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Something incredible is happening. On September 6, 1943, Winston Churchill famously told an audience at Harvard University that “the empires of the future will be empires of mind”. It was interpreted as a signal Britain understood the age of empire was coming to an end; but of all Churchill’s great soundbite quotes this is perhaps the most insightful, and least understood.

The age of empires did indeed draw to a close, but Churchill’s empires of mind have only just begun. These new empires of mind aren’t built by armies, run by colonialists or shaded pink on the map (or any other colour). They have no Head of State, nor State for that matter either. They are ideas and information, and one such idea - free western liberalism and democracy - and the information about it, is conquering new territory every day. Ronald Reagan said that information was the oxygen of the modern age, for it “seeps across the borders topped with barbed wire, wafts across the electrified borders.” The internet has turned that seepage and waft into a tidalwave - and the results are staggering. Unrelated and distant events are all proof.

Why did the public in Pakistan so suddenly turn hostile to a Taleban threat they had been happy to appease? They got a viral email featuring a YouTube clip. No one knows what the poor young girl had done; what they did know is what they saw done to her - held to the ground and whipped - and that they were reviled. Video killed the radio star, YouTube killed the Taleban (or their PR anyway).

What’s letting protestors communicate and the public stay informed in Iran? Twitter and its #hashtags. It’s not so much a case of “They may take our lives but they may never take our freedom” but more “they may rig our election but they may never take our Twitter and Facebooks.”

Why do we know Labour planned to smear its rivals? How can anyone reach a global audience? How can the World, his wife, his kids and the pet parrot all have a say? Blogs.

From video of state wrongdoing - the recent taser incident being newest - to blog journalism, YouTube video to Twitter updates, the ever more rapid and open flow of information is going to be the biggest force for change - and it’s good news for freedom and democracy.

Most of it may be rubbish - YouTube videos of cats yawning, blogs about Ukip, Twitter Tweets about the weather - but that’s its biggest strength. They can block the BBC, but they can’t stop someone outside pasting articles onto an email or blog (and if they find and block that then another will take its place). And they can’t stop people imparting information about other places and lifestyles from even the most mundane of things.

The Internet will change the World, and the revolution won’t just be televised, it’ll be YouTubed.

Sir Alan Sugar is one person who really annoys me. The Apprentice is one of my favourite shows, I’m extremely pro-business and have no qualms with any other businessman in particular – but he drives me mad.

Maybe it’s because I’ve not agreed with a single one of his final choices on the series – James and Miriam in Series 1 then Lucinda and Raeph from S4 were the only ones deserving a six figure salary – or maybe it’s because he is just such an envious, arrogant and obnoxious misery (as Paul Merton discovered when Siralan went on Room 101).

But most of all I think it’s because he promotes himself as one of Britain’s top business gurus. Margaret Thatcher ones said that being powerful was like being a lady, if you had to tell people you were then you probably weren’t. I get that feeling with Siralan.

He sits on his raised chair in a TV studio’s mock-boardroom with its bizarre shortage of seating, presiding over grovelling Apprentice hopefuls who had never heard of him before the series started, telling us all how he’s an acclaimed business expert. But has anyone bought an AMSTRAD lately? No, me neither.

Alan Sugar was extremely successful at producing and selling cut-priced consumer electronics; mass market versions of more expensive products. There is no knocking him for that. But that does not qualify him to be the nation’s business guru, the government’s oddly titled ‘Business Tsar’. He failed to innovate, stifled creativity, built shoddy products, fall out with buyers from chains such as Currys (reportedly being rude, swearing at them etc)…and got left behind.

From its heights to its sale last year, Amstrad had lost 90% of its value.

If the government wanted a real advisor on business, I would recommend Sir James Dyson. Also a self-made man, he exemplifies innovation, quality, and sound business practice. Worth £1.1 billion according to The Times, Dyson is the market leader (by value) of vacuum cleaners in the USA – outselling Hoover in their home Hoover market!

He also knows – as he told the Money Programme recently – that Britain’s future lies in the creative industries, innovation, design, technology. Being the best rather than being the cheapest. The polar opposite of Siralan.

A brief advert from Iain Dale;

Next Friday from 9am until 4pm, and Sunday evening from 6pm until midnight I will be hosting, along with Hopi Sen, a live elections programme on PlayRadioUK. These would be very much akin to how we covered the local elections on 18 Doughty Street on local election night in 2007. Very rough and ready and using citizen journalists all round the country to provide information and updates on what is going on in their area. It will be a sort of PoliticalBetting.com on radio…

The BBC is not doing an election programme on the 5th and won’t be on air until 9pm on the Sunday, so it seems to me there is a lot of scope to do something very innovative.

I’m looking for correspondents to cover each of the County Council/Unitary elections and also for the Sunday, correspondents to cover each Euro region - preferably more than one. We have the facility to get people on air by phone, Skype, email, text and Twitter.

We’re not going to try to repeat the kind of election programme the mainstream broadcasters do - it will be very much live and loose, and totally reliant on citizen journalism and bloggers to make it work. We’ll be talking to leading politicians and pundits over the course of the programmes too, but the bulk of it will be devoted to people like you.

When I first wrote about this, I had a huge response from people offering to play a part, and I’ll be emailing you all over the weekend. But if there is anyone else who may be attending a count, or be able to act as a correspondent, do please email me or leave a comment and I will add you to our list.

And while I am at it, don’t forget to tune into my normal weekly show on Playradiouk tonight from 11pm to 1am. And even better, call in!

I’m beginning to worry that we are a nation of witch hunters. First it was the bankers and the national witch-hunt for anyone who could be scapegoated for the recession; now it’s MP’s expenses which - although I am very angry about - needs a sense of proportion. We need to look at each case before chasing our MP’s down the road with the stake and setting up the bonfire!

What has made me worry is actually unrelated. Nervous Britain’s Got Talent star Jamie Pugh felt the wrath of our hardly honest newspapers (here, here and here for starters) because he once performed for one night as part of a group at a showcase for new talent in London and had answered “No” to the question “have you ever done anything like this, where you’ve sung with an audience like this?” he has been assaulted by the merciless language of the witch hunt. But define this - this as a talent show, this as a solo, or this as singing?

The moment they saw talent and a potential hook, the hunt was on.

The language of the hunt is dramatic - “Exposed”, “Liar”, “Fraud” - you can’t argue back. The exaggeration huge as a 1,000 capacity theatre becomes a 1,000 strong crowd and one night becomes “West end experience”. The underlying envy dripping from the pages. Previous winner Paul Potts was similarly attacked as not amateur enough.

Amanda Holden, the talentless judge best known as Les Dennis’ ex-wife and who stupidly expected Merlin Cadogan - suspended up-side-down from a burning rope in a straight jacket - to burn to death rather than fall, even said: “He got on my t*ts. I didn’t think he was genuine. I didn’t believe his emotion and I hated his voice. He sounded like a car starting. We all said, ‘Yes’ to him on the day so I feel terrible for saying it, but my heart’s not in that performance. He’s just a very weak Paul Potts. I didn’t like it.” She later buzzed him in the semi-finals and all three judges attacked his performance.

Of course speaking of liars, Piers Morgan and fake photos spring to mind.

The new Google Street-View service has received a lot of criticism, with one village near Milton Keynes ambushing the Google camera car and halting the photography. Complaints seem to resolve around privacy and security, and I can understand both, but I also feel we must put both in perspective.

With regards privacy, seeing your house on the Internet - and anyone being able to virtually walk past - feels a little weird. Some say it infringes privacy, but Google has broken no law and done nothing which isn’t already bring done, albeit on a vastly different scale. Anyone can walk down a public road, taking photographs or even filming, and share them in any way we like, so what is the difference? Indeed in reporting the villagers complaints, the film crew recorded the reporter walking down the street outside people’s houses. Whether we like it or not, we can’t live in a country where taking photographs from public places is illegal.

And this leads me to the security issue. Several people have suggested the photographs allow criminals - from burglars to terrorists - to familiarise themselves with an area or property, and thus make crime including terrorism more likely. But again these are all already public places, where anyone can go anyway, are photographed anyway, and are mapped by Ordnance Survey. We have already seen people arrested or stopped and searched under the Terrorism Act for taking photographs, from a freelance photographer at a carnival to trainspotters on a road bridge. We must not go down this route of paranoid fear. In a free country we can take photographs in public areas.

Google Street View does however have its uses, apart from being a curiosity and desktop city tour. Anyone buying a house, or chrcking out an area for access before visiting (wheelchair users etc), or discussing a property for whatever reason (council planning, builders etc), are just a few uses.

But the main thing is that as odd as this virtual world is, it’s still only digitalising what we can already see and do.

On Monday Channel Four’s Dispatches attempted a demolition job of Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London for just under a year now. Apart from being rather quick off the mark - they waited 8 years to investigate Red Ken - and made by an openly pro-Ken Antony Barnett, it was a waste of C4 budget, time and effort.

A central theme was “does he have a strategy to take London forward as the capital faces economic crisis?” despite the fact the economy isn’t part of his portfolio, though it then went on to criticise him for abolishing things such as the Low Emission Zone and Congestion Charge extensions in an effort to help remove burdens faced by small businesses. This was apparently contradictory to his manifesto pledge to improve air quality - though no mention of the fact the LEZ only cuts emissions to where they would be within a few years anyway as older vehicles get replaced, nor the fact halting both plans was in his manifesto. He was then accused of pandering to Sun readers because his Press Office spoke to them and they wrote an article!

In fact Mr Barnett was very obsessed by the environment, but not tree planting funded by abolishing the free newspaper, because apparently free propaganda is good. He is also very keen on bendy busses - with the new Routemaster being wrongly labelled dangerous, inaccessible and correctly “not expected until 2012″, which in this breath was considered a lifetime, but in the next (about the Olympics) almost imminent!

Traffic lights being reprogrammed to stay red for less time was similarly “bad” - no mention of how this reduces congestion, the time cars stay idