flamingos

Keir Starmer’s Government has pledged to tackle loopholes in Britain’s political funding system, amid growing concerns over foreign interference in UK political parties.

MPs debated the “urgent need” to reform political finance rules on Thursday, as public trust in political parties remains at record lows.

The debate followed warnings from multiple independent bodies, including the Intelligence and Security Committee and the Committee on Standards in Public Life, about the dangers of unchecked political donations.

Political finance regulations have come under intense scrutiny in recent years — and are a national security issue given Russia’s intense disinformation and influencing campaigns to destabilise Western democracies.

It has also been given fresh urgency by suggestions that Donald Trump ally and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is considering giving up to $100m (around £80m) to Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK party.

Transparency International UK notes there is “widespread evidence” of opaque donations, foreign interference, and unchecked big money influencing elections.

Research from the non-profit campaign group revealed that nearly £1 in every £10 donated to political parties since 2013 comes from unknown or questionable sources.

Today the UK Government has announced plans to open up the Land Registry – which, if delivered, will finally reveal more about who owns land in England and Wales.
[…]
Currently, it costs £7 to view a single land title register, and with 24m land titles registered, it would cost a member of the public £168m to find out who owns all of England and Wales. If the Government’s shift in policy towards the Land Registry is enacted, this should result in search fees dropping to zero – though it would require a Minister to table secondary legislation in Parliament to do so. Search fees comprise just 5.3% of the Land Registry’s income, with the vast majority of their revenues coming from conveyancing costs from people buying homes.

Maps of who owns land in England are even harder to access currently. Since 2017, the Land Registry has published large datasets listing the land and property owned by UK and overseas companies, but hasn’t released accompanying maps. In future, if the datasets were published with unique geographical identifiers for each address, called INSPIRE IDs, it would allow campaigners to map them – thereby revealing, for example, if developers are land banking.

I am concerned that, without rapid, targeted intervention at legislative level, the OSA will have a unwarranted and detrimental effect on the plurality of sites and services available to people in the UK, and impede and put at risk people running sites and services in the UK, for no material impact on the safety of people in the UK.
[…]
The OSA has an adverse unwarranted impact on a plethora of providers of small, low-risk services.

We are talking here of bloggers with comments sections, a small hill-walking forum or runners club, a discussion board for a scout troup or local gardening society, of people running a small fediverse service or code forge, or even a family’s shared calendar or photo-sharing tool.

These services are often run by volunteers, in their spare time. Many services have run for years without a problem.

These providers - primarily but not exclusively in the UK, since that is where the OSA’s risk and burden is felt most strongly - are subject to obligations to carry out multiple risk assessments, to adopt or amend terms of service, and to have in place OSA-specific policies and processes.

Worse, the OSA is not written in an accessible, intelligible way.

It is as if the OSA overlooked entirely people who run their own services for friends or family, or who have created small community services.
[…]
There is a simple solution to this unnecessary complexity and regulatory burden:

• Exclude from the scope of Part 3 small (e.g. 15,000 monthly users or fewer, with clarity needed around “user”) services, where the provider has a reasonable belief that the service is of no or low risk; and

• Simultaneously giving Ofcom the power to impose a positive obligation on a provider, by notice to the provider, to engage with some or all of the OSA if, acting on evidence, Ofcom considers that the service poses more than low risk and imposing an obligation to engage is necessary and proportionate to that risk.

Toot

Archive

Apple is stepping up its fight with the British government over a demand to create a “back door” in its most secure cloud storage systems, by filing a legal complaint that it hopes will overturn the order.

The iPhone maker has made its appeal to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, an independent judicial body that examines complaints against the UK security services, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Silicon Valley company’s legal challenge is believed to be the first time that provisions in the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act allowing UK authorities to break encryption have been tested before the court. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal will consider whether the UK’s notice to Apple was lawful and, if not, could order it to be quashed.

The case could be heard as soon as this month, although it is unclear whether there will be any public disclosure of the hearing. The government is likely to argue the case should be restricted on national security grounds.

The Press Recognition Panel (PRP), an independent body which oversees the only official independent press regulator Impress (as opposed to the larger self-regulator Ipso), has just published its ninth annual report on the effectiveness of the press regulation system set up in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry into misconduct in the press.

It currently does not compel publishers to join the state-backed regulator on misconduct — but the so-called Section 40 axed last year would have enabled that to happen.

The report argues that while recent high-profile legal cases brought by celebrities such as Hugh Grant and Prince Harry have led to settlements and substantial payouts, the vast majority of victims of press abuse cannot afford to pursue justice and redress in the face of powerful and influential media owners. A system of independent — but enforceable — regulation would allow low-cost redress for those victims, according to the PRP.

Examples of press intrusion and harm highlighted in the report include CCTV footage of a fatal hit and run being posted on a news publisher’s website for “clickbait”, journalists informing siblings on the doorstep of the death of their brother in a terrorist attack, and news outlets falsely accusing people of murder.

“No other industry, including broadcast journalism, enjoys the privileges and protections that ‘news publishers’ enjoy in law,” the authors argue, adding: “However, these protections and privileges are not balanced by responsibility or accountability.”

News publishers are not required to participate in independent press self-regulation, which has resulted in a fractured and incoherent system.
[…]
But all the major national titles have instead opted to set up their own complaints processes or join the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), which does not meet the criteria for an independent regulator — in part as it is dominated by the newspaper editors it is meant to oversee.

According to the analysis, between 2018 and 2022, IPSO investigated just 3.82% and upheld 0.56% of the eligible complaints it received, far lower than the proportion of cases upheld by Impress.

The PRP’s report notes that news publishers often cite concerns around the impact of regulation on freedom of the press as one of their reasons for not joining a regulator which meets the criteria for independence.

But the PRP argues that members of Impress undertake “high-quality investigative journalism without any constraint from the regulator” — as long as they can justify their actions as being in the public interest.

Broadcasters also undertake high-quality, award-winning investigative journalism despite being subject to statutory regulation under Ofcom.

Skeet

In an abrupt about-face, King Charles III of the United Kingdom announced on Monday that he was downgrading Donald J. Trump’s upcoming state visit to lunch with Prince Andrew.

Instead of Windsor Castle, where the state visit was to be held, the lunch between Andrew and Trump will now occur at a Pizza Express restaurant in Woking.

According to royal sources, Andrew was “incandescent with rage” when his older brother informed him of the engagement, but the King told him, “Sorry, chap, you’ve got to take one for the team.”

After Andrew asked what he and Trump could possibly talk about over their pizza, Charles suggested, “Maybe you two can reminisce about your good times with Jeffrey Epstein.”