Categories
Meon Valley

Stopping terrorist attacks

A 250-word article for the Petersfield Post, Clanfield Post, Horndean Post and Bordon Post answering the question ‘What action would you/your party propose to take to prevent more terror attacks like the one in Manchester from happening again?’:

The atrocity in Manchester was horrifying and very distressing. One of the few points of light has been the failure of ISIS’s strategy of using this kind of attack to polarise the community in Manchester and nationally: they’ve almost completely failed to do this. It has also been reassuring how quickly the security services seem to have wound up the network responsible for the attack – enabling the terror threat level to be reduced from critical to severe.

The critical question remaining is how it could have been prevented. People who knew Salman Abedi reported that he was a risk on several occasions but he still slipped through the net.

While we need to wait for the results of Police and MI5’s review of this failure, one reason for Liberal Democrat concern with the brutal Conservative cuts to policing budgets – including here in Hampshire – is that this kind of problem might emerge. That’s one reason our manifesto pledges to increase community policing by giving an additional £300m a year to local police forces.

We also need to continue to collaborate internationally in fighting terrorism. Theresa May’s plans for an ultra-hard Brexit must not be allowed to jeopardise this. Finally, we must also resist the temptation to use this to justify indiscriminate snooping powers or to weaken encryption. The priority must be strong community relations to identify people who are potential risks – and then focused efforts – via surveillance or, if necessary, through TPIMs to disrupt any potential attacks before they happen.

Categories
Europe

Mini-rant about Gibraltar

Both sides are over-reacting massively here.
 
The Brexiteers are reacting to a (perhaps deliberate?) misunderstanding of the EU letter. It didn’t say that Spain would take over Gibraltar. It says that Spain will have a veto on any trade (or other EU-related) relationship between the EU and Gibraltar. That’s either a statement of fact – or a recognition that QMV won’t be used by other EU states to overrule Spain on Gibraltar-related issues (not sure which applies – possibly the latter, otherwise the letter wouldn’t have said what it did).
 
The idiotic Howard quote now means that Remainers are compounding the misdirection by implying that Howard is saying we’ll invade. Some other particularly idiotic Brexiteers have gone on to say this – but Howard didn’t. He just did some standard Brexit BS bluster about how ‘resolve’ can somehow make a Spanish veto go away… (it can’t).
 
All sides are missing the fundamental difference between the Falklands and Gibraltar. The Argentinians – as they discovered – didn’t have a veto. And while the Spanish can’t enforce a change in sovereignty, they do, and can block almost any other aspect of the relationship between Gibraltar and the EU. And despite what the Daily Telegraph says, we can’t use military force to overcome that.
 
Whether Spain want to use their veto or not is a different issue. They have a lot of voters who work in Gibraltar – and a whole bunch of other issues at stake in their relationship with Britain (and Gibraltar). The ‘punishment’ approach to Gibraltar didn’t work before – and there’s no reason why it should work now. Longer-term they have more to gain from a positive approach.
 
But if the UK Government and its proxies continue to behave as complete knobs – and pretend that they can unilaterally tell Spain what to do, it’s not impossible that Gibraltar will be caught in the resulting crossfire and suffer as a result. After all, Spain has voters and a sense of national dignity as well. We can’t barge around gratuitously pissing people off and expect there to be no come-back.
Categories
Air Quality Latest News Winchester

Conservatives vote down tougher action on air quality

Once again, Conservative Councillors at Winchester City Council have voted down a proposal from the Lib Dem group to have a tougher policy on air quality in the city.

I summed up on a proposal at today’s council meeting that it should be compulsory for all council proposals to report on the air quality impact of any action they recommend.

Under the Conservatives, again and again, the council has treated air quality as something that’s only done by the environment team.  Other departments are left free to ignore it. It happened with Station Approach. It happened with the ‘pollution patio’ in St George’s Street. And the proposed new Parking Strategy doesn’t do enough. With 51 deaths a year in the Winchester district from air pollution, this can’t carry on.

It’s got to be impossible to ignore air quality in council plans – right across the council – as well as making sure that the Air Quality Action Plan due later this year does enough to tackle it. You can’t sort air quality in a silo. It’s got to be everyone’s business.

