Private owned public spaces, online and off: What do they imply for the future of public life? And how does data factor in?

Online and off, free assembly in public spaces is threatened by the liability of private owners, and by surveillance. The Facebook data scandal only makes addressing these threats more pressing.

When the government announced it's intention to follow the recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, all of the focus was on the proposals for a new electoral offence. However, the timing of the announcement may have buried the lead.

That report also criticised the state of affairs where social media companies are not held liable for what is said and done on their platforms. It recommended new measures to hold the companies liable like publishers, based on the interpretation that social media companies don't just provide a platform but shape user experiences.

This section of the report has become all the more important in the light of the work of Carole Cadwalladr, and others at The Guardian and at Channel 4, in uncovering the data harvesting involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytics - and the subsequent use of that data in formulating election 'strategies'.

The questions being raised about the future of social media have no simple answers. Among the complicating factors is that social media fulfils online the role of an open public space where people can freely assemble.

In the physical world, there has been growing concern about the rise of privately owned public spaces - and their possible use not just to ban ball games and the taking of photographs, but also suppress the right to free assembly for public protest.

Allowing the privatisation of public spaces comes with the risk of the public being excluded from them - in turn increasing isolation, that can spur both loneliness and extremism. Now, urban planning has been used in the past to suppress the public, and to suppress dissent.

Louis-Napoleon's remodelling of Paris prevent riotous neighbourhoods from being easily able to construct barricades. Yet, the historical trend has been towards freeing people to peacefully demonstrate.

So how do these issues extend to the digital world?

Firstly, it is important to understand that there has never been a mass use, public owned, digital public square. Online public spaces have been privately owned from the beginning. However, up to the present, they have been free to use and free speech has prevailed under light-touch moderation.

Secondly, the matter of data complicates things. The 'free' use of these privately owned spaces comes with hidden costs in terms of data - complex profiles, mapping specifically you, the user, and your habits. This is not something easily replicated in the physical space.

The Facebook-CA controversy, the harvesting of user data to build complex profiles on citizens, has blown open the question of online spaces and the data they gather - only bringing forward debates that would have to happen eventually anyway.

Paul Mason's response to the Facebook-CA controversy was to suggest three ways forward: Regulation, breakup and nationalisation. Mason argues that, in each major region, Facebook could be broken into several competing platforms - with public ownership of at least some of the 'technical infrastructure' that supports social technology.

The idea is no more radical than public ownership of highways or rail networks, or municipal oversight of local high streets or planning. With democratic oversight, there could at least be a little more hope for a regulatory system that protects a person from exploitation.

For some this will be too much to ask. And yet, offline people have tolerated the rise of the surveillance society in the name of public safety - letting authorities install cameras in public spaces to watch your movements, to track money and correspondence.

Online and off, this surveillance - and the data generates - is being outsourced along with our public spaces. And even the invasiveness of surveillance isn't comparable to what can be harvested online.

This matters, because privacy is about far more than what it is often reduced to: getting away with wrongdoing. Privacy is about defending yourself from coercion and manipulation by powerful bodies - governmental and private, and even peer pressure.

And, we are discovering, privacy also guards a commodity you possess that may ultimately be more valuable than your labour: data.

In essence, this is not just about invasion of privacy but also theft of property. We are learning that everything we know about how people live is crucial data, not just economically, but for the development of all next generation technology and decision-making.

That is so much for the economic questions - for how we adequately protect the right's of citizens to consent, and to ensure their power over, what they posses that is of economic value to the community.

But what are the consequences for free speech and free assembly? What will be the fall out of demanding the owners of privately owned digital public spaces, like social media, become liable for what is said there?

As it stands online public spaces are subject to the same government regulation as offline - and this has already been seen in a number of cases involving things said on social media platforms. So regulation and enforcement of behaviour does exist.

What is it that we are asking private companies to do in terms of becoming liable? How are they going to enforce the law online? Offline, private companies running public spaces and it is not clear that not enough has been done to ensure that public liberties remain free from infringements.

The next steps must be careful. People must have control over their data, of such huge economic and technological value. People must be free to assemble, to talk and to protest. But both of these be balanced with safety.

People's data must be secure. People must be protected from harassment and abuses of free speech. The next steps must be cautious, with responsibility as the byword.

