Over the past week (in addition to school and other things) I’ve taken an interest in the UK Pirate Party. They’re a relatively small, single-issue party who campaign for the reform of copyright laws. They were officially registered as a party on the 11th August, just over 3 months ago. I have previous experience with small parties; I’ve been engaging in a strange email/phone conversation over the past few weeks with a man called Ed from the Alliance for Worker’s Liberty. What hampers me from learning more about them is that this guy is the only member in Oxford. Any branch meetings happen in London, and as with most branch meetings they take place n the evening. It doesn’t appeal to me to make a one-hour train journey from London at 10 O’Clock in the evening, especially if it’s a school night.
Small parties have a limited reach, if anyone’s interested that email conversation with Ed broke down as I haven’t replied for 12 days and will most probably carry on with this silence until I forget the AWL even exists. What’s different about the Pirate Party is that they use their background experience in technology to their advantage. Their party website, while not as flashy as some party websites is pretty good going for a party with such a tiny membership. Even more surprising (and I think this deserves to be recognized by every other political party out there) is the fact that the PPUK facebook group has more members at the moment than the official labour party group. How does something like this come about? The easy response is that the Labour Party doesn’t understand facebook or use it properly. Sadly this is not the case, the Labour party page even allows you to start registering for to something called ‘Membersnet’ using your Facebook or Twitter account.
The main difference with the PPUK is that their members are (probably) young people who know how to use social networking. I remember mentioning Twitter to one of the SWP members in Brighton, he didn’t understand it much and he didn’t see it as a valid platform, then last wednesday I was invited to join to ‘bring more young people into the Party’. Now I know I’m going to sound quite negative in this, and I still think Twitter is an awful service even now, but if the SWP need members they should actively use social networking. If Labour want to use social networking to connect with young people they should change their image as the ‘middle-class mother’ party.
Totally apart from the way they’re technologically in-touch and are made up of enthusiastic young people I also agree with their policies: They want to reform copyright law (but with the eventual aim of abolishing it). They want to make as much government data as possible public. They want to support open-source software. They promote freedom of speech, (the result of which would stop events such as this one occurring). I support all that stuff (except free speech for the BNP, they don’t deserve it).
OTHER VAGUELY INTERESTING NOTES (mostly taken from their Wiki):
The Swedish MEP for the European Pirate Party sat in the green coalition.
The members of their ‘Freedom of Speech Policy Working Group’ are called RancidPunk, Fozz Dog and Miiguel.
Music has been around for 30,000 years but copyright has only existed for 300 years. This is why people will still make music without enforced copyright.
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