Posts Tagged ‘Labour Digital’

Policy in the pub is back! This evening, plot the digital revolution over a pint

13/05/2014, 04:55:49 PM

What are you doing this evening? Well, if you’re in and around Westminster, cancel your plans and get yourself down to the Two Chairmen (39 Dartmouth St, London SW1H 9BP – nearest tube St James’ Park) for a spot of policy in the pub from 18.30.

You know the format: pitch a policy idea in just ONE minute, followed by TWO minutes of questions from the audience’s Q&A, culminating in a vote for ONE Top Policy. The Policy must be fiscally neutral, funded and well thought out to sustain scrutiny from the floor/Chair.

This week its all about the digital revolution, with Labour Digital’s Lord Parry Mitchell in the chair and sponsored by O2 (who are paying for all those lovely non-digital pints).

So what are you waiting for? Stop reading this on your computer or checking twitter on your phone and get down the pub for some face to face digital policy-making.

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Labour Digital: Welcome to the Brave New World

10/03/2014, 11:03:44 AM

by Jonathan Todd

The internet, claims the opening sentence of The New Digital Age, the bestseller by Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, is among the few things that humans have built that they don’t truly understand. Labour has, however, resolved to learn and act accordingly.

That is the goal of Labour Digital, launched last week at Google Campus. The crossbencher Martha Lane Fox and Labour’s Parry Mitchell, the digital entrepreneurs of the upper house, spoke, as did John McTernan, who will gather digital policy ideas for the next Labour manifesto.

Lane Fox and Mitchell both focused on the digital divide – unequal access to digital technologies. Some are highly digitally literate, many are not, denying them tremendous benefits. As an egalitarian party, correcting this should be a Labour priority.

For 20 years, Labour spokespeople have stressed the need for adaptation to globalisation. Yet, in a seminal mid-1990s paper, Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, attributed more importance to technological change in determining the wages of the low skilled than international trade. Labour spokespeople, however, have less frequently highlighted the importance of adaptation to technological change.

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