The UK general election is only a month or so away. If you are from the UK or keeping up with our news you will know that in recent polls conducted it seems that we may be on course for a hung parliament - with no party in overall control.

Tying back into my earlier article about the need for political reform, in particular the point about how Parliamentary debates are scheduled and squashed according to Government whim, this week brought us a leaked memo from the BPI concerning the Digital Economy Bill. The BPI, a music industry lobbying organisation, claims that MPs are "resigned" to the fact that they will not be allowed to debate the bill or give it detailed scrutiny. They cite an expert on legislation as saying that the bill would be likely to die if MPs insisted on examining the legislation in detail before voting on it - i.e. doing their job. It seems that the BPI are fairly confident that our MPs won't bother to do their jobs properly any more now that this Government is almost done. I hope that they are wrong.

The music industry is celebrating today after the House of Lords voted through an amendment to the controversial Clause 17 of the Digital Economy Bill. Civil liberties campaigners are less impressed with this outcome. The Digital Economy Bill has been a source of concern since it was first put forward; Liberty, Index on Censorship and the Open Rights Group (of which this site's editors are members) have campaigned against the bill, and Talk Talk have raised awareness through their site Don't Disconnect Us. We first wrote about our concerns with the Bill back in December. Since then the protest has gained momentum, with not only well-known privacy activists like Cory Doctorow adding their voices to the mix, but also professionals within the music industry. Billy Bragg , protest singer and co-founder of the Featured Artists Coalition, told Mark Thomas, "Perhaps the high-end artists are losing out, but for people down my end of the industry [file-sharing] helps, it spreads the word. The potential for artists is really incredible - stuff comes into the charts that hasn't even been promoted by the record industries, and they find that very frustrating."

Yesterday evening I went to an event run by ResPublica, a Tory public policy think-tank (their website says non-partisan, but everyone I spoke to on the night knew that it was a Tory gig). The event was billed as a 'Liberty and Innovation' speaker event, with Damian Green MP speaking on the subject of civil liberties for the poorest members of society.

I'm not alone in noticing that the Economist are doing a good job of contrasting Conservative rhetoric with the data. The most significant bits of the article for me:

Google have been in the news again with violations of their users' privacy, following the launch of their social networking tool Buzz. The first I saw of this was, unexpectedly, on one of the feminist blogs I read, Fugitivus by Harriet Jacobs.

On 12th March 2010. Andrew Norman, host and organiser of Thimbleberry Music Festival in County Durham, UK is due to appear in Durham Crown Court facing the charge of "permitting the use of cannabis on his premises" relating to alleged use by the festival-goers of cannabis at the last September festival. No-one was, I believe, arrested at the festival. In effect he is to be prosecuted for the alleged offences of other people, who have not themselves been charged, and whose actions were not under his control anyway.

If you've been following our Twitter feed you've probably noticed a few links about electoral and governmental reform mixed in with the more directly relevant stuff lately. I've been spending some time over the last year looking in more detail at the processes and procedures that take place to bring into law stuff such as the swathe of 'anti-terrorism' legislation that we so often end up reporting abuses of, and the more I find out about how our government currently works, the less surprised I am that I felt the need to start this website. I'm also more and more convinced that some fairly fundamental things need to change about the way our political processes and organisations currently work before we will have fixed the actual causes of some of the problems we're facing, rather than just fiddling with the symptoms.

Expand freedom of information. No more ID cards. Stop the creeping intrusion of the database state. These ideas are often seen as exclusively the domain of civil liberties campaigners, who are considered by some politicians as just another vocal minority. The Power2010 deliberative poll put paid to this notion.

A public protest is planned outside the Home Office at noon on Tuesday 15th Dec against the imminent extradition of Gary McKinnon. Gary is being extradited to the USA, where he will face up to 60 years imprisonment for a crime which, if tried in this country, would very likely not warrant a custodial sentence at all.