I have just made a telephone call here in the House of Lords and lying next to the telephone was the confidential briefing that the LibDems have given to their spokespeople on what to say if they are asked about a hung Parliament.

It starts with a stern admonition:

“The only benefit of a debate about a no-overall-control Parliament is if we use it to get across our key policies.

Entering into speculation about the mechanics of a “hung” or “balanced” parliament will simply see you dragged into further complexity.“

And we know that Liberal Democrats cannot cope with complexity.

Apparently, “only if pushed” are LibDem spokespeople supposed to say:

“There will be no deals, understandings or agreements of any kind before peole have voted.  No such conversations have or will take place.”

So what are they hiding?  Why can that only be said, if pushed?

And then they have their mandate line (but still “only if pushed”:

“IF voters decide no party deserves an overall majority, then the party with the strongest mandate will have a moral right to be the first to seek to govern on its own or seek alliances with other parties.“

So that is a nice, unconvoluted, set of words.

And sorry to be a pedant but each voter is an individual casting their ballot in a single constituency – so voters cannot collectively decide that no party should have an overall majority.

And what constitutes the strongest mandate?  Helpfully there is a little Q & A to explain it:

“Q:  Does the ’strongest mandate’ mean more seats or votes?

A:  It will be abundantly clear after the election which party has the strongest mandate.  It would be pointless to speculate at this point as to whether that means seats or votes – we are setting out a principle, not a mathematical formula.“

Errr pardon?  Would you just run that past me again? 

I thought that the Liberal Democrat principle was that we needed electoral reform so that the precise national balance of votes cast was reflected in the numbers elected to Parliament.  But now – despite our so-called unfair voting system – seats matter just as much as votes.

So like all Liberal Democrat principles, this strongest mandate thingee is eminently flexible and Nick Clegg will be open to the best offer on the day …

They might call that a “principle”; I ‘m not sure that I would.

Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former Dame Eliza and Director-General of the Security Service (MI5), gave the Mile End lecture in the House of Lords a few hours ago.  Her topic was “Reflections on Intelligence” and I understand that the text of this will shortly be available on the Parliamentary web-site.

In the Q&A after the lecture one Jack Bauer enthusiast asked her about torture.  She was unequivocal in her reply:

“Nothing – even saving lives – justifies torture.”

She’d earlier made some comments about US “waterboarding” activities at Guantanamo Bay and she added the caustic comment:

“The sad thing is that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush watched “24″.”

Admiral Lord Alan West, the Security Minister, has spoken out today about the cyber-threat that Britain faces.  I am pleased that he has tackled the subject so directly.  Too many businesses and too much of Government have been complacent about what has been happening for years.

When I first started raising the problem in the House of Lords more than five years ago, I was repeatedly assured that there was no significant threat and that the protection around the critical national infrastructure was more than sufficient to fend off any problems.

When I started asking questions of each Government Department about how often their systems had been compromised, it was apparent from the answers that some Departments simply didn’t know.  I was clearly making progress when two years ago, I started being told it was “not in the national interest” to divulge the information.

When I found three reputable penetration-testing companies prepared to check Government systems pro bono, I was assured such external testing was not needed.

Now – at last – the real and present danger of such cyber-attacks is being acknowledged and the necessary systems to combat it are starting to be put in place.  I just hope it is not too little too late.

It is nice to know that debates and questions in the House of Lords have an impact in the outside world.  In June 2005, I asked the following question in the House of Lords:

“Whether the time spent preparing the e-Government Unit’s document, Tomatoes are not the only fruit: a rough guide to taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies and the like, represents value for money.”

This was not, of course, entirely serious, although it did seem to me to be a particularly jargon-led approach to promoting e-government and the wrong approach to making e-government easy and accessible.

I haven’t thought about the matter since then, so I supposed I should be flattered/embarrassed to discover it appearing yesterday in a blog hosted by the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama.  The blog has the catchy title: “Metalogues from the Delta” (I wish I’d thought of that one first) and is subtitled “A Bama SLIS student’s weblog on all things metadata”.

