the Government agreed to publish online, on a quarterly basis, information about ministerial meetings with outside interest groups. Information for the period 1 October to 31 December 2009 will be published by Departments as soon as the information is ready.

You can imagine this playing out in all kinds of ways. Some lobby groups will have yet more incentive to maximise their meeting count, regardless of whether they're being listened to, just so they can show to donors how much ministerial conflict they have. Others will be even more desperately trying to figure out how to skirt around the law, arranging for their meetings to be social, unofficial or otherwise off the record. And whether the data is of any use at all will, naturally, depend on whether the political website crowd manage to get anywhere with it.

Relatedly, The Yorkshire Ranter links to the German government site, 'a public version control system for legislation'.

My favourite -- both as an article, and because I agree with him -- is Joss Garman in the Independent. He's fiery about Obama ("a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speaker-phone from a beach in Hawaii"), and Wen Jiabao ("sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager's house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere."). But he still finds a few likeable figures, such as Lula and Ed Miliband.

Mark Lynas is more simplistic. His much-forwarded Guardian piece has one villain: China

The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame.... China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and thenensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again.

Lynas staunchly defends both Gordon Brown and his own employer, the government of the Maldives*, while attacking the country chosen by both the British and American governments to carry the can. He tries very hard to present this support of the powerful as a contrarian position -- and, given he's writing for Guardian readers, I suppose it is. George Monbiot's article, for example, is more typical in blaming America. "The immediate reason for the failure of the talks can be summarised in two words: Barack Obama".

Lynas also snaps out a not-entirely-unfounded accusation against the NGO world: "Campaign groups never blame developing countries for failure; this is an iron rule that is never broken".

It's a shame he doesn't go into more detail on this. Developing countries seem to have largely outsourced their negotiating teams in environmental summits to NGOs, and to first-world campaigners willing to work cheaply for the good of the planet. It's the same trade of influence against expertise that happens when they rely on multinational corporations to provide legal or economic advice in trade negotiations -- just with added idealism. This area must conceal some fascinating culture clashes and conflicts of interest, which I'd love to see somebody dissect for public consumption.

• It's hardly encouraging that the Guardian lets Lynas gush about the president of the Maldives without mentioning his conflict of interest.

Anyway, Libération has some more details on the form the law is likely to take. "So as not to appear discriminatory", they write with justifiable snarkiness, the law will be against any covering of the entire face within a public space. Presumably they'll spend the coming weeks assuring exceptions for skiiers, motorcyclists, beekeepers, and anyone else with a non-religious reason to cover their face. [I guess they won't do anything about balaclava-wearing anarchists, oddly enough;)]

Meanwhile laïcite is being played in the other direction, in reaction to the Swiss minaret ban. At least, it is providing the language in which to condemn a statement that "when there are more minarets than Cathedrals in France, it will no longer be France".

Students are also thought to be victims of the happiness industry. The author suggests that rather than enhancing wellbeing, the preoccupation with student satisfaction, value for money and support for special needs may, in fact, breed unhappiness. Surveys of student satisfaction are singled out for blame: Watson highlights a "reverse Hawthorne effect" based on their findings, where "the more they are encouraged to assert their consumer rights, the more inclined they will be to be grumpy".

So, it has no connection to the vague and insatiable demands placed on students, the ways in which teachers assign work with only the faintest idea of how much effort is required for it, or how offhand comments are endlessly amplified by an undergraduate culture generally dependent on rumour to figure out what the tutors really want?

[I avoided academic misery almost entirely, by a combination of being personally resistent to pressure, and studying in a department that went out of its way to shield students from the paranoia across the rest of the university. But I was one of the very few lucky ones]

2) Crooked Timber searching in vain for political novels. Even CT's collective erudition doesn't turn up much, at least in the Anglophone world. This is odd; surely politics should be the perfect backdrop for fiction? Constant conflict of duty, ideology, loyalty, and self-interest. Articulate, self-aware characters continually mythologizing their own lives for public consumption. A prefab Greek chorus of pundits and journalists. Day-to-day politics may be dull, cynical and idea-free, but that doesn't stop it twisting people in fascinating ways. So, what excellent political novels should I be reading?