Corbyn and the Labour Party pass their first big challenge - showing solidarity against the government's trade union bill

Trade Unions led this summer's London Tube Strike over the safety concerns tied up in the extension of services to running 24 hours. Photograph: Tube Strike by Barney Moss (License) (Cropped)

Today saw the second reading of the Conservative government's trade union bill. This was the first debate on the controversial measures, aimed by the government at stopping what they have called 'endless' strike threats. Following a morning on which Jeremy Corbyn's new shadow cabinet had been announced (May, 2015), Labour was in need of an issue on which they could present a united front.

If an opposition, particularly a progressive opposition, has any role at all it is to challenge power and the way it is used. The trade union bill presented the first, very early, opportunity for the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn to do just that. The measures to be debated included an extension - up to two weeks - of the notice required before strikes can be held, allowing employers the use of agency workers to cover striker shifts, and mandatory identification to be worn by picketers with their details to be provided to police (BBC, 2015).

The reading of the bill by minister Sajid Javid met a hostile reception from the beginning, with Caroline Lucas and Dennis Skinner setting the tone. The Conservative position was that their proposed regulations were aimed at stopping a malign minority of trade unionists forcing strike action - damaging to the livelihoods of other workers -  upon the broader general public (BBC, 2015{2}).

Elements of the bill were criticised by influential Conservative backbencher David Davis (Mason, 2015; Casalicchio, 2015). Davis described measures requiring strikers to identity themselves and provide details to police as more suited to Franco's Spain than "Queen Elizabeth II's Britain". Yet during the debate itself, Davis argued that the bill, stripped of its illiberal elements, would tackle one of the side effects of public sector monopoly, that withdrawal of public sector labour means withdrawal of the service - deeply inconveniencing the lives of the wider public.

However, human rights groups have described the bill as a dangerous restriction upon the human and democratic rights of workers that, in particular, makes it 'easier for the Government to be a bad employer' (Ogilvie, 2015). The bill has also been described as a vindictive attack on civil liberties, by Liberal Democrat former business secretary Vince Cable and the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress Frances O'Grady (Taylor, 2015; Cable & O'Grady, 2015).

Through first the Liberal Party and later the Labour Party, trade unions in the UK have sought better rights and protections for people in the workplace. In the early years that meant a mix of support of parliamentary candidates and organisation of large strikes. Yet over the years - though with some periods of resurgence - time lost to industrial action has dwindled to give way to negotiation and under the restraints of increases in trade union legislation (Bienkov, 2015).

The ability of public sector workers to strike, with an impact on the wider public, is part of the right to strike. As private sector strikes challenge the interests of their employers, in the form of their accumulation of profits from labour, public sector strikes challenge the interests of their employer, the government, in the form of their votes dependent upon public satisfaction. With employers holding an unequal power in being able to withhold employment upon which the lives of workers depend, it is not unfair that workers to also be able to withhold benefits from their employer - in fact it is recognised as a human right (Ewing, 2015).

Whatever the differences between the factions within the Labour Party that Jeremy Corbyn has been elected to lead, opposition to anti-union tactics likened to those of dictators - a poignant example of a disturbing conservative trend of attacking human rights, suspending liberties supported by legal aid or social security, and even naming opposition parties as a risk to national security (Dearden, 2015) - provides an easy point of agreement.

If the role of opposition - and the roots of what it means to be on the Left - is to challenge power, attempts to restrict liberty of peaceful protest and civic dissent should be able to unite the Labour Party. Especially since opposition to the bill has been supported across progressive parties, by Labour, Green and also Liberal Democrat MPs - whose leader Tim Farron said that the bill attacked trade unions who stood up "for workers' rights" and protected "against workplace abuse and bullying" (Farron, 2015).

There is no rule against being constructive in opposition. But a majority government has little need of aid in pursuing its agenda. Corbyn's first day has seen Labour taking a stand, showing some solidarity with the trade union movement - which alone is admittedly a small victory. And yet, it is the small victories and acts of solidarity out of which a larger labour movement is built.

Manchester Pride is a symbol of the campaign for individual liberty that is only sustainable with greater economic equality

Manchester Pride has grown to be a bright and gleeful reminder of the advances made in the struggle for the freedom of identity. The Pride parade has become a city-wide carnival celebration of the acceptance of difference (BBC, 2015).

Yet the liberty that the parade lauds is a fragile thing. It can only survive so long as the society around it is willing to support the capacity of its citizens to exercise that freedom. In the long run, that means support for more than free association. It means supporting the economic equalities and opportunities that makes the so-called 'luxury' of choice a realistic possibility.

