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Michael Foot was a romantic idealist whose admirable commitment to causes won him Labour’s leadership when those causes suited others’ aims. But those same commitments led to wrong policy choices in the 1980s which disbarred him from forming a government. His real achievements as a minister deserve respect, his speaking talent admiration, and his ability and achievement as a writer amply deserve both. This certainly amounts to greatness of a kind, and greatness in the service of excellent humanitarian aims: peace, justice, knowledge, a better world. Those who knew him also speak uniformly of his kindness, warmth and generosity – that can be no accident. For once, then, there is no trace or irony when we say Michael Foot was both a great and a good man.

Like Nick Baines, I welcome the launch of the Citizen Ethics Network, an initiative that can only be positive and that I, too, will be following. The wider and more democratic this conversation is, the better. I hope the debate takes off.

A real threat to our public ethics comes from the determination of some religious believers, and the readiness at least of their leaders, to justify and maintain discrimination on the grounds of personal sexual conduct. Parts of the media join in with glee, too. If we could get rid of that thinking, and the kind of hypocrisy that dares complain about bigotry after forcing a man to withdraw from a bishopric precisely in order to appease prurient bigots, our public ethics would be the better for it.

These are the Wikio overall blog rankings for January 2010.

Some quite interesting movements this month:

1. The craft challenge blogs are back !
2. The non-partisan political blog Political Betting continues to reduce in ranking (see graphs below). That is interesting at the start of an election year, and should change quite quickly.
3. Left Foot Forward is in the Political Top 10 – it is 11 here, as these are the overall rankings.

Back on 11 March 2008, Tom Watson, then a Parliamentary Secretary at the Cabinet Office with a special interest in Digital Media, consulted on his blog to create a set of guidelines for Civil Servants who were active online. Tom’s original post is here – note especially the conversation in the comments.

For newcomers, it will give you a bit of an idea about how blogs work to know that this came a few days after the “Civil Serf Incident”, when an anonymous blogger writing an unauthorised blog about frustrations with the civil service firstly hit the national papers, then deleted the blog (on 8-9 March 2008) to dodge the subsequent “investigation”. In a further blogger style act, Simon Dickson put an account of the incident back at the location from where the Civil Serf site had vanished, here.

There followed debate by a range of bloggers (samples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), and subsequently the code appended to this article was published. Tom’s code was treated as an extension of the existing Civil Service Code specifically for the online environment. The approach was what I call “principles based” rather than “practice based” – in short, asking Civil Servants to “behave like this” rather than “do these things“. It would fit on a single sheet of paper, and was exactly 379 words long.

The reason I’m posting about this now is that the bodies which run the Methodist Church in the UK are creating a similar code for their employees, Methodist Ministers – of whom there are around 3000-3500, and members active online, and there’s a debate going on amongst Methodist Bloggers. This debate has been triggered by Pete Philips, who blogs at Postmodern Bible, with contributions by – amongst others – connexions, Fat Prophet, Steve Jones, Big Circumstance and Methodist Preacher. I’ll aim blog about the Methodist process next week, but in short some people – and I agree with this approach – prefer a shorter document that follows the Civil Service approach.

So I thought I would revisit the Civil Service Guidelines, and see whether they had been effective. I was interested to see whether a single page code had worked well across such a large and diverse organisation.