The Labour Party’s proposed policy programme only mentions the digital economy once, and this is to promise more speed, everywhere it can go. There are two internal pressure group style swarms/groups/initiatives looking to do better.  The first is launched by the front bench incubated if not commissioned by the impressive Chi Onawaruh MP, currently shadow spokesperson for the Cabinet Office. This has it’s home at this site, Chi publicised the initiative at in an article at Labour List called How can we make Digital Government work better for everyone?. A great deal of thought has been undertaken in launching this initiative. The second initiative is @LabourDigital, which has a web site, http://www.labourdigital.org, and a now familiar New Labour bit bucket crowd sourcing site. In this case, it’s an email address! I have a companion wiki article, which details the sites and links. As part of this, Prag Rad are running a Digital top of the Manifestoes event which I intend to attend. Having spent some time recently thinking about the EDRi charter, I have come to the conclusion we need policy based on the following slogans.

  • Public Money buys Public Domain (or maybe a copyleft right)
  • Law must be Transparent, the regulator’s code must be free
  • A fair copyright term, it can’t all be enclosed forever

No doubt the third of these will be controversial since the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party voted for the DE Act, but we can but try. (Let’s not fool ourselves, all three will be opposed by big business.)

Policy for Labour on the Digital Economy
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