The present political era has been described as a 'liberal age' (Payne, 2015). With the general paucity of success for liberal political parties, that might seem to be a bit of a grand statement. Yet it reflects the astounding success of social liberalism in society.

The liberties of the individual have been widely accepted - as Manchester Pride shows. When Ireland embraced equal marriage, in an emphatic plebiscite that was signed into law on Saturday (The Irish Times, 2015), it left only Italy as a hold out for the old ways in Western Europe (Kirchgaessner, 2015).

Yet, as touched upon in Nick Clegg's resignation speech, the advance of these freedoms is fragile in the face of 'fear and grievance' (Lindsay, 2015). These strong emotions follow an historical pattern, with tough times, caused by an economic crisis, leading to fraught social disputes and hearts turning inwards towards tribalism - just when a broader social solidarity is called for.

In the age of austerity, these problems are exacerbated by the inequalities that the austerian system promotes. Concentrations of wealth (Piketty, 2013; Naidu, 2014), the strains of globalised competition and the slashing of social security only reinforce these fears and tribalism (Rivera, 2014; Washington, 2013).

Few organisations epitomise this modern struggle and contradiction so fully as the European Union. It champions social liberalism, supporting the liberation of the individual from the ideological chains of the state, even as it is itself used by nationally conservative parties as a vehicle for the fiscally conservative policies of austerity.

On the one hand, in Italy there is pressure from European institutions for the country to meet the basic rights of its citizens over issues of identity and gender - against pretty stern resistance in places like Venice (The Guardian, 2015). Yet on the other hand, Greece has been struggling under heavy fiscal pressure applied by the European 'Troika' (Fazi, 2015) - largely against the democratic voice of Greek citizens (Monbiot, 2015).

The trouble for this liberal age is that it's happening side-by-side with an age of conservative economics - and all of the success won by social liberalism is under threat from it. Without strong social security safety nets, with people burdened by servitude as a way of life, they have little time to find, let alone make the most of, opportunities - and that takes away their capacity to make choices for themselves.

The Manchester Pride parade, with its lights, music and colour cheered on by the citizenry, is the symbol of a modern, progressive society - and a social solidarity stretching beyond simple tribalism. The spirit of solidarity symbolised by the Pride festival - even with it's imperfections (Amelia, 2015) - is needed now in the struggle against a conservative economic supremacy that, by taking away the social security, threatens the freedoms of all citizens.

Liberal Democrat Leadership Election: Who's who and what do they stand for?

The Liberal Democrat leadership election is the first step to recovery for a party whose voice is being missed in the campaign to protect human rights in Britain.

After the party's electoral collapse in May, the Liberal Democrats have run an accelerated campaign to elect a new leader to replace Nick Clegg. Voting will come to an end on 15th July and the results will be announced the following day.

Clegg's resignation has, dramatic as it was following the party's disastrous election night, been seen as a long delayed inevitability (Wintour & Watt, 2015). Ultimately, the decision to go into coalition with the Conservatives seems to have been something from which the party could not recover.

And yet, early indications suggest that the party nonetheless possesses an enduring appeal. Their presence is already being missed in the defence of civil rights and liberties (The Guardian, 2015), and council bye-elections are already being won (Steerpike, 2015).

However, their collapse has raised a question within the party, one that has importance for all of the parties across the Centre-Left (Kettle, 2015). Is the response to the election loss to move Left and embrace more idealistic positions, or to move Right and try to win voters away from the Conservatives directly?

For the Liberal Democrats this has been distilled into the nominated candidates. The candidate representing continuity with Clegg, seen as the Centrist and Centre-Right wing of the party which is concerned with being a practical party of government, is Norman Lamb. The more Left-leaning candidate, which in the case of the Lib Dems means embracing its campaigning and grassroots tendencies, is Tim Farron.

Norman Lamb

Norman Lamb served in the last government as a Minister of State for Care and Support, a position he pursued with a personal passion. He has made a point of vociferous campaigning on issues of mental health, and was deeply involved in the party's aims of putting mental health onto an equal footing with physical health (Lamb, 2015).

Lamb is very much the designated heir of the Centrist liberal faction that took the party into the Coalition - something reflected in the endorsements he has received, which include Clegg's closest supporter and former party leader Paddy Ashdown (Lindsay, 2015). Little can symbolise that more distinctly in the minds of voters than the fact that Lamb voted for the Coalition reforms to tuition fees (BBC, 2010).

