Corbyn promises to 'democratise the internet' - Politics live

• Owen Smith has challenged three Tory cabinet ministers to support his call for people to be allowed to vote on the final Brexit proposal in a second referendum, saying they backed the idea in the past. He was referring to David Davis, the Brexit secretary, Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, and Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary. Smith said:

Theresa May is running scared of a parliamentary vote on Article 50 because she is afraid of the scrutiny on the final Tory Brexit deal. David Davis, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt should have the courage of their previous convictions and argue in Cabinet for the second referendum they used to believe in.

Davis proposed a second referendum in 2005 in an interview with the Sun, when he was running for Tory leader. Hunt said in June that any final Brexit deal should be put to the people, either in a second referendum or in an election. And a Sunday Times story last year quoted a “friend” of Johnson saying Johnson could see the case for voting to leave the EU because that could be followed by a second referendum.

• The Labour MP Chris Bryant has revealed that he is one of more than 24 MPs who have received an identical death threat this weekend. He told LBC:

This weekend we have had, more than two dozen of us have now had, an identical email which says: ‘Warning, I am going to kill you and kill all of your family’. With a very unpleasant photo attached. And part of you hopes that is just somebody being stupid but it may be somebody being more than stupid.

The picture was of someone who had been beheaded, he said.

• Twenty nine Unite officials have signed a letter backing Owen Smith for the Labour leadership - even though the union itself is backing Jeremy Corbyn.

• Members of BECTU, the union representing people working in broadcasting and the arts, have voted by 83% to 17% in favour of a merger with the Prospect union. The merger will come into effect in January next year.

• MPs and council leaders have written to Theresa May seeking assurances after a delay in the publication of a government report on the UK’s flood defences.

That’s all from me for today.

Thanks for the comments.

WebRoots Democracy, a group campaigning for online voting, has welcomed Jeremy Corbyn’s digital democracy manifesto. Areeq Chowdhury, its chief executive, said:

Online voting is forward-thinking and will help drag our democracy into the 21st century, and we call on all political parties and the prime minister to back the reform. Action on voter engagement is necessary in this day and age, with millions not turning out to vote in elections in the UK. Almost 13 million people did not vote in the recent referendum on EU membership, and some police and crime commissioner elections have seen turnouts as low as 10%.

The manifesto does not explicitly talk about online voting but it says: “We will utilise information technologies to make popular participation in the democratic process easy and inclusive.”

Here are two more articles analysing Jeremy Corbyn’s digital democracy manifesto - both more critical than Amelia Tait’s (see 3.03pm.)

• Sebastian Payne at the Financial Times says Corbyn showed that he is a technical Luddite.
  

The biggest problem with Mr Corbyn’s digital push is that he believes Labour is going to win the next election online. The internet is an important part of the British economy but it is not necessarily where and how you gain power. In the 2015 general election, Labour’s hubristic reliance on the social media echo chamber was one of the reasons it believed it was on course to win. It was wrong — and the team of Ed Miliband, Mr Corbyn’s predecessor, was humiliated.

There is no evidence that this has changed in the past year, and Mr Corbyn’s promise to run “the most visible general election campaign ever” confirms he does not have a strategy to counter the party’s electioneering failures. As Mr Cameron once remarked: “Britain and Twitter are not the same thing.”

• John Rentoul at the Independent is scathing about the launch. (Rentoul is a diehard Blairite, and not a Corbyn fan.)

At the event, the candidate himself boisterously took the fight to his those of his critics who say that he sometimes comes across as lacking a sense of humour. One of the proposals in his Digital Democracy Manifesto would be to end “unjustified surveillance by CCTV”, he said. Those of us who got the reference to Richard Branson’s use of footage from CCTV on a Virgin train to attack the Labour leader could only applaud inwardly. Or would have done if the live video stream from the event hadn’t gone down.

I, for one, admire Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt to restore the glory days of Windows 95, when the internet was swashbuckling and free and people spelled online with a hyphen. I share his vision of the information superhighway, based on high-speed dial-up for all. In particular, I like his idea for an Open Knowledge Library: if only someone could think of a catchy name for millions of computers all over the world, all connected to each other and sharing information without charge.