The blog’s first paragraph is a classic:

“While reading Heather Hedden’s “Better Living Through Taxonomies,” I couldn’t help but be reminded of a brief article on taxonomy that circulated about Dr. MacCall’s LS 500 class during my first semester in the MLIS program. Really, how could anyone forget a title like Tomatoes are not the only fruit: a rough guide to taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies and the like?”

And the blog then refers to another earlier blog entitled 

025.431: The Dewey blog

Everything you always wanted to know about the Dewey Decimal Classification® system but were afraid to ask …

Clearly, there is a big academic market out there for Lords debates.

For those who want the original exchange here it is:

e-Government Unit

11.22 am

Lord Harris of Haringey asked Her Majesty’s Government:

Whether the time spent preparing the e-Government Unit’s document, Tomatoes are not the only fruit: a rough guide to taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies and the like, represents value for money.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, yes, the document was published in 2002 by the Office of the e-Envoy, at the request of technical users in government who were new to the subject. It was produced in-house at an estimated cost of less than £100.

Lord Harris of Haringey: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that information. I ask him to congratulate the civil servants concerned on the diligence and speed with which they must have produced 12,000 words and four charts on the subject of Tomatoes are not the only fruit, containing such gems of information as:

“How long has it been for many of us since the primary meaning of the word ‘mouse’ has been ‘a small furry mammal that frightens elephants?’”,

 or the information that carrots can be either salad or root vegetables. That will no doubt come in very helpful in promoting e-government.

Can we also congratulate the authors of the Guide to Meta-Tagging with the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary, which gives another eight pages of valuable advice and information? It includes the information that the phrase “common agricultural policy” may appear under the phrase “European Union” or under “Farming” but will mean the same under both.

Given the diligence of the civil servants in the unit, can the Minister assure the House that the same energy and effectiveness is being applied to delivering information security throughout the public sector? Are such arrangements susceptible, or likely to be susceptible, to external challenge?

Lord Bassam of Brighton:

My Lords, I shall of course pass on my noble friend’s congratulations. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that civil servants are, as we speak, listening carefully to his kind congratulations and warm words.

As to my noble friend’s second point, there is an important issue at root here—I said that with a straight face. The Government are paying careful attention to those information security issues. The document, although it has attracted a certain levity, is, I am sure, most useful to those who work in government IT services.

Earl Ferrers: My Lords, can the Minister not pass on congratulations to the civil servants on producing a document that is completely incomprehensible to a normal person and really does not make any sense at all? Why cannot they learn to write English?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, having looked at the document, which has a modest number of words, I disagree with the noble Earl. I believe that IT users in the business will probably find it very helpful and useful. Certainly, when I read it, I began to understand notions relating to taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies.

Lord Maclennan of Rogart: My Lords, although the use of what the Civil Service calls “controlled vocabulary” may operate as a disincentive to get online  
to the Government, can the Government say whether there has been a significant improvement in access to e-government over the past two years? It was made clear in June 2003 that only one-tenth of the population was using the online e-government services, as compared with 50 per cent of the population in Canada, with its single portal.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, there have been improvements, and I am sure that the e-Government Unit is aware of its role and responsibility in ensuring that those improvements continue. There is an increasing number of visits to government websites and increased participation—as I understand—in www.govtalk.gov.uk. So I believe that people are learning their way around the system.

Lord St John of Bletso: My Lords, would the Minister comment on how successful the OGC has been in implementing Sir Peter Gershon’s e-government efficiency review?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I can only at large and in general say that I believe that there have been improvements. The work of Sir Peter Gershon has been widely welcomed throughout government, and our IT record is one of continued improvement and success.

Viscount Eccles: My Lords, is the Minister aware that if he were unfortunate enough to have cancer of the bladder, medical advice would be that he should eat no more tomatoes? Is that information on the website?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, not that I am aware, no.

