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.

There's no such thing as politics without ideology - only policy made in the context of hidden or unexamined assumptions

George Osborne and Tony Blair took some time out of their busy, and well-paid, post-government lives to talk to a conference in Dubai about the "moderate, pro-business, socially liberal, internationalist" gap at the 'centre of politics'.

The centre that both have in the past claimed and which both have claimed to be a non-ideological space. It's a common claim, mostly levelled at Labour and it's Bennite left-wing, which Theresa May has used against both them and the EU.

But the use of 'ideology' as a pejorative misses one crucial thing: there's no such thing as politics without ideology - just policy made within the context of hidden or unexamined assumptions.

So what is an ideology? In short, it it comprised of: a philosophy of what the world is, an ethics of how people should behave in that world, an ideal of how society should function, and a politics laying out how to get there.

Politics is active element of ideology. It represents the structures, or absence of them, intended to shape society in a particular way, towards particular outcomes.

Comprehending this is crucial to understanding the Tories' time in government. While accusing their opponents of abandoning the centre for polarisation they oversee policies that, from a progressive perspective, have impoverished working people amid widening inequality.

When the evidence appears to be staring us in the face, when it seems so obvious to progressives, and yet conservatives do not see it, there has to be a bigger picture. That is ideology.

Consider the government's housing policy, born during the Coalition. The plan was to convert social housing into affordable housing, to support private sector house building with a higher rent threshold, thereby saving taxpayers money by reducing government housing spending.

This came with the acknowledged cost of a rise in housing benefit payouts, but it was believed that it would balance out in the public favour. It was, in basic, an attempt to shift an expenditure off the public books.

Yet the move in favour of privatised house building has not delivered for ordinary people. If there are benefits to tax payers, they are not balancing out the rise in average rents that has come with the collapse in social housing construction.

The government pursued a similar course with tuition fees. The cost of higher education was shifted onto the shoulders of students. This private, regulated, debt burden was deemed manageable by the Treasury and preferable to it contributing to the the national debt.

That demonstrates a rather cavalier attitude to private debt and Theresa May recently promising a review shows the government is feeling the need to moderate it's position against pushback from opposition.

So why continue with such policies - on housing, on tuition, on healthcare, on welfare, on so many core parts of society - even after it seems so clear, to progressives at least, that it isn't working and people are suffering?

The only sensible answer is ideology - the belief that the pain is a transitional phase, in a journey towards an ultimately more beneficial light at the end of the tunnel. Or, more darkly, that the pain is the point.

Spring Statement: Even with the deficit reduced, the Tories continue to sacrifice the present and future of ordinary people

Photograph: NATO Summit Wales 2014 by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (License) (Cropped)

On Tuesday, the Chancellor Philip Hammond is set to mark the end of the financial year with the government's report at the Spring Statement - and will perhaps mark the near elimination of the budget deficit.

This month has already seen his predecessor and former boss, George Osborne and David Cameron respectively, pat each other on the back for setting in motion the policy of wiping out the deficit that Hammond has overseen in it's latter stages.

With the deficit is reduced, and a bumper year of tax receipts as well, surely austerity can be eased now? No, is the answer from the Chancellor. There will be no new spending because there is still a debt to pay off. So says the Chancellor.

As a result, the Spring Statement is set to be a plain response to the Office of Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) biannual forecast - and will likely be taken as an opportunity for the Conservative government to revel a little. However, Hammond is expected to be as cautious as ever.

In 2013, then Prime Minister Cameron told the gold plated, black tie, Lord Mayor's Banquet that austerity should become a permanent feature for ever - to produce a 'leaner' and 'more efficient' state that could be afforded in the long term.

That isn't good enough for the worst off. As with the closing of the coal mines in the 1980s, austerity is slashing the state and gambling on the private sector picking up the slack - and perhaps the pieces of those people whose lives were shattered and were left to fend for themselves.

Yet the Conservatives double-down on austerity every time - even when their doesn't really chime well with reality. For instance, the current budget has largely been in balance - taking day-to-day spending against tax revenues - for years. And the national debt is not the product of reckless public spending, but of quantitative easing (nationalising huge corporate financial debt to save the banks) and borrowing to invest in the future.

However, the Conservatives have pursued balancing spending both for the present and for the future against current receipts. They have managed to nearly eliminate this definition of the deficit - but they have done so on the backs of the poor, sacrificing their present and the future for their children in the process.

Squeezing both present and future spending into today's tax receipts makes today harder for the worst off, while hurting our ability to lay the ground ready for the future - especially since borrowing for long term infrastructure investment is so efficient.

The present fiscal situation is not exactly a resounding success story either. The Conservative plan is long beyond it's target year and still borrowing around £40bn a year for investment. And, while growth has helped, it is a very minor up tick to 1.5% - which is simply less bad than thought. The same goes for productivity.

For the Chancellor, this appears to be a sign of work still to do. But there are questions that need answers. There is still a shortage of homes. A necessity for food banks. Household debt being driven by a struggle to afford even necessities.

The Chancellor is flying in the face of opinion by pursuing debt reduction over ending austerity. Economic growth has been strangled and the UK national debt is not proving to be very worrying to anyone. He has room to manoeuvre.

But Hammond is the model of a fiscal conservative. He wants rid of the debt and to put something aside for a rainy day. That means another £40bn or more is still to be cut from public spending - either through budget cuts or raised in taxes.

At the weekend came the news that around a £1bn went unspent from the housing and local government budgets - which was ostensibly for building affordable homes - and was recouped by the treasury.

While there are people asking why was this money not spent and if it will it be reinvested in building affordable homes, the reality is that it simply be squirrelled away for the rainy day fund.

It is telling, perhaps, that the Chancellor and the Government don't seem to see this as a rainy day - perhaps looking gloomily ahead to the impact of Brexit? But there are many people out there in the real world who may very well disagree.

It is understandable to rule out major changes to taxation and rules - the IFS were among those recommending it stop. Doing so twice a year is a lot to keep up with. However, no one struggling under the burden of austerity is looking for a complicated readjustment of fiscal rules and tax brackets.

For those who have carried the burden of getting to this point, they want a little more support. A little more investment, or cheap credit, that could create a few more opportunities. Some surety of a roof over their heads and a means of putting food on the table. Care they can rely on when they're ill or retire. None of this should be considered too much to ask.