So far Lamb has argued that the party should not retreat to its comfort zone (Lamb, 2015{2}), a sentiment likely reflected by those in the liberal centre. Yet, at the same time he argued for new ways to tackle economic inequality that are not based on old models of redistribution - singling out mutuals and social enterprises as things that liberals 'instinctively' support.

Tim Farron

Tim Farron remained aloof of the government during the last parliament, during which he served as the party president - a position from which he was often a voice critical towards the coalition (Greenwood, 2015). As might be expected, he voted against the coalition tuition fee changes (BBC, 2010).

The MP for Westmoreland and Lonsdale has received the endorsement of the party's more radical, campaigning, Left - including former leader David Steel, who was very critical of how the Coalition was handled (Steel, 2015) - and the leaders of the Welsh and Scottish Lib Dems (Perraudin, 2015). He also, notably, has the endorsement of both The Guardian and the New Statesman (The Guardian, 2015{2}; New Statesman, 2015).

Farron's main distinctive positions came up in the debate between the candidates at 2015 Conference of the Social Liberal Forum group (Lindsay, 2015{2}). He displayed his openness to liberals increasing taxes to fund public services and expressed a willingness, should he become leader, to not get into conflicts with the party conference policy making processes. Farron has also stressed his intention of rebuilding the parties grassroots and so increasing party membership 100,000 by 2020 (Farron, 2015).

Quiet establishment man or the problematic firebrand?

Voices in the social liberal and liberal centre wings of the party have their own reasons for leaning either way. Those in the liberal centre argue that there is value in the consistency of remaining in the Centre, from which the party's only opportunities to make its policies a reality will come through coalition with the Conservatives or with Labour (Tall, 2015).

For social liberals, however, there were important things ignored by the party leadership from 2010 onwards (Howarth, 2015; Smith, 2015). They argue that the leadership abandoned the radical Left-of-Centre causes and ideals, upon which they had been elected, in favour of a Centrist coalitionism - built around stability, unity and the embrace of a Toryism-lite - for which they had no mandate and were duly punished.

The Guardian has argued that there is a need for a figure who can lead a 'charismatic insurgency' (The Guardian, 2015{2}). But there are also warnings against the danger of traumatised parties electing 'feel good', comfort zone, candidates (Kettle, 2015). That need for a comfort zone candidate may factor in if there is felt to be a strong need to distance the party from the previous leadership and its direction.

One way of ensuring that distance could be embracing the rebranding of the party, with talk going around of a possible name change. Changing the name of the party could be a powerful moment upon which to hang the interviews and coverage that would make clear how the Lib Dems have heard their critics and responded (Withnall, 2015). In that case, Tim Farron's detachment from the Coalition would seem to make him the more ideal candidate - and he has certainly floated the idea of a fresh start (Farron, 2015{2}).

Yet there remain lingering reservations about Farron, in regards to his seemingly anti-liberal personal stances on a number of pressing social issues from abortion to gay rights (Birrell, 2015). With the party desperately needing to regain trust and a consistent identity, his own inconsistency could well factor against him and the party.

Though Farron might suggest that these personal standings should have no bearing, it is hard to escape an overriding feeling that there is also a decision to be made between the candidates' different characters: the quiet and practical, though establishment, man or the problematic firebrand. It's as if liberals are once more being faced with the spectre of siding with Asquith or Lloyd George. A more easily unifying figure would have been preferable, such as Jo Swinson - who would surely have been a leading candidate had she retained her East Dunbartonshire seat.

Rebuilding trust

In The Guardian, back in 2006, the late Charles Kennedy argued that:

"Fewer people are joining political parties, yet single-issue pressure groups continue to flourish. Mass international movements - from opposition to the war in Iraq to last year's Live 8 - demonstrate how great issues and principles can still motivate on a huge scale. But somehow our current political culture seems unable to accommodate and address such concerns...

...The danger in all of this is that if sufficient people conclude that there is nothing in the conventional political process for them then they may opt for more simplistic and extreme options on offer. I remain an optimist. But across the mainstream political spectrum there is a candid recognition of the danger."

For Liberal Democrats, and liberals generally, this has become a matter of great importance. Regardless of who becomes party leader, their first task must be to regain political trust. That means carving out a distinctive position that the whole party can comfortably adhere to and, importantly, campaign on. It means opening the party to working with others for electoral and political reform and encouraging a progressive alliance, even if only informally.

From a pragmatic point of view, those will likely remain the priorities - for the moment at least. Anything else might simply lead to a division that would strip the party of any credibility it has left, which means that neither candidate is likely to pick a fight with the supporters of the other. As a result, the issues that arise between the Centre and Left strands of liberalism are likely to go unresolved in the present. This election will instead be about who leads, rather more than to what they lead the party.

