The Slog kicks off a campaign of ‘Vote-fear’ to make internet providers more accountable

I’m sorry Sloggers, but those of you who get a Slogpost update email are going to have to sign up for an RSS link, or simply stick the address – https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/ – in your favourites from now on.

I was more than happy to continue providing this tailor-made service for loyal Slogfans, but Google has decided they don’t want me to, so that’s that. I’m still waiting for a reason, but at the fourth time of asking this morning, I’m kind of giving up hope. I just lost 635 names, with no redress against this authoritarian company.

Once again, I apologise for having been dumb enough to choose Google first as my Blogger supplier (they shut me down) and then as my mail supplier (they switched me off). If you want to contact me privately from now on, the address is

wardslog@ aol.com

One of the things I blog about perhaps more than anything else is accountability. The power to get away with being completely unaccountable to anyone effectively involves nothing more complicated than making a great deal of money, at which point you can safely consider yourself above the law. That is to say exactly, you could still be brought to book, but it won’t be the police, the legal system or the Government that will do it. Murdoch is the best example we’ve had in a long time, although in the 1970s certain elements of the Trade Union movement demonstrated a similar all-powerful influence upon the defenceless. And don’t forget, Murdoch’s son may be trotting back for another lie-detector session in Parliament soon, but not a single member of this Mafia Family or its closest henchmen has yet been tried and gone to jail.

The question of accountability, when placed in the right hands, knows no political bias. The question becomes simple – is this person/organisation acting in an anti-social or socially responsible manner? But once put into the hands of lawyers, it goes without saying, this is a question that can go on ringing up an hourly fees rate for years.

However, such miscreants are extremely easy for most citizens to (a) spot and (b) agree upon their general level of nastiness. The simple reason is that such outfits dump on the ordinary citizen day in, day out. Google is one of them, Microsoft  is another, Newscorp is another still. Broadly, across a spectrum of life in the contemporary West, they can be summarised as follows:

Internet service providers   Phonecos   Government departments   media sites   eurocrats   bankers   the police

They go about their vital work happy in the knowledge that, almost whatever happens, the political, insurance and legal professions will protect them from justice. And this is why, as the title at the head of this piece asserts, the ordinary citizen comes last.

There are just the two exceptions to this general rule: small children, and animals. At least in Britain, the full force of well, everything really, will rain down upon your unfortunate head if you mess in any way with somebody’s kids, or their pets. This was Newscorp’s big mistake. I doubt if any of the others will make the same one in the future, but we can but hope.

Let me give you some examples of the staggering arrogance that exemplifies this sort of unaccountability.

If you ring a microsoft dealer today, he won’t be able to give you the Microsoft telephone number in the UK. He probably won’t know the address of its Head Office. Given the ubiquity of direct delivery and downloading nowadays, he probably isn’t a dealer any more.

If you complain about something forcefully to Orange (or any of its companies) they’ll hit you with an abuse allegation. If you do it again, they’ll blacklist you from all email services. Don’t bother contacting OfCom: it’s a black hole.

When I attacked the New Labour leader in 2009 under my old brand of NotBornYesterday, the web was flooded with lies about both me and the site. In the end, I had to change the name. The Guardian has censored everything I’ve posted at Comment is Free since that time.

If you obtain a politician’s Twitter address and tweet regularly to ask about a lack of progress in their field of responsibility, Twitter will switch you off – for ‘internet abuse’. It’s a key excuse-word, ‘abuse’: all of these buggers use it as a catch-all accusation to frame us all as nutters.

When I wrote an anti-Obama piece about the Bin Laden raid earlier this year, Huffington Post banned me. The reason given was ‘promoting conspiracy theories’. But the piece had nothing to do with conspiracy theory. When I protested and got support, Huffpost leaned on WordPress, and they switched me off. They then hastily retracted this as ‘an error’, since when I’ve had no problems from that quarter.

And of course, my favourite outfit given their form to date, the ‘Do Right’ company, Google. Following on from the Huffpost bollocks above, I understand that the Obama campaign now has a new tactic leading up to election year: every time they Google ‘anti-Obama sites’ and find a new one, they make a ‘hate/abuse’ complaint in force to Google. In fact, Google knows about this….but bans the sites anyway. It’s always a good idea to stay well in with the White House. You see, that’s above the law too.

Google switched off The Slog twice when I was with Blogger. They never replied to any of my requests for information, although they did in both cases eventually restore the service. So for the second time in fifteen months, I moved the site. It cost me over a thousand hits a day, and took me six months to get back to the previous readership level.

A year ago, unauthorised Google ads started appearing on my site. I’ve written, emailed and called Google. Nothing.

Five weeks ago, Google disabled my Gmail account on the grounds of it having been hacked. It took a while before anyone in the silo woke up to my plight: their warped view of life is “He’s been hacked, disable him. Job done, hacker dead”. Hello? Remember me – the innocent victim?

But I was never entirely convinced. Then the week before last, it happened again. I complained. It came back on again, although again the ‘why?’ was never forthcoming.

Last Wednesday, it went again. I don’t think it’s going to come back. I had, by the way, just posted a piece about Obama’s cheek in telling the EU to get its debt in order.

So, what comeback do I, as a citizen of a sovereign State, have against Google. The answer is ‘none’. This is what it says when you go to the disabled Help page:

‘Google wants to ensure that everyone has a chance to safely and securely connect and communicate. To help preserve this environment, Google reserves the right to:

Terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.’

Ah yes, the usual ‘it’s for the good of society really’ bollocks. This camera is staring at you in order to protect you, etc etc etc.

It also tells the now mail-free customers that they probably broke terms of service. But if you click on the TOS info button, it just goes to the blank Google search page.

Anyway, this is what I left there today:

I’ve told you 3 x already what happened.
You clearly have no intention of helping me.
You reserve the right to disable accts without notice.
I don’t see anywhere your right to do so without reason. This makes you unaccountable to the citizen.
Please restore my account as soon as possible.
Sincerely
John Ward

You have to be very polite, do you see, or the abuse charge does for you. It’s a foolproof way of ensuring they can sit all those thousands of feet down in their padded silo, safe in the knowledge that nobody can get at them, and they in turn can’t hear anyone.

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During 2009 and 2010, I had meetings with half a dozen MPs at various levels in an attempt to get ISPs under some degree of control. The responses to my pleas fell into three camps: don’t know what you’re moaning about, I’ll talk to the Minister about it, and once we’re back in power, we’ll address the problem. Nothing has happened. I’ve searched the Hansard site in vain for a reference to the subject. It isn’t there.

This is nothing new, as most of us who are even half-awake know only too well. Most politicians no longer exist to serve the citizen, but rather to make themselves wealthier than they were before being an MP, and to ease the way for important people like Rupert Murdoch, trade unions and property developers to get a hearing. Unless you’re lucky and find a Human Rights lawyer willing to take on a big corporation pooing on people, the legal profession won’t help – the best people in it will be working for the company. And the police – yes, ha-ha, let’s not even go there. The police think they are there to do the bidding of politicians, minority anti-hate groups, and Social Services keen to kidnap another kid they think to be ‘in danger’.

The citizen comes last. Bankers can take all our tax monies paid while doing honest work, but the political class won’t touch them. The Eurocrats will take all our liberties and replace them with mad laws, but the political class is busy up the backside of the US, Turkey, India, and anyone else who might have some money. The Civil Service can rip the citizen off to the tune of £1.1 trillion in illegally obtained pension benefits, but the pinstripes know where the bodies are buried, and so the political class gives them a wide berth too. The politicians themselves can blow £23M on Connecting for Health (the official figure is £14M, but it’s a lie) and not suffer any comeback beyond….a non-executive directorship in a private health group. Hurrah for her.

The three most influential newspaper/media groups in the UK are owned by a foreigner who hates Britain, a Russian who used to work for the KGB, and a shady pair of NonDom twins who live on Sark. Banning any form of foreign, non-taxpaying media proprietor might therefore seem to be in order: the French have always done it. Our political class wouldn’t dream of it.

Security services are above the law because they have a file on every politician and Judge in the UK. The ISPs are above the law, because without them, the security services couldn’t peek and overhear at will. On and on the list goes: the Harmanite wing of Labour can drivel on about minority and/or human rights from now until Domesday: what about the rights of the 90% who have to struggle to make ends meet without even the remotest chance of getting a fair crack of the whip?

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Basically, we are back again to two of The Slog’s biggest hobby-horses: keeping money out of politics, and coming down hard on every form of unwarranted privilege until the Citizen comes first, not last. We won’t get either of those until the political class is forced by vote-fear to do our bidding, rather than the bidding of their mates and/or blackmailers and paymasters.

I know I will get comment threads telling me how to get my Gmail back and why I should be with a privately controlled offshore site host and how the pols will just find another way to make money, but frankly this is to miss the point entirely.

The single biggest reason why the UK’s legislators put the citizen last is because they have no vote-fear at all.

Votes are the only thing in Britain that are equal regardless of age, class, gender or education. Taking the Lord Aschroft to Google tendency and adding them to the political set, I’d estimate that there are about 10,000 of them, and 30 million of us. The political class can insist on sticking with a blatantly unfair voting system designed purely to protect their narrow interests, but that’s the worst they can do to us…..for the time being. Creating vote-fear on a mass scale on the big issues on the internet is the only window left open to those who believe in sensible democracy, and the right to free speech and assembly.

Today, I’m going to start making life difficult for ISPs and internet site giants generally. It’s not necessarily the most important issue in the world, but it’s a start – and it’s a way to show both the pols and the People that nothing is ever ‘hopeless’. Except the financial position of Greece: that is totally and absolutely hopeless.

I’m going to open a new dedicated page called Webollocks. I’d like your support in terms of mailing, tweeting and generally getting the link well known in the blogosphere – and of course, contributing webollocks injustice as and when you find. And I’m going to consider ways to turn this into a very big issue such that vote-fear is created – at the end of which I’d like a compulsory system of easy and open accountability for ISPs and their fellow travellers* on the Statute Book.

Thank you in anticipation.

* Vanessa Redgrave need not apply.