Big Brother is still with us, but for how long?

The Telegraph had another story this morning about RIPA and CCTV intrusion (probably serves me right for reading this particular title). But like John Naughton on Memex 1.1 yesterday, I too wonder whether our new government will “deliver on the rolling back of the national security state”, standing by its commitment in its policy document “to implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour government and roll back state intrusion”.

The last government never admitted that it presided over the most authoritarian government this country has seen outside of wartime. Commenting on the plans to scrap ID cards, the National Identity register and the ContactPoint database, regulate CCTV, and restore rights to non-violent protest, a Labour spokesman continued to trot out the fiction that Britain was not a surveillance society.

The problem, as so often is the case, is the gap between intention and reality, and the insidious effect of policy creep.

A Surveillance Society? – The Government Reply to the Fifth Report from the Home Affairs Committee, given in July 2008, recognised the issues,

Ensuring the application of proportionality and maintaining the appropriate balance is key to providing the right level of safeguards for the public and providing the right level of service to the public. That approach will continue to be adopted in all that we do. The Government acknowledges concerns raised in some quarters that this balanced approach always starts out as the ideal but gradually, the balance between the rights of the individual and the powers of the ‘centre’ is severely tilted. That is why in successive pieces of legislation we have made it clear on the face of the Act exactly what can and cannot be introduced by secondary legislation and why there is a requirement for such secondary legislation to be put before Parliament for approval.

But what the Government said, and what it and its agent did, were very different. Will this government avoid this?

As John Naughton says, “I’m not holding my breath”.

Twittering the Billable Hour

Why am I on Twitter? The family have stopped asking, and just accept that although I long ago got rid of my BlackBerry and obsession with emails, this has been replaced by an equally worrying (to them) interest in Web 2.0: Twitter, FourSquare, Spotify, Feedly ~ to say nothing of FB and LinkedIn.

It is always easy to justify one’s peculiarities (not least as to you they are not peculiar at all) but lately I have been giving some thought as to whether Twitter is really of any value, other than to boast about my homegrown asparagus. I am quite sure that it is. For me its value lies in the links I find. These may be to legal or management articles or blog posts, be about current affairs, or, very close to my heart, bird sightings. And all delivered (usually with a little help from bit.ly) in 140 characters.

The result is that I have access to an enormous range of thought.

A very good example was a tweet by Patrick Lamb (@ValoremLamb) yesterday, which took me to the Law Society of Western Australia’s website – and ultimately allowed me to download The Chief Justice of Western Australia’s address to the Perth Press Club, “Billable Hours – past their use by date”, given on 17 May to launch Law Week 2010. It is an excellent analysis, given, as the Chief Justice admits, “with a view to stimulating interest and debate, which may in turn accelerate changes which are already evident in some parts of the profession”.

You need to read the speech for yourselves (it’s a pdf on the website). It is pretty even-handed (what would you expect from a lawyer?) and he sets out both the advantages and the disadvantages, which will be familiar to most lawyers here and there. But one particular paragraph caught my eye:

Focuses on hours, not value

Time costing focuses the efforts of the legal practitioner upon the production of billable hours, rather than the production of value for the client. It rewards efforts and not results, promotes quantity over quality, repetition over creativity.

There is quite a lot more like that, but even though the Chief Justice accepts that “time billing has a place in legal service charging” he is quite clear that there are other methods “which encourage efficiency and better allocate risk”.

Certainly not out of the woods yet

Nick Robinson is so often spot on. From his Newslog about the reactions of the Chancellor and two would-be Chancellors to Ken Clarke’s comments about a hung Parliament,

So, on a day when unemployment rose to the highest level seen since 1994 and at a time when all parties agree we are facing the worst budgetary crisis and the biggest spending cuts in decades, these three [Darling, Osborne and Cable] argued about the only fact that has electrified this election – opinion polls which suggest the likelihood of a hung Parliament – and which, whisper who dares, might turn out to be wrong.

Let’s hope so.

And as for the unemployment figures (8 per cent of the workforce, taking it to the highest since 1996), Yvette Cooper, Work and Pensions Minister, was quoted as saying “we are not out of the woods yet.”

Always an easy target?

Luke Johnson’s weekly The entrepreneur column in the FT’s Business Life section is always a good read: trenchant views and punches rarely pulled. His attack on the legal profession three weeks ago was no exception, and it made for somewhat uneasy reading. For a flavour of the tone of the piece, read on,

But somehow lawyers have risen to such exalted status that many of them appear to believe they are a breed apart, not subject to the same standards of decency and fair dealing to which the rest of us in commerce attempt to adhere.

It also attracted more attention than many of his pieces do, and not just in the way of on-line comments on Ft.com, but a post in Legal Week’s Editor’s Blog (“great knock-about stuff”), tweets on Twitter, and no doubt much more elsewhere. By and large the comments fell into two categories: those violently disagreeing (mainly lawyers) and those violently agreeing (everyone else). No surprises there then, although reading some of the comments I can only supposes that they were drafted in green ink.

I read the piece on my way to an all parties meeting in London, on a corporate transaction that was, and remains, slightly sticky. In one of those lulls that seem to characterise any corporate deal, usually an opportunity to discuss cricket, rugby, football, racing – in fact anything but the deal itself, the conversation turned to the column. It turned out that the lead corporate finance adviser on the seller’s side (a director of a Top 4 accountancy practice so glasshouses and stones came to mind) had read out choice extracts to his clients and their lawyers before we had arrived. Nothing like putting the lawyers in their place.

But although there is some truth in what Luke Johnson wrote, and no one likes a mirror held up to them, he misses a very important point. The profession is only too well aware of the issues, and by and large lawyers are taking steps to get things right. Luke Johnson had an unhappy experience, and these are still all too common, but law firms know that experiences like that lose clients, and if nothing else one consequence of the overlawyering he describes is competition.

And while the attitudes he so pungently describes were commonplace 20 years ago, and the experiences of clients reflected this, clients today expect something very different, as does our regulator. Within law firms there is a recognition that change is not something we can or should avoid. Similarly, although there are lawyers who still fit the stereotype he portrays (and not all of them are my generation), for every one of them, there will be many more who understand that the game has changed.

The boys are back

Saturday afternoon in Yarner Wood: bright sunshine and Pied Flycatchers. Summer is starting.

Yarner Wood is our local patch, and we visit the reserve throughout the year. But our first visit in April is always special, as we wonder whether the Pied Flycatchers are back. It was no different last weekend. The car park was unusually full (we later met the guided tour) and the weather not warm. Some years leaf break will have started; this year the oaks were still bare branched.

At the hide very little, but Caroline suddenly fixed on a male Pied Flycatcher. This was the only bird we saw from the hide, although there was birdsong in the treetops. We took our usual route, along and up, and as we reached Flycatcher Alley, nest boxes every other tree, we heard and then saw more Pied Flycatchers. All male, and in the course of the afternoon about eight in all. Reading the Warden’s notes later, they have been back at Yarner since 8 April.

And as well as the Pied Flycatchers, a Raven high over the wood, a Bullfinch, Greater Spotted Woodpeckers drumming, and all the usual suspects: Chiffchaffs, Great, Blue and Coal Tits, Blackbirds, Wrens, Robins, Nuthatches and Treecreepers. Time stands still in Yarner Wood and by the time we left it was well past six o’clock.

The next day we were having a birthday tea with my mother-in-law. Her garden was alive with bird song, and she knows Summer is back because the Swallows, who have been nesting in her garage for the past 15 or so years, have returned. We stood and watched them, a fast glide and down below the lintel and up and out of sight.

All we need now are the Swifts.