"deep embarrassment...permeates the senior ranks of Gordon Brown's ministerial team this morning....."Shaming and dreadful" is how one prominent colleague privately put it" --- Michael White in the Guardian

"She has little experience and is a bizarre choice. It would be a sign that European diplomacy is downgraded to an economic policy post."
--- French official quoted in the Telegraph

"On the day of her election, the best that could be said of her was that she is a good listener". "expectations are so low that Van Rompuy and Ashton can only be a positive surprise"
---Spiegel

More justified grumbling elsewhere:

• Crooked Timber
• A Fistful of Euros
• European Tribune

Baroness Ashton has no obvious expertise in foreign affairs before last year. Nor has she ever won an election. "Even friends are stunned that someone so low key could have been elevated to such a high profile job", according to the [FT]

She's an apparatchik. Worse, she's an apparatchik who doesn't even know Brussels. At least not until last year, when she was shuffled in as Trade Commissioner so that Mandelson could sneak home and salvage the Labour party. Before then, she was a backroom figure in the UK, working her way around charities, quangos and political posts. All worthy, but hardly preparation for Europe and the world.

How did she end up at the job? Was it Machiavellian manouvering by Britain? Talk up Blair, drop him at the last minute, and bounce Ashton in on the resulting pan-European wave of relief? Somehow I don't think so; I just can't see why they would go to all that trouble for somebody so unpromising. Instead, I'll have to rely on the standard explanation for how every EU appointment happens: she was suggested at the last minute, and nobody knew enough about her to object.

Ban Ki-Moon was the last appointment to disappoint me this badly, and for similar reasons. Without a charismatic leader, the UN faded further into the shadows, and is losing influence month by month. Ban was chosen in part by people who wanted to keep the UN weak; what excuse is there for the EU ministers? Intentionally or not, they've just placed a brown paper back over the head of Europe.

I had heard about it in the US, where it's a bigger issue. There the numbers are larger, the rules are tighter (in some states ex-cons are also covered). And dubious implementation of the law -- let alone the law itself -- have been claimed as deciding the 2000 presidential election. But in the UK, it just bubbles along a little way below the headlines.

Most of the pressure to change the situation comes from outside. Prisoners have been trying to use human rights legislation in order to vote, most recently Peter Chester. He is kept in jail not because of his original crime (he's already served 20 years for that), but because he is considered a danger to the public.

Four years earlier another prisoner, John Hirst, won a case in the European Court of Human Rights, demanding his right to vote.

I'm not sure of the legal implications of that ruling. The government certainly didn't jump to change the law. There is now a consultation in progress, which I suppose is the most time-consuming way of doing nothing.

Apart from the moral case, John Hirst puts the practical argument pretty nicely:

"When you're a prisoner, the only thing you can do if you want to complain and no-one listens, is riot and lift the roof off"

Nicolas Sarkozy is developing a taste for nepotism. Having already helped his son Jean into political and other positions, he seems now to have abandoned all shame. He's attempting to give the 23-year-old control of La Defense. Roughly equivalent to Canary Wharf (albeit with less of that entertaining halo of occult conspiracy theories), it's worth many billions of dollars. The job of running it is no sinecure, and I can't see much excuse for giving it to the Dauphin like htis.

Kircher lived on the cusp between the magical world of the Middle Ages and the rational and scientific world of modernity - as perhaps we do again today, except that we're going in the other direction. His half-sceptical, half-credulous cast of mind is very much to our current taste.

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The Wall Street Journal keeps most of its content behind a paywall, so I mostly ignore it. To its credit, though, it is one of the few institutions whose idea of Europe gives near-equal attention to Central and Eastern Europe. This blog is one part of that.

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In a (month-old) interview with Gerry Adams, Johann Hari situates the Troubles within a trans-Atlantic context:

Over the next few years, Catholics in Northern Ireland - stirred by the black civil rights movement in the US, and the dream of Martin Luther King - started to peacefully organise to demand equality.... "There was a sense of naiveté, of innocence almost, a feeling that the demands we were making were so reasonable that all we had to do was kick up a row and the establishment would give in," he says. But the civil rights marches were met with extraordinary ferocity. Protestant mobs attacked the demonstrators, and then the RUC swooped in to smash them up.

Following this line, the divergent outcomes for the two movements become a case study of the snowball effect of political choices. Also of the distortions of hindsight, which tends to elide the violent parts of the US civil rights movement, and the peaceful elements of Irish republicanism.

In spirit, although perhaps not explicitly, this runs counter to one of the other big currents of economic punditry I've lately been bombarded with. Parts of the French media, Esprit and RiLi for instance, have been pushing behavioural economics as the solution to all that ails economics. In this view, economics failed by concentrating too much on rational behaviour -- they couldn't see the bubble-inflating irrationality driving companies and traders, so they failed to predict the inevitable collapse.

It's theoretically possible to have both these views -- to argue that economics should take lessons from sociology and elsewhere in order to understand the markets, but avoid themselves dabbling in social problems. In practice, though, won't the blending of sociology and economics always cut both ways?