Hope Not Hate, the anti-racism campaign, is organising dozens of “More in Common” community events around the UK this weekend to honour the values of the Labour MP Jo Cox who was killed in June. Nick Lowles, Hope Not Hate’s chief executive, said: “As Jo Cox famously said, we have far more in common and there is much more that unites us than divides. We truly believe this is the case and over the coming weekend we want everyone to celebrate what is best about their local community.”

Details of the #MoreInCommon events are here.

Here is the full text of the statement issued after Amber Rudd’s meeting with Bernard Cazeneuve. (See 2.53pm.) Essentially, they are just promising to carry on with Anglo-French security cooperation.

Amelia Tait has written a good analysis of Jeremy Corbyn’s digital democracy manifesto for the New Statesman. Some of his ideas are good, she says, some are already in place or are being implemented, some are bad and are meaningless.

Here’s an extract.

Corbyn hopes to “foster the cooperative ownership of digital platforms for distributing labour and selling services”, which essentially means he wants services like Airbnb, Deliveroo, and Uber to be community-run (or, if you want to go there, nationalised). The National Investment Bank would fund these websites and apps, which in turn would allow greater regulations of employment contracts. It’s quite a utopian vision and it’s easy to be cynical about how this could work in practice, but were it to work, it could arguably transform the entire economy.

Amber Rudd, the home secretary, and Bernard Cazeneuve, her French counterpart, have issued a joint statement after their meeting in Paris. They have both confirmed that they are committed to maintaining the current arrangements allowing British officials to carry out border control checks in Calais (the Le Touquet treaty).

• Jeremy Corbyn has been accused of hypocrisy after publishing a digital democracy manifesto including proposals for a “digital bill of rights”. The manifesto (pdf) says “the human right of personal privacy should give legal protection for British citizens from not only unwarranted snooping on their on-line activities by the security services, but also unjustified surveillance by CCTV and other hi-tech methods within the workplace”. But the Lib Dems said that Corbyn was being “hypocritical” and that his words were “empty” because Labour did not oppose the investigatory powers bill when it was going through the Commons. The Lib Dem MP Alistair Carmichael said:

I am glad to see that Jeremy Corbyn has caught up with the Liberal Democrats and is finally backing our proposal for a Digital Bill of Rights. However, actions speak far louder than words and when it actually came down to standing up for people’s privacy online by voting against the Investigatory Powers Bill Labour swung behind the Tories supporting an expansion of the state’s surveillance powers. Corbyn himself didn’t even bother to vote.

Corbyn might profess to want to stop the ‘unwarranted snooping’ on people’s online activities but apparently his party are fine with the government retaining all of our web histories for 12 months. It doesn’t add up.

Labour abstained on the bill’s second reading, but voted in favour of it at third reading after securing some changes to its contents.

• Apple has been ordered to pay up to €13bn (£11bn) in back taxes to Ireland after the European commission ruled that deals between Apple and the Irish tax authorities amounted to illegal state aid.

• Francois Hollande, the French president, has said the EU will not conclude its free trade deal with the US (TTIP - the transatlantic trade and investment partnership) until after President Obama leaves office in January. Hollande said:

France prefers to look things in the face. These discussions cannot result in an agreement by the end of the year. The negotiations have bogged down, the positions have not been respected, the imbalance is obvious.

• Charlie Elphicke, the Conservative MP for Dover has urged the government to avoid any “tit-for-tat” battles with France over border security before talks in Paris between Amber Rudd, the home secretary, and her French counterpart.

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• Downing Street has defended David Cameron’s decision to give some of his special advisers pay rises worth up to 24% after the 2015 general election. Asked about the story, a Number 10 spokesman said:

A decision was taken by the then prime minister that these reflected the changes in the scope and range of their responsibility in going from a coalition government to a single-party government on their reappointment in 2015. Decisions about pay take into account the various factors of level of responsibility across government.

The Internet Services Providers’ Association has given a qualified welcome to Jeremy Corbyn’s digital democracy manifesto. But it says Corbyn should accept that some deregulation is necessary to ensure everyone has access to high-speed broadband. This is from James Blessing, the ISPA’s chair.

ISPA is pleased that the leader of the opposition recognises the incredible power of the Internet and the important and positive role it can play throughout our economy and society.