That’s what we proposed. And it’s deeply disappointing – although not surprising – that, once again, the Conservatives voted it down.”

Categories
Air Quality Education Parking Recycling St Paul Station Approach Winchester

Autumn 2016 St Paul Ward Focus

Topics include:

  • Station Approach
  • Station Area Parking
  • New Tory ‘Tip Tax’
  • Our crossing campaigns
  • The local vote to ‘remain’
  • Air Quality
  • Grammar Schools
  • Safer Routes to School

Download St Paul ward Autumn 2016 Focus (pdf, 4.8MB)

Categories
Charity Gift Aid Shopify Technology

Making Shopify work with UK Gift Aid

At the Men’s Health Forum, we’ve been using Shopify for a while now and we really love it.

They have a great value non-profit rate (if you ask nicely). It’s great for handling trading. It’s great for handling digital downloads. All we needed was for it to handle donations and we were done!

The good news is that there’s a pretty straightforward way of doing it by using Shopify’s approach to collecting customisation information – as outlined here.

To make a Shopify product page work for donations we wanted to do three things:

  • Ask about Gift Aid
  • Remove the quantity selector
  • Put the description above the area where people select the donation

You can do all of this by working your way through the customisation page – with a few tweaks along the way.

  1. Create a new template for donations
    Take the same approach as Shopify outline for customisable products – although I called my page donation instead of customizable.
  2. Add customisable form fields that ask about Gift Aid.
    The code I used for this was:

    <div>
    <h3>Gift Aid</h3>
    <strong>Boost your donation by 25p of Gift Aid for every £1 you donate. </strong> Please treat as Gift Aid donations all qualifying gifts of money made:

    <input id="giftaid-today" name="properties[Include Gift Aid made on donations today]" type="checkbox" value="Yes" /> <label class="inline" for="giftaid-today">Today</label>

    <input id="giftaid-p4y" name="properties[Include Gift Aid made on donations in the past 4 years]" type="checkbox" value="Yes" /> <label class="inline" for="giftaid-today">In the past 4 years</label>

    <input id="giftaid-future" name="properties[Include Gift Aid made on donations in the future]" type="checkbox" value="Yes" /> <label class="inline" for="giftaid-today">In the future</label>
    <p id="taxstatement"><small>I confirm I have paid or will pay an amount of Income Tax and/or Capital Gains Tax for each tax year (6 April to 5 April) that is at least equal to the amount of tax that all the charities or Community Amateur Sports Clubs (CASCs) that I donate to will reclaim on my gifts for that tax year. I understand that other taxes such as VAT and Council Tax do not qualify. I understand the charity will reclaim 28p of tax on every £1 that I gave up to 5 April 2008 and will reclaim 25p of tax on every £1 that I give on or after 6 April 2008.</small></p>

    </div>

    The relatively long name descriptors are needed to make the shopping cart and payment pages look sensible when your visitors check out.

  3. Remove the quantity selector
    Just replace the selector code with a hidden input field. Specifically, replace:

    <div class="product-single__quantity{% unless settings.product_quantity_enable %} is-hidden{% endunless %}"><label for="Quantity">{{ 'products.product.quantity' | t }}</label>
    <input id="Quantity" class="quantity-selector" min="1" name="quantity" type="number" value="1" /></div>

    with

    <input id="Quantity&quot;" class="quantity-selector" min="1" name="quantity" type="hidden" value="1" />
  4. Add a bit of JavaScript to hide the Gift Aid text until needed.
    I added the following inside the final script tag:

    var countChecked = function() {
    var n = $( "input:checked" ).length;
    if( n == 0 ) {
    jQuery("#taxstatement").hide();
    } else {
    jQuery("#taxstatement").show();
    }
    };
    countChecked();
    jQuery( "input[type=checkbox]" ).on( "click", countChecked );
  5. Reorder the page until you have it how you want it.
    I moved:

    <div class="product-description rte">{{ product.description }}</div>

    just below the form tag:

  6. Create a new product in Shopify as you would do normally, but select product.donation as the template suffix (in the bottom right of the page). The end result should look something like this.

Er. That’s it. Comments and suggested improvements welcome.