This Tory Gang Is A Repressive Regime, Exploiting Britain For Its Own Gain

The British government's recent attacks on public sector workers' pleas for fair pay and the right to strike have shocked only those who have not followed the plans of Boris Johnson and a cabal of Conservative Party members, donors and cronies...

Since early 2016, when Johnson and Gove hatched their Brexit plans at a dinner with the wealthy son of a Russian KGB officer, Britain's Conservative Party has been transformed into a vehicle for bending Britain to the will and benefit of a far right cabal under a false banner of 'liberty' and other lies. At stake is power and the ability to allocate vast amounts of public money to their plans, starving everyone else of wealth and power in the process. This is the very opposite of 'liberty' and 'democracy' and has most in common with Orban's regime in Hungary and Putin's regime in Russia. There is hope for ordinary Britons, just as far right experiments have been defeated for now in the US, Australia and Brazil. Yet ultra conservative forces continue to lurk even in those countries. 

The first step was to persuade the masses to decouple Britain from the world's largest trade bloc, not only the UK's biggest external market for goods, services, labour and capital, but also a source of trade rules and standards - many designed by Britain itself - to protect consumers and workers and ensure a level playing field among members of the bloc: all standing in the way of this Tory cabal and their plans. The inevitable blow to Britain's economy (while their hedge fund donors made billions) was key to weakening potential sources of resistance to their plans.

As soon as this gang had a public mandate for destruction, they were able to root out from their ranks anyone who stood in their way. The 2019 election saw the removal of all centrist Tory Members of Parliament who were not prepared to kow-tow to the Enterprise Research Group and a web of conservative 'stink' tanks. 

Once country and party were fully in their hands, Johnson and his gang were free to unlawfully award vast fortunes in contracts to cronies, break international asylum and trade laws, behave as they wished even in the grip of a pandemic while requiring others to follow their rules, threaten any source of resistance in the media; and begin their assault on workers rights (proposing laws only seen in Russia and Hungary), food and other product standards, financial constraints and other checks on greed and corruption, recklessly introducing legislation to rip-out any laws adopted from the EU by the end of 2023 without adequate assessment of the impact. 

That process is still playing out before our very eyes under the false flag of 'liberty' and libertarian ideals that are actually authoritarian in nature and designed to bend Britain's economy and people to the Tories' self-serving whims.

Make no mistake. Sunak and his crew are of the same stamp as Johnson and Gove (mostly the same people). And as Sunak's failure to rein in Johnson's own lucrative speaking tour while still an MP has perfectly demonstrated, they are all in government purely and simply for themselves.

Yet none of the alleged benefits of leaving the EU has ever surfaced. Only the downsides for everyone but the Tories and their donors and cronies. 

It's the biggest electoral fraud in Britain's history, and the most repressive regime this country has seen in modern times.

Whither the UK's Implementation of #PSD2?

It's still a case of 'hurry up and wait' on the transposition of PSD2 into UK law. 

The Treasury had initially said it would issue the consultation paper on transposing PSD2 into UK law in August 2016, but nothing forthcoming as at 3pm today. In mid-October, the Treasury told a stakeholder meeting at the FCA that the paper was "being finalized" with no public explanation for the delay (though one could readily speculate that Brexit related projects might be a key distraction!). 

Officials have my deepest sympathy, but it's a little more frustrating because the European Banking Authority has moved forward with consultation on certain regulatory standards related to strong authentication and communication amongst PSPs, passporting, authorization and so on.

The EBA's proposed standards associated with authentication, in particular, have drawn a fair degree of criticism from the industry and European Parliament, partly for assumptions concerning the nature of payment initiation and account information services, as well as their inflexibility and the extent to which they perhaps give the incumbent 'account servicing' PSPs more control than PSD2 was intended to allow.  It will be interesting to see whether the concerns are reflected in the next iteration, expected in December/January (although they do not take effect until at least October 2018 to allow for development work).

Two Stones, One Bird?

Convenience.

Because most web sites with anything remotely important on them seem to require log-in codes, I keep many different usernames and passwords in my head. Apparently, the average person uses 12 (Independent Extra, 21.11.07, p.8). That's nothing compared to the many phone numbers that we used to remember before we began relying on the directory in our mobile phones and laptops, or Skype. But it hardly aids freedom of movement around the web.

To ease my passage, so to speak, the (worryingly named) Open ID programme would have me replace all my passcodes with a single ID. It would sit in a database somewhere to be checked when I access each participating web site.

Cue another standards battle, and Round 10 between Google, Microsoft et al.

But the people working on the semantic web would say that I shouldn't have to move around the web at all. Their goal is making information "understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web". As I recall the explanation of Dr Nick Gibbins (School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton) at the SCL's Law 2.0 event in September, the key issues are trust and provenance in the information which the computers are being made to understand. Both vary according to the source, time and context in which the information is given, as well as the content itself. You trust Prof Lillian Edwards' view of privacy law, but not her tips on car repair. But rather than drawing on a single ID in a single (hackable) repository somewhere, the computers would rely on a whole range of circumstantial evidence to confirm that the data in question is likely to be true and relevant to you - or in a log-in scenario, that the person whose computer is trying to gain access to a database is you.

Cue another massive battle over standards, but also over ontologies, taxonomies and other elements of the semantic web that are worthy of such top-draw words.

I guess that Open ID may be a stepping stone along the way to the semantic web, in which case we should get on with it. But that does seem like two stones for the one bird. Whereas the semantic web promises convenience without humans having to do all the moving around - so two birds with one stone.

I know which sounds better.