Marathon Update.

Yep I've spent most of today (23/4/12) trying to catch up on a week worth's of news in a couple of hours. I dread to think what my email inbox is going to look like.

More importantly though more information has emerged about yesterday's (22/4/12) London Marathon. Firstly event organisers have apologised for making the personal details (name/address etc) of all participants available online. As a marathon race is an Olympic event this obviously Britain trying to promote discussion about protecting the details of the Olympic participants including all the spies especially from the email/phone hacking media who are still in trouble at the Leveson Inquiry. Even more importantly the 30 year old woman who died in yesterday's event has been named as Claire Squire from Leicestershire and since then her Justgiving.com page has raised £120,000 (USD190,000) for The Samaritans charity. Although I'm sure that most of this is just the generosity of the British public it does make her death look more suspicious.

While her death was undoubtedly from natural causes you can't just run the London Marathon. Assuming that you're not a professional marathon runner represented by a national athletics association you have to apply for one of the charitable places which are massively over-subscribed. If you are lucky enough to win one of the those places you then have to raise a minimum amount of money (I think £3000/USD4800) in order to compete. Therefore it wouldn't be too difficult for someone with the right sort of access to manipulate the selection process to make sure a person who wasn't physically quite up to running 26.2 miles got a place especially if that person had previously been involved in the Royal Air Force (RAF) Association. Having the amount of donations suddenly spike draws attention to a death that occurred on a very busy news day and promotes discussion about the changes to the UK tax laws on charitable donations. You see the objective is not to totally remove the charitable sector of civil society but to make it more dependent on the Crown. For example many of the charities I've dealt with like Mind in Croydon and Croydon Voluntary Action are registered with the Charity Commission and fulfil the legal framework for a Charity. However their fund raising activities are limited to simply cashing government cheques. After the proposed reforms these sort of Charities will be fine but it is arguable that they are part of the state sector rather then civil society

An example of a country where civil society has been co-opted into the state in this way would Mubarak's Egypt where the food subsidy system meant that rather then having farmers selling wheat and bakers buying flour through private enterprise you simply had the government providing bread. Apart from providing me with a good example of the importance of civil society it also reminds me that I need to get on with Egypt's upcoming Presidential election and the trials over the Port Said football tragedy. For example I'm not sure suspending the football league is the best idea. After all if people are going to be rioting surely it's better they do it in a stadium where they have to opt in by buying a ticket and travelling to the game rather then doing it in the middle of the capital city where they'll get in everyone's way and scare off the tourists.

And don't even get me started on how Britain is trying to castrate the House of Lords by turning it into an ineffective elected body just as impotent as the House of Commons.