Rainbow celebration needs to fuel fresh momentum in the long struggle to create societies that take consent seriously

Photograph: Rainbow American via photopin (license) (cropped)

In two terms, mired in partisan politics bitterly divided between Liberals and Conservatives, US President Barack Obama has struggled to give his administration a definitive identity. A pair of Supreme Court (SCOTUS) rulings from the past week have certainly helped make that task a little easier.

The first Supreme Court ruling ensured the continued existence of Obama's flagship healthcare reforms, for the near future at least (Roberts & Jacobs, 2015). The ruling decided that the Federal government could deliver its affordable health insurance plan in all fifty states.

The second ruling confirmed equal marriage as a constitutional right (Roberts & Siddiqui, 2015). That means that in all fifty states same-sex couples will have the right to marry, and that marriages from other states have to be recognised.

These rulings, lauded as successes by Obama (Jacobs, 2015), have been heralded as a triumph for liberalism and individual freedoms, over the conservatism of the established social order. Along with having earlier overseen the end of the ban on openly gay military service (McVeigh & Harris, 2011), these rulings have made civic equality into a major theme of the Obama administration.

Although there clearly is still resistance, some of which has been aggressively intolerant (Butterworth, 2015), people will adapt. But that doesn't mean that the work is over. Combined, these steps have established a new social plateau, which represents a renewed acknowledgement of the rights of consenting adults to live on equal terms with their peers. Yet, those who have won equal marriage will still face discrimination and legal hurdles (Roberts and Siddiqui, 2015; Buncombe, 2015).

Though by themselves these rulings are huge victories for human rights, civil rights and individual liberty, they also represent smaller parts of a broader human struggle, towards the attainment of respect for consent as a central human value.

The ideal of a representative democracy is based around consent. Government by the consent of the governed, laws created with the consent of those who have to abide by them, economics with the consent of the community, and social interactions with the consent of the participants.

Without the removal of coercion and fear, whether from economic conditions in which you cannot afford to get ill or from social conditions where you cannot openly define your own identity due to discrimination, there can be no civic participation on the basis of consent. Without liberty from coercion and fear, there can be no free choices.

To get there, the Supreme Court rulings need now to be the inspiration for the next step (Thrasher, 2015). They are breakthroughs in their own right and just cause for celebration, but that energy and solidarity needs to be poured into renewed motivation to keep moving forward.

Conservative Queen's Speech offers some relief to Human Rights campaigners, but also holds new threats to civil liberties

The State Opening of Parliament took place in Westminster today, amongst all of the usual pomp and circumstance. At centre stage of the whole event was, as usual, the Queen's Speech - aka the Speech from the Throne. Accompanied by the government's full 103-page list of bills and notes - and through the traditional though slightly odd process of having a monarch read out the government's plans, largely in their words, like a celebrity giving an advertising endorsement - the Queen announced the Cameron ministry's 26 main legislative objectives for the coming Parliamentary session (Sparrow, 2015).

Alongside some of the expected promises, like an EU Referendum and a more conservative approach to addressing immigration and extremism - along with harsher rules for trade union strike action - there is also some fairly positive news and some news that is less so for those concerned about changes to the Human Rights Act, and to our civil rights and liberties (The Guardian, 2015).

The most notable absence from the speech was a firm commitment to scrapping the Human Rights Act (Wintour & Mason, 2015). In the speech, the commitment has been watered down to bringing forward proposals - meaning that there is likely to be, at the least, a consultation period lasting some years before any legislation is produced.

If so, that would mark a huge first success for the opposition to David Cameron's government. Campaigners for the Human Right Act have been very vocal from the day that Cameron took office and it looks like the message has gotten through.

However, human rights campaigners will have a new task on their hands with the return of the snooper's charter - long resisted by the rights and liberties protecting efforts of the Liberal Democrats (Wintour, 2015). Progressives will be hoping for an extension of the campaign to protect human rights to also cover civil liberties, as the proposed Investigatory powers bill - allow the tracking of communications data - returns to the table greatly expanded (Travis, 2015).

There is hope that progressives can succeed. The pressure they have brought to bear so far, in only a short time in opposition, may well have successfully delayed attempts to tamper with the Human Rights Act for years. Now that the campaign to protect our guaranteed rights has made a significant breakthrough, the next big effort will be to protect our civil liberties.