The problem is that, like Andrew Rawnsley, I am far from convinced that Ed (or indeed any major British politician) is even close to having any of the answers. His recipe seems to be an effort to go back to the basics of party political campaigning – more local activity, community organising as inspired by Arnie Graf. Fair enough, but it’s not as if any British political party of any political colour has ever gone far away from this model. It is more than as parties have declined as mass membership organisations, and voting allegiances and populations have become more transitory, meaning the old models do not work as well as they once did. Plus local organising is time consuming and expensive, and in the absence of state funding of political parties, where is the cash going to come from?

The heart of the problem is summed up with Ed’s line “I won’t make promises that I can’t keep”. I think he expresses this line honestly enough, but who actually believes it? I don’t believe it from him any more than I believe it from any other politician, and hell, I am on Ed’s side. It’s as if Ed Miliband is trying to just be a better version of a traditional politician, that one last push with the old means will be enough. I’m absolutely sure that it is not, even if it might just be enough to get Labour back into power in 2015.

So what can Ed and Labour do? The 2015 programme could be so vague that no-one would be able to tell if Ed’s promises had been broken – hardly a resounding success. Alternatively if promises had to be broken later, this could be done with honesty rather than trying to find ways of showing promises had been kept when everyone else was thinking the opposite. Neither of these approaches is remotely inspiring.

The only alternative is to bring more people into the policy making and governing process, and to do this through online networking. If Labour cannot deliver on its budgetary promises because the economy prevents it, the party could learn from participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre and, by making the facts available to the public, collaboratively reach better decisions – even if those decisions were not perfectly in line with the party’s manifesto. The party would also need to experiment with participative democratic tools such as Adhocracy or Liquid Feedback to engage more people in its policy processes from an early stage. This would mean that Ed’s line would better be “If I can’t keep my promises then you will know why, and you will have the power to help me find solutions”. The internet is the best tool ever invented for mass consultation, yet no British political party has even attempted to make it central to its policy making. It is also not even necessary to have absolutely mass participation in this process – it empowers the citizens who want to participate, and by doing so helps legitimise the decisions taken. If you doubt it then this might allay some of the fears.

Will all of this work? I am not altogether sure. But I for sure know that more of the same, even a better version of the same, is not going to be enough. Ed posed the right questions yesterday, and here is my partial answer. What’s your answer?

So what’s to be done to bring this site, and the dozens of others I’ve built over the years, into compliance with the new rules? That’s where it gets complicated. The ICO has released guidance about how this should be done, but it’s as clear as mud. So I’ve experimented a bit, and spoken to a few people, and these are my conclusions.

Firstly, I have looked at explicit consent plugins for WordPress – essentially displaying some sort of warning message to site visitors, telling them that cookies will be set. I’ve particularly evaluated EU Cookie Directive and Cookie Control. There are pros and cons of each. EU Cookie Directive displays a prominent message at the top of any page – it’s in your face and almost forces people to comply as a result. Cookie Control is more subtle, sitting at the bottom left of your screen, and also has better compatibility with Google Analytics and has better control over which countries should show the warning.

BUT the first day running this site with Cookie Control installed, site visitors to Google Analytics plunged 80%. Visitors were either not giving consent, or did not understand what the whole thing was about. Also how all of this applies to mobile devices, and old browser versions (IE) is a minefield.

So I am – for now – going for the same sort of approach that the UK government itself is using for its own sites, as explained by the Cabinet Office here. Hence I am not going to be seeking prior approval for cookies, but – for this site and for any others that I host – explaining clearly and simply what first party and third party cookies are set, how these can be controlled by an individual visitor, and explaining clearly what will be done with any data submitted by users of sites. The privacy statement for this blog can be found here.

One of the pioneering projects in this regard was FarmSubsidy.org, trying to shine the light on how the funding of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy was used, and the website blossomed as more data was made available. Yet this year things have gone backwards – with the cover of a Court of Justice ruling about the privacy of recipients, 92% of recipients have not been published. Sorry, but if the EU is spending my money – taxpayers’ money – I want to know who is getting that cash, and how much of it.

This comes on the back of another story – the failure of efforts by Andrew Duff MEP to introduce roll call votes into committee meetings in the European Parliament, voted down by the Constitutional Affairs committee.

Then there are Ronny Patz’s ongoing headaches to simply get documents from the EU institutions.

In short all of this does not really add up to a positive picture of the openness of the EU institutions!

So when Macovei says that budget discharge should not be granted to 3 EU agencies – the European Environment Agency, the European Medicines Agency and the European Food Safety Agency – people rightly sit up and listen. The whole story is explained in more depth by EUObserver here. The main part of Macovei’s case is the conflicts of interest in the three agencies relating to the way they employ staff, and what these staff do afterwards.

I really do not understand the position of the S&D group in all of this. German S&D MEP Jutta Haug was harsh in her critique of Macovei, and I also had a Twitter exchange with S&D Budgetary Control Committee coordinator Jens Geier, shown in the screenshot. More from him in the S&D press release here. To muddy the waters still further, the European Commission has today announced it wants to do something about the revolving door issue for EFSA.

Here, as in so much of how the EU does its business, it’s fiendishly hard to work out what’s going on. There is no denial that there is a problem with these agencies, yet why then is the critique of Macovei so vehement? Strikes me that there must be more to this than meets the eye of us, the outsiders.

Two youngish, surly French men passed through the train, one wearing a working man’s sweater and boots, the other with a bomber jacket with US baseball insignia on it, each of them with little, fluorescent Eurostar armbands. One asked me to see my ticket.

“What’s the reason for this control?” I asked him in French, as he looked at my ticket and showed no interest in my passport. “It’s just to check the tickets, to see that people have tickets, to see if they are sitting in the correct carriage.” I told him I had moved from the neighbouring carriage, and despite the fact I had an odd DB ticket, he was fine with it and off he went.

Notably this control was not the same as the rail police control from a few weeks ago. I still do not understand its purpose though, not least because my ticket was stamped by the UK Borders control in Bruxelles, and my ticket and passport were checked in London too (the Lille loophole checks). Why do a second level of these checks in the train as well – if that’s what this check was for? There were also 4 civilian security personnel on the platform at Calais, kitted out in bright orange jackets, but notably these were civilian security guards – were they something to do with it too? In the past there have sometimes been armed military present at Calais.

What is going on with all of this?

But saying that the issue is not important is not a legitimate position.

The composition and format of one of the two chambers of a national legislature is an issue of major, long term importance, even if elections are not won or lost on the basis of it. A non-elected chamber would be considered abhorrent in almost any developed country and it’s high time the issue was examined.

The man on the street, to use David Davis’s line cited here, might rightly want the government to focus on job creation, but if the UK had a sensible and mature political culture there should be no problem working on both this and constitutional reform. Parliament should be capable of debating matters of constitutional importance and passing bills to sort out the economy. Further, it’s not as if there is a whole line of growth-generating bills just ready to be debated that are being blocked by Lords Reform – the government already has the austerity it wants.

Instead people like Davis and Bernard Jenkin, with the press complicit in their game, are happy to tie the issues together. Rather than opposing reform of the House of Lords on its merits, they instead aim to to kick the issue off the agenda by claiming something else is more important. It’s a disingenuous tactic.

A few weeks ago at a meeting in London, one of the Labour Party’s best known bloggers literally snorted at me when I said that Labour had much to learn from the Pirate Party. But I’m undeterred by that, and having spent the last week in Germany, I’ve been looking in depth at the Pirate phenomenon, and its effects are interesting – but not in the obvious ways.

The highlight of the week was speaking on a panel at the re-publica conference with Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Pirate Party in Sweden. Falkvinge at first sight does not exude positive feelings. His slightly hulking frame and features that express an almost permanent frown mask an inner optimism about the Pirate Party and its values that’s optimistic and forward looking. He’s a thoughtful and very engaging person, someone I wish more mainstream politicians would engage with.

Just prior to the re-publica panel I asked him about the internal culture in his party. “We just took our culture into politics” he said, essentially meaning nerd/programmer culture. A simple phrase, but that is the essence of the Pirates and why their movement so fascinating.

How would Labour look if we just took our way of behaving as people, and behaved that way in the party? Because we absolutely do not – we self-censor in order to conform.

The problem of course is hierarchy, and how that applies to how a political party functions internally. The Pirates are, in essence, the first post-hierarchy party which, if you think about it, is an obvious way for a political party to go. In the same way as social networks have helped to flatten hierarchies in news reporting or journalism, why not apply the same principles to a political party? Indeed the two overlap – as a new political movement denied traditional press coverage, blogs and social networks are the way to overcome the lack of coverage.

The advantage of German politics is that the proportional election system allows a party like the Pirates to break through, in the same way as the Greens did three decades ago. The UK election system, at national level at least, prevents this, and so the problem is masked – declining election turnout, and declining trust in representative democracy instead. The old systems, and the people chosen within those systems, may be presiding over a declining base of support, but it still functions more or less in the UK context. Change is not really what Ed Miliband is advocating in his statement today; instead he is calling for just a slightly better version of the status quo.

The Pirates, as I see it, are most important just now as an embodiment of the non-hierarchical networked age and how that applies to politics. They take the internet’s capability of allowing anyone to be consulted on anything and place that at the heart of their approach. This is much more important than the actual policies (in the traditional sense) that they advocate, important though those are. The party makes the very way of doing politics its core appeal. From that we all have a lot to learn.

I’m at re-publica in Berlin, appearing at 1315 on a panel about the European public sphere online. You can follow the panel here (Stage 5).

This morning we started debating these issues with a speech from Euroblogger Ronny Patz, whose ideas are summarized (in German) on Spiegel Online. Ron’s approach is similar to my own, namely that blogs about the EU are rather few and the EU blogosphere helps to slightly enlarge the Brussels bubble, but doesn’t take EU matters to a wider audience. Why, asks Ron, are the EU bloggers sleeping through the Euro-crisis?

News in the mainstream media this morning helps explain it.

I saw tweets like this from Bruno Waterfield, the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, last night about a tetchy Ecofin Council where Osborne refused to agree to Basel-III banking reforms at EU level. The problem is: what actually happened?

Take a look at the news stories about the Council from the Daily Telegraph and Spiegel. Can you actually tell from either why the discussions failed and why – substantively – the UK argued the agreement was not tough enough? OK, we know Osborne was angry (seems at least as much to do with missing a dinner in London than anything else? But he has form on being an arrogant sod in Ecofin), but what solution – if any – did he propose? And if the UK opposes weaker rules, what would the consequence be of the UK sticking with tougher rules while the rest do not? We just do not know. We have a partial picture of what happened, and there is very little bloggers can do to fill in the blanks – we don’t have the resources to be there.

This summit was an EU issue covered through partial, national lenses by the mainstream media. Therein is the lack of a European public sphere, even when it’s an EU issue at stake.