a lot of people on Twitter RTing tweets from someone calling themselves @UKLabourParty. This is very odd, because the official Labour Twitter stream (as advertised on their website) is @UKLabour. The @UKLabourParty tweets are passionately pro-electoral reform, but the official Labour tweets have nothing to say on the issue. My guess is that either @UKLabourParty is being run by some fringe group on the left, or it is a deliberate scam. Either way it is a dirty trick designed to convince LibDem supporters that Labour is pro-electoral reform, and an awful lot of people appear to be falling for it.

Update: I may have underestimated the Tory right. This Guardian article suggests that the UKIP vote, though small, cost the Tories 21 seats. I haven’t checked the numbers, but I have no reason to believe that they are wrong. Of course the UKIP position is for total withdrawal from Europe, which Cameron must know would be a foreign policy disaster, and probably an economic one too. He can no more espouse that than Labour can espouse nationalization.

Meanwhile Gordon Brown has agreed to step down as Labour leader in order to facilitate negotiations with the Lib Dems. That suggests that negotiations between the Tories and Lib Dems are not going as well as they might.

Well, that was not the worst thing that could have happened.

The worst possible plausible result would have been a Tory government reliant on the Ulster Unionists for support. It doesn’t look like that will happen.

The next worst plausible result would have been an outright Tory win. That certainly won’t happen.

Next worst would probably be a discredited Labour hanging on thanks to the support of the Liberals and a rag tag group of minor parties. Such an arrangement would be horribly unstable and would terrify the City. When it collapsed the Tories would sweep to power.

The pressure is now on Friendly Dave. He can listen to his right wing, try to soldier on alone and hope for an early election that he’ll run on a much more right wing platform, where he’ll get slaughtered by a Lib/Lab alliance. Or he can do a deal with Clegg in which he gets to be PM on condition that he behaves himself and lives up to the Friendly Dave image.

What should Clegg demand?

Probably not PR, because that would drive the Tories away. Instead he should use the threat of a Lib/Lab, pro-PR alliance as a stick to keep Cameron honest.

He should insist on no deal with the Ulster Unionists. There should be no place in UK politics for extreme right-wing “Christian” thugs.

He can also insist on keeping the Human Rights Act, re-examining DeBill, and a much more compassionate approach to immigration and the economy that the Tory right would like.

(DeBill I expect he’ll lose on because, like Mandy, Cameron will be terrified of offending Murdoch, but there can at least be some re-examination.)

Whether this will do any good for Clegg in the long run is another matter. In the short term he’ll get a small amount of say in running the country, but at the next election he’ll lose seats to Labour and not gain from the Tories unless they really screw up. Probably the best he can hope for is that Cameron does something really bad fairly early on before Labour have their confidence back.

As for Labour, what they need is time to find a new leader and to re- energize themselves. Trying to hang on to power now will only result in even bigger loses at the next, very early, election.

As you may have noticed, there is an election going on here in the UK. I have been trying not to bore you too much about it, but there’s only a day left before polling day, and I’m not sure I’ll have time to blog much tomorrow, so here’s my one election post.

It is facile to complain that politicians are “all the same”, but these days there is a certain amount of truth to that allegation. The UK has, to a large extent, moved away from conviction driven politics that is a battleground between Capitalism and Socialism, and instead embraced celebrity politics where clean-shaven men with nice smiles try to convince you that they are marginally more trustworthy than any of the other liars out there. We are faced with an election where all three party leaders want to present themselves as the heirs of Tony Blair, without all that messy Iraq stuff.

The situation is complicated by the fact that the UK is in a very severe financial crisis. Things haven’t looked too bad of late, because Gordon Brown knew only too well that if he didn’t make the situation look rosy he had no chance of re-election. Once the election is over there will be an urgent need for action on the economy, and that will mean ferocious cuts in public spending, no matter who gets in.

So the question becomes, who do you trust to make those cuts? There has been a lot of talk that a hung parliament will be a bad thing because a coalition government won’t be able to agree on a course of action and will dither fatally. I can’t see that happening, because if the minor coalition partner tries to block any action on the budget then the major party in the coalition can just go to the country and demand a mandate. You won’t get a California-like stalemate.

What you will get is bargaining over exactly where the cuts fall, and how they are spun. Whichever party gets in will pick their own scapegoats, so we should be asking ourselves who those victims are going to be.

If Labour hates anyone then it hates the rich. And the rich, for the most part, can take care of themselves. Some of them may, of course, choose to leave the UK as a result, and economically that’s bad in the long run, but it won’t be a disaster.

The Liberal Democrats are much too nice to hate people. It is not their style. They might get annoyed at people who pollute the environment, but that’s about the extent of their angst. Besides, they are not going to win. The best they can hope for is to be a minor partner in a coalition.

The Tories, on the other hand, despite friendly Dave’s attempt to consign all of their lunatic fringe to UKIP and the BNP, still have their fare share of hate-motivated adherents. They might claim not to be racist, but they are all over the rhetoric of “tough on immigration” and “tough on Europe”. Nor has it stopped them from finding common cause with some of the least savory people in European politics (a fragile alliance whose common hatred of the EU barely manages to overcome their hatred of each other because they are foreigners). They might claim not to be homophobic, but that doesn’t stop them claiming that gay people are possessed by demons and can be cured by prayer.

Whoever wins the election will be keen to make cuts, raise taxes, and to spin all this in such a way as to annoy the fewest of their voters. The Tories, should they get in, will seek to do so with as little harm as possible to the rich, and by taking advantage of the weak and defenseless. In particular they will seek to look good by picking on small, disadvantaged groups that they can rely on the media to demonize. It won’t matter that the savings are small, as long as the PR gains for victimizing such people are big.

Not content with that, they have also been talking enthusiastically about repealing the UK’s human rights legislation and replacing it with a new “rights” act that will be little more than a charter to discriminate. It will be ugly.

I’m not exactly thrilled with the prospects for the future, regardless of who wins. I am, however, much more worried about the prospect of a Conservative victory than about any other possible result.