Lord Peyton of Yeovil: My Lords, I really wonder whether the noble Lord is aware of the extent to which he has attracted to himself this morning the wholehearted sympathy of the House at the appalling ordeal that he has had to go through in not giving a single answer to a question and really fluffing what he has said beyond the limits of comprehension.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, the noble Lord always makes generous remarks across the House, and I suppose that I have to be the beneficiary of those remarks on some occasions.

I have had a rather scary thought.

This evening there was a meeting of the Labour Peers’ Group.  Now normally I follow a strict rule that I never post on this blog about private meetings I have attended, nor reveal any privileged information I acquire on such occasions.  However, to explain my scary thought I have to reveal just a little about this meeting. (I promise I won’t deviate again.)

This evening’s meeting received an oral briefing from Black Rod, who is amongst other things responsible for security in the House of Lords and about which he was briefing colleagues.

I have just remembered the last time Black Rod (or rather his predecessor) attended a meeting of the Labour Peers. It was for a similar purpose.  And I remember on the previous occasion a number of (very) senior colleagues making scathing remarks about the need for any greater security in the Palace of Westminster (there was no repetition this evening I am pleased to say).

And the date of this previous visit? 

Wednesday 6th July 2005. 

Remember what happened the following morning ……

Scott Charney, the Microsoft Vice President in charge of Trustworthy Computing, is speaking today at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.  He is re-stating both Microsoft’s commitment to “End-to-End Trust” but also the need for business, government and the public to work together to ensure that those using the internet are safe and secure.

The message is an important one: responsibility for internet security has to be shared.  The House of Lords Committee on Personal Internet Security, on which I sat, reported nearly three years ago and used a road transport analogy to make the point: safe road use requires responsible behaviour by drivers and pedestrians, but cars need to have safety features embodied in them, roads themselves need to be well-maintained and properly lit, there need to be laws regulating safe behaviour on the roads (speed limits etc) and those laws need to be properly enforced.

If anything the message has become even more important since our Committee reported.  More and more commercial and personal interactions take place on line.  Social networking sites are booming and an increasing proportion of commerce is conducted via the internet.

The threats to security have also become more pronounced.  The threats are no longer from isolated individuals, but from organised crime and it is also becoming abundantly apparent that some nation states are operating in the same way to infiltrate commercial and government networks for their own purposes.

And the technology itself is developing.  Cloud computing is becoming the norm and this presents its own challenges.  Certainly, this has raised the issue of security for many people (although it is not automatically a given that the security of data held in a cloud is necessarily worse than if it is held on your own servers, particularly if it turns out that they are inadequately protected).

So how do we move forward?

Partnership is certainly essential.  Governments have to work together in setting an international framework for collaboration and for law enforcement.  And at a national level they must also work with IT service providers and with business in general.

But above all, the individual user must be at the heart of all this.  Sensible security arrangements that make sense to the individual have to be devised.  It needs to be acknowledged that most individual users of the internet, whether they are trying to do their weekly shopping or organise their social lives, are rushed and busy.  Moreover, they are not technological experts.  They have inadequate levels of knowledge, so an error message or system alert that makes sense to an IT professional will probably be gibberish to most of us.

And critical to all of this is the need for robust identity management.

Surely, it is not too much to ask that people can feel confident that their personal details are secure, that they can communicate with others secure in the knowledge that the person or organisation with which they are communicating is who it says it is, and that when they are asked to identify themselves they need reveal no more about themselves than is necessary for the transaction concerned.

If today’s discussions at the RSA Conference take us further towards those objectives, we will be making real progress and we can all feel more hopeful that a trusted and secure internet environment is being built.

Each session of Parliament begins with the pageantry of the State Opening, the summonsing of the Commons to the House of Lords by Black Rod and the Queen’s Speech, in which the Monarch lists the Bills that the Government will put before Parliament.

The Sunday Times, however, has revealed secret Tory plans to change all of that. Apparently, there is:

“a radical idea to reform the Queen’s speech”.

The plan is that:

“she should no longer read out the traditional shopping list of bills. Instead, her address at the first state opening of a Cameron government would not mention any specific legislation but would offer a more general message.”