There are a number of interesting policy suggestions in the manifesto, including a proposed digital bill of rights to protect civil liberties and the promotion of digital skills, but more information is required over a high speed broadband universal service network. ISPA members are already rolling out superfast broadband nationally and locally across the UK that covers over 95% of the country using a range of technologies.

Industry has led this transformation, and alongside public funding in harder-to-reach areas, speeds have risen significantly from 3.8 Mbps in 2006 to 28 Mbps today. We call on policymakers to focus on reforming regulations and barriers to rollout to make it easier for companies to deliver broadband.

As well as giving an interview to Today (see 10.34am), Joseph Stiglitz gave an interview to BBC Radio Scotland. The Nobel Prize-winning economist sits on Nicola Sturgeon’s council of economic advisers and he said that Scotland should consider having its own currency if it opts for independence. Before the 2014 referendum the Scottish government’s fiscal commission working group (part of the council of economic advisers) proposed an independent Scotland having a currency union with the rest of the UK. But this may have been a mistake, Stiglitz said:

They wanted the smoothest transition possible. They wanted to say that we could move from the current economic arrangement to another one while keeping our currency and keeping other forms of institutions. I think, in hindsight, that may have been a mistake.

It would be a mistake to join the euro, by the way, so what they would have needed to do, perhaps, was resurrect the Scottish pound and let it float.

Small countries can have their own currency. The reason that Iceland, which had one of the deepest downturns in 2008, had one of the strongest recoveries was because it had its own currency.

If there was a Scottish pound floating, you could help stimulate the Scottish economy. The deficit would come down to make it acceptable to joining the EU.

Countries that join the EU - as an SNP-led independent Scotland would want to do, if by then the UK had left - are meant to commit to joining the euro. But Stiglitz said he thought the EU could make an exception to this rule for Scotland.

I think there’s going to be, going forward, a greater willingness - I hope there is a greater willingness - within Europe for countries to be a member of the EU but not have the euro. Sweden doesn’t have the euro, obviously the UK did not have the euro before, so they have shown some willingness - a concerned willingness - to accept countries into the EU without joining the euro.

Meanwhile Owen Smith, who is challenging Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership, has launched a campaign bus today.

Here is some Twitter comment from journalists on Jeremy Corbyn’s digital democracy manifesto.

From BuzzFeed’s James Ball

From the Financial Times’s Sebastian Payne

From Emily Bell, head of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s School of Journalism

From the Herald’s Iain Macwhirter

From the New Statesman’s Stephen Bush

From the Daily Mirror’s Mikey Smith

Here is Jeremy Corbyn’s digital democracy manifesto in full (pdf).

It is one of three entries on the “policy updates” page on Corbyn’s campaign website.

My colleague Anushka Asthana was at the Number 10 lobby briefing this morning. It went on for ages. This is what she tweeted when she came out.

In the comments trenchfeet has said this about Jeremy Corbyn’s open source proposal.

Andrew - have you thought through the consequences of this innocuous looking sentence: "We will require that all publicly funded software and hardware is released under an Open Source licence."

Most IT projects use proprietary software, that is then tweaked for purpose. That will pretty much stop any IT company working on a public sector project. It's huge.

trenchfeet30 August 2016 10:37am

This did come up in the Q&A. Someone asked to what extent Corbyn would extend the principle of open source. Richard Barbrook said in response to that question that “where possible” the government should use open source software. But he also said that the digital democracy manifesto was a work in progress. (See 11.24am.) Corbyn himself also stressed that his ideas were not finalised. (See 11.32am.)

Corbyn says online abuse is appalling. Labour has a code of conduct on this. People should realise that putting material online is the same as publishing it.

He says people treat Twitter like a pub conversation. But these comments then stay there forever, he says.

He says Labour is chasing this material down and objecting to it.

It can be particularly harmful to young people, he says.

And that’s it. The Q&A is over.

Corbyn says many people are frightened of new technology. He says it is claimed some MPs do not turn on their computers because they do not know how to.

Downloading music for free sounds fine, he says. But this means musicians do not get paid. That is why digital rights are so important. He says he has not produced the last word on policy on this yet.

Richard Barbrook says there have been various experiments around the world in “liquid democracy” (using the internet to develop policy ideas). This manifesto is an example, he says. Obviously it is just a first draft.