So, the Digital Economy Bill was passed last night by 189 votes to 47 and here in the UK we’re all the poorer for its ill-conceived stategies.

Adapted from PopKulture’s vintage Hangman’s Whip Flickr image

Now I can’t be arsed with file sharing (the Bill’s main bête noire). There was a window when, as part of my Cnut like attempt to stem the tide of middle age, I dabbled with BitTorrent, but then Spotify came along – and I never got into the whole gaming thing.

With no emotional investment in the benefits of file sharing, I guess it’s easier for me to be clear that copyright theft is a problem, and a big one. But it’s also clear that the Bill (#debill) is at best deeply flawed:

1. It’s crazy that it was rushed through ahead of the election
2. Its injunctions seem draconian and, more importantly, simply ineffectual
3. Surely, in the digital age, a complete overhaul of copyright law is needed, not just jumping to the crack of the BPI’s dominatrix whip?

I don’t know enough to talk sense about overhauling copyright law, but many who work on the web are at least aware of proxy hiding techniques, botnets, and a host of other reasons as to why the Bill is more likely to catch innocent bystanders and bit-part-players than those it deems the real demons. I wonder how many of the MPs who voted for the Bill understand this reality? It was the duty of any that don’t understand this stuff to vote against the Bill, not merely abstain from it.

The fact that Stephen Timms, the Minister for Digital Britain who drove the Bill, allegedly doesn’t even know what an IP address is, doesn’t instil faith that votes were cast in an informed manner…

This morning, the Today programme interviewed David Laws MP, the Schools and Families spokesman for the Liberal Democrats. He brought real clarity to the muddled Conservatives policy of tax breaks for married couples, saying…

We’re deluding ourselves as a nation if we think that some sort of small tax break [...] is really going to make a fundamental difference to parenting or marriage.

Equally dismissive of Ed Balls’s Guide to Being a Father initiative announced today, he went on to say…

I would put all of this money into the education system. […] Focusing that money on [disadvantaged] children, giving them skills and aspirations, and giving them as much stability as we can and the life skills that they need, will do far, far more to promote responsible citizens and good stable families than all of this tinkering around.

Asked about using tax policy for social engineering, he again hit the nail on the head…

We have as politicians to be realistic about what we can achieve. We have a great enough problem sorting out the problems in the education system which we can perhaps do something about if we get all the right policy levers in the right place. We have precious little chance of persuading people through some trivial change in the tax system to get married […] and we’ve got to be realistic about that.

David Laws summed up the relevance of marriage to good parenting when he said…

The key thing is whether there is stability and whether there is love and that can often be highly associated with marriage but it’s not exclusively associated with marriage.

That this common sense is even a matter of discussion is galling, common sense that is echoed in Charles Leadbeater’s more general New statesman article about re-evaluating our relationship with money…

What we most value – love, dignity, good conduct, pride, trust, friendship, care – does not come from money. If we were to try to use money to buy any of these things most people would think we were mad.

But not, it would seem, the Conservatives!

I’ve been tickled today by MyDavidCameron.com, and I thought I'd add my own. It’s in the spirit of Clifford Singer's about statement in which he says, amongst other things...

…we apologise to any detractors who may have missed this – this site is not in fact entirely serious

I heard our Dave saying (on Desert Island Discs, I think) that he loved the Jam at school and the irony of liking The Eton Rifles was not lost on him.

Answering a charge of inverse snobbery

I don’t actually have anything against people who have gone to Eton, per se – I’m a fan of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for example – but I’m not a fan of the idea of private education. In practice, I know that life ain’t that simple, as a forthcoming post will touch on.