This extraordinary idea would turn the present anodyne statement of proposed legislation into a sort of regal party political broadcast packed with the sort of meaningless feel-good sentiments that Cameron’s Conservatives prefer to clarity about their real plans.  And even at that late stage the public wouldn’t be permitted to know what laws the Tories were intending to put through Parliament.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.  But I wonder what Her Majesty thinks.

The House of Lords has been without a Minister at the Department of Health since Lord Ara Darzi stood down last July to resume his role as a full-time surgeon at Imperial College.  In the intervening time, all health matters in the Lords (and apart from a substantial legislative load there are a huge number of health related questions) have been dealt with by Baroness Glenys Thornton, in addition to her role as a Government Whip.  Finally, after seven months, the position has been rectified with Glenys being appointed as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health.

This is being widely welcomed in the Labour Peers’ Group where her hard work – hitherto unrecognised – leading on Department of Health issues has been much praised.

And it is good to see a former Chair of the Greater London Labour Party being properly rewarded.

My local MP, Lynne Featherstone, who is the LibDems spokesperson for Youth (she describes her age as 58) and Equality, has been put on the spot by the distinguished obstetrician and gynaecologist, Nick Morris.  He has asked her to intervene in the row over Jenny Tonge and to call on Nick Clegg to withdraw the Liberal Democrat Whip from the noble baroness.

New readers start here: Baroness Jenny Tonge, who was Liberal Democrat spokesperson on health in the House of Lords made a public call for the Government of Israel to investigate allegations that Israeli Defence Force medical teams providing humanitarian assistance in Haiti had “harvested” organs from the injured.  This bizarre repetition of the historic blood libel against the Jews provoked widespread condemnation.

Initially, Liberal Democrat Leader, Nick Clegg, stood by her.  But then, as the row went on, showing the consistency and principle for which he is well-known, he sacked her as a Lords’ spokesperson.  However, he did not remove the Liberal Democrat Whip from her, despite her having been sacked before as a LibDem front-bencher for expressing her empathy with Palestinian suicide bombers.

So what stance will the Party’s spokesperson on Equality (who also is an MP with a sizeable Jewish population in her marginal constituency) take on the issue?

Nick Morris starts his letter by pointing out:

“I have voted Lib Dem all my life.” (I suppose somebody has to.)

And goes on:

“My late father Professor Norman Morris was one of the original signatories of the SDP in 1981, but after Baroness Tonge’s most recent outburst I will not be able to vote for your party while Jenny Tonge holds the whip.

The reasons for this are both personal and professional.  My brother David, who is a physician in Montreal was seconded to the IDF hospital in Haiti, along with Canadian Nationals and Columbian Health care workers.  He wrote to me about the great pride he felt in working alongside the Israelis.

He too is a Liberal but lives in Canada – a country where outrageous comments such as those made by the Baroness would be taken much more seriously.  She has slurred not only Israel but also all the health care professionals who went for humanitarian reasons from Canada and Columbia.”

His brother’s account is here.

Nick Morris calls for the Liberal Democrats to remove the Whip from Baroness Jenny Tonge and he urges Lynne Featherstone to take the issue to Nick Clegg for action.

I hope he is not holding his breath waiting for a positive response …..

I am reading “A View from the Foothills” by Chris Mullin.  It is enormous fun, a good read, and entirely convincing about the misery of life as a Junior Minister.

There are also some fascinating asides.

Like this entry from 5th April 2000, recording an encounter in the tea room with Archie Norman, then an MP and Chairman of the Conservative Party, now of course not-an-MP and Chairman of ITV:

“Later, half an hour in the Tea Room with Archie Norman.  He said it costs about £9 million a year to run the Tory party and about another £10 million to run an election. ‘There won’t be any more big poster campaigns because we can’t afford them.’  He added quietly, ‘It is amazing what some people will do for a peerage.  I know stories I could never tell.’”

I wonder what it is he could never tell?

Of course, Cameron’s Conservative’s are spending big on posters at the moment ….

Meanwhile, ConservativeHome records the search for a hundred new Tory peers ….

Now is there a pattern here?