Author Archives: Ken Westmoreland

Ken Westmoreland

So long Skype: the demise of a once disruptive technology

By Ken Westmoreland | Thu 6th March 2025 - 9:24 am

I haven’t used Skype in years, and nor have many of my contemporaries, and it was only reading a reference to it by a Lib Dem peer in a debate that I remembered it still existed, but in the wake of Microsoft’s announcement that it will soon be discontinued, it’s worth remembering what the world of international telecommunications was like before it.

Having lived and travelled abroad in the 1990s, I remember when international calls were a thing, and an expensive one at that, either entailing buying phone cards or frantically feeding coins into a payphone just to get someone call you back. Indeed, it reflected the era Skype was born in that a Guardian headline referred to how it ‘disrupted the landline industry’, and while it did become available on smartphones, it still conjures up images of clunky old desktop computers.

Skype is what is known as Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, and while it was not the first such service, it was certainly the most user-friendly, and inexpensive, as it only required you to download a piece of free software, create an account with a user name and password, and you were free to call anyone else who had done the same. By contrast, other VoIP services required you to buy expensive bits of hardware, and even if you were willing to, how many of your friends and family were?

Its founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, were no strangers to disruptive technology, having been behind the file-sharing app Kazaa, before it faced multiple lawsuits from record companies and film studios over copyright infringement. However, while creative industries could arouse public sympathy, given the cultural resonance of music and film, the same could not be said for telephone companies, which were, and still are, charging subscribers exorbitant amounts by the minute for voice calls, and were in dire need of disruption by the likes of Skype.

Traditionally, international phone calls were only possible because telecom operators in different countries had agreed to interconnect with each other, or rather, governments, because they were often state owned, and extensions of the post office. In addition, those operators were usually a monopoly, and if they weren’t, other operators were subject to licensing and regulation.

But Skype changed that; it mattered naught what country you were in, as long as you had a decent internet connection, you could use it, although some telecom operators did their best to block or throttle it. In addition, you were not completely cut off from the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) as you could buy credit to make outbound calls to regular phone numbers, and receive inbound calls on a regular phone number in the country of your choice.

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Ken Westmoreland

“I said not one word of that”. When AI puts words in our mouths

By Ken Westmoreland | Thu 20th February 2025 - 9:48 am

Last December, the Conservative peer Charlotte Owen introduced the Non-Consensual Sexually Explicit Images and Videos (Offences) Bill, which has made its way through the House of Lords. This followed the 2023 Online Safety Act, which not only made it a criminal offence to share, or threaten to share, images or videos of someone in an intimate state, but also included digitally manipulated ones, known as deepfakes, appearing to show someone in such a state.

I am entirely on her side, but I would also like to see it cover content of a non-sexual nature, audio as well as video, which can cause similar humiliation and distress to those targeted, male as well as female. While AI cannot literally put words in our mouths, it can do so virtually or digitally, cloning our voices as well as our faces.

Back in 2023, Stephen Fry asked his audience to compare his voice, from a clip of a documentary about the Dutch resistance he narrated in English, with an AI-generated version of it, only to tell them that was the AI: ‘I said not one word of that.’ His agents, unaware such technology existed, went ballistic, but he knew there was more to come: ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet.’

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, however, would have seen quite enough, after hearing a deepfake audio sounding like him early last year saying inflammatory things about Remembrance weekend, calling for pro-Palestinian marches and declaring that the Metropolitan Police did what he told them to do. It certainly sounded like him, with the London accent, complete with glottal stop; this was a part of his identity having been stolen and subverted, which understandably angered him.

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Ken Westmoreland

New Zealand and proportional representation: what there is to learn from it, and what there isn’t

By Ken Westmoreland | Mon 3rd February 2025 - 2:19 pm

The debate on proportional representation in the Commons last Thursday was all fairly predictable, with few Conservatives bothering to turn up, and Labour MPs as likely to defend first past the post as not, but it was interesting that while several speakers mentioned the experience of other countries, usually in apocalyptic tones like Israel, none mentioned New Zealand.

In an article for the politics.co.uk website in 2023, Tim Bale, Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London, once a New Zealand voter himself, advised advocates of proportional representation in the UK to manage their expectations of it; namely that if they think it will benefit the Liberal Democrats, they should think again, if New Zealand’s experience is anything to go by.

The problem with this is that comparing New Zealand to the UK is not really comparing like with like. Granted, New Zealand is a Commonwealth common law Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, but it is much smaller in population, with a much smaller parliament even for its size, and a single-chamber one at that; few remember that an upper house, the appointed Legislative Council, existed before 1950, the only purpose its chamber now serves is for MPs, summoned by Black Rod from the House of Representatives, to attend the Speech from the Throne.

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Ken Westmoreland

Seanad Éireann: Lessons from Ireland on Lords reform

By Ken Westmoreland | Wed 29th January 2025 - 11:55 am

This week sees elections to Seanad Éireann, the Irish Senate, following elections to Dáil Éireann, the more powerful lower house of the Oireachtas or parliament. Unlike other elected upper houses, and indeed its predecessor, the Seanad in the Irish Free State, it is elected completely in tandem with the lower house, and in its entirety, so when the Dáil is dissolved, so too is the Seanad. 

Senators are a mix of indirectly elected and nominated members, 43 chosen by TDs (Teachtaí Dála or Dáil Deputies), local councillors and outgoing Senators, to represent five vocational panels, Administrative, Agricultural, Cultural and Educational, Industrial and Commercial, and Labour, having been nominated by organisations registered for that purpose, while 6 are elected from university constituencies, graduates of the National University of Ireland and Dublin University (Trinity College Dublin) electing 3 each and 11 nominated by the Taoiseach, or prime minister. 

The vocational panel system was devised by Éamon De Valera, the architect of the 1937 Constitution, and inspired by Catholic teaching.  On paper, it sounds quite attractive as a model for a reformed House of Lords (or Senate) in the UK, drawing upon various sources of professional expertise, but in practice, election to the Seanad has often been used as a consolation prize for those who have lost a seat in the Dáil, before trying to get back into it, or those unable to get elected to it first time around,  making the Seanad more of an ante chamber than an upper chamber. 

On a side note, the party De Valera founded, Fianna Fáil, is now the sister party of the Liberal Democrats in Liberal International, despite the former historically having been socially more conservative, though De Valera got on well enough with Lloyd George, the pair able to compare their respective Celtic languages; in Irish, ‘seanad’ means ‘senate’ in the sense of ‘second chamber’, but in Welsh, ‘senedd’ means ‘parliament’, preserving the original general Latin meaning of ‘senatus’.    

Across the border, the Senate in the old Northern Ireland Parliament was elected by its House of Commons, with many members holding hereditary peerages or later acquiring them, but was even weaker than its counterpart at Leinster House, and all devolved legislatures at Stormont have been unicameral since. As for the House of Commons there, while it was initially elected by the single transferable vote, Unionists later scrapped this, gerrymandering constituencies, and only abolishing  the Queen’s University Belfast constituency and property vote in 1969, 19 years after Westminster.

Talking of university constituencies, this Seanad election is significant as it will be the last one in which Senators will be elected from them; at the next election, there will be a new six-member Higher Education constituency, for which any Irish citizen with a tertiary education qualification will be eligible to vote or stand, if not less elitist, then at least less of an anachronism. 

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Ken Westmoreland

Voting rights, residency, citizenship and reciprocity

By Ken Westmoreland | Fri 13th December 2024 - 10:04 am

On 7 June 2015, an EU member state held a referendum on a political change, one that its proponents said would send a message to the world about how enlightened the country was, but its opponents said would erode the country’s national identity. When the result was declared, it was an emphatic ‘no’, with just over 70 per cent voting the proposal down, in an 87 per cent turnout, with those who would have most benefited from the change feeling undervalued or rejected.

No, as you will have gathered, it wasn’t ‘that’ referendum held in June the following year, but the one held in Luxembourg on extending voting rights in national parliamentary elections to foreigners resident in the country. Despite only being intended for those who had a) been resident for at least ten years and b) previously voted in either European or local elections, this went too far for many in a country whose national motto translates as ‘We want to remain what we are’.

Granted it did not have the ramifications that ‘other’ referendum had, but it illustrates, even in the EU, how many still believe that voting rights in national elections should be restricted to citizens of the country concerned. In addition, in countries like Ireland, despite the role of those in the diaspora in supporting the economy through remittances over the decades, there remains opposition, sometimes vehement, to giving them the vote, even from some in the diaspora itself.

On the other hand, eligible Irish citizens registered to vote in constituencies in Northern Ireland can enrol as overseas electors, but not ones in Great Britain, and even then, they need to prove they have been born in Northern Ireland, not just anywhere on the island, and eligible for British citizenship, even if they have no intention of ever holding a British passport.

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Ken Westmoreland

The Timorese in Taunton: an unexpected migrant community

By Ken Westmoreland | Thu 14th November 2024 - 9:18 am

12 November in Timor Leste or East Timor, is National Youth Day, which commemorates the massacre of dozens of young pro-independence activists by Indonesian troops in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili in 1991. Like Sharpeville in South Africa in 1960, during the struggle against apartheid, Santa Cruz was a pivotal event in highlighting atrocities in the former Portuguese colony, which Indonesia had invaded and occupied in 1975, declaring it the Republic’s 27th province.

Back then, I was in correspondence with Lord Avebury, previously the Liberal MP Eric Lubbock, a supporter of East Timor’s right to self-determination, in the years when it seemed a lost cause. Yet by 1999, things in Jakarta had changed, with it agreeing to a UN supervised referendum, in which 78 per cent voted for independence, though the backlash from Indonesian-backed militias saw most of the infrastructure destroyed. This led to the deployment of the Australian-led InterFET peacekeeping force, to which the UK contributed the HMS Glasgow and the Gurkha regiment in Brunei.

Many of the young activists I met living in exile in the UK and Ireland would return home after independence in 2002, becoming parliamentarians, ministers, diplomats or civil servants, with others joining NGOs. However, there was a flow of people out of the country, for economic reasons, just as there were in the Philippines, and even Indonesia; unlike citizens of those countries, however, the East Timorese had the advantage of being entitled to Portuguese, and hence EU, citizenship, which at the time, enabled them to live and work in the UK without needing work permits.

As a result, East Timorese migrant communities sprung up in towns around the UK, like Oxford, Peterborough and Crewe, as well as Dungannon in Northern Ireland, which I visited in 2006, nicknaming it ‘New Dili’. While the Republic was far more supportive of their homeland’s struggle for independence than the UK, as a small nation itself, it was Northern Ireland, or rather the Moy Park chicken factory in Dungannon, which proved a far greater pull than Dublin.

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Ken Westmoreland

Don’t blame us for Trump

By Ken Westmoreland | Thu 7th November 2024 - 11:04 am

A friend of mine in Florida, who only recently became an American decades after marrying one, cast her vote for Kamala Harris early, to keep Donald Trump (or the ‘orange stain’, as she calls him) out of the White House. However, four million US nationals will have had no say in the matter; while all US citizens are nationals, not all US nationals are citizens, disenfranchising them further.

When Trump-supporting comedian Tony Hinchcliffe described Puerto Rico as ‘a floating island of garbage’, it was a particularly low blow given that its residents have no vote in the presidential election, despite being US citizens, and its only representation in Congress is a non-voting Resident Commissioner in the House of Representatives, with none in the Senate.

Historically, before being admitted to the Union, many states, then territories, elected non-voting delegates to the House as a first step to achieving statehood, but since Hawaii in 1959, no territory has been admitted. Puerto Rico, the most populous of them, is divided on the issue, with some favouring statehood, others independence, and others the status quo, while in the US itself, Republicans are lukewarm, dreading an increased number of Democrats on Capitol Hill.

In my innocence, I thought that the reason for this limited political representation was because Puerto Rico, along with the US Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Marianas and American Samoa, was because they weren’t subject to federal taxes, a case of no representation without taxation, but there are more unsavoury reasons, hence them being ‘foreign in a domestic sense’.

When most of them were acquired following the Spanish-American War, there was a Supreme Court ruling that they were inhabited by ‘alien races’ unable to be governed by ‘Anglo-Saxon principles’, and therefore the Constitution didn’t have to apply there, and by extension, nor did voting rights. Despite only being supposed to apply ‘for a time’, it does so to this day, having been extended to the formerly Danish US Virgin Islands, the formerly German American Samoa, and the Japanese Northern Marianas, which only have non-voting delegates in Congress.

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Ken Westmoreland

Falling between two stools: the British Overseas Territories

By Ken Westmoreland | Thu 31st October 2024 - 9:59 am

Unlike the Conservatives and Labour, which both made mention of the British Overseas Territories (BOTs) in their recent election manifestos, the Liberal Democrats made none at all in theirs.

The last time they were mentioned in any detail in a policy document was in 2019, and only then as two pages in ‘Modernising the relationship between Britain and its citizens living abroad’, a symptom of how they fall between two stools, under British sovereignty, unlike the wider British diaspora, but outside the United Kingdom, despite often being called a part of a ‘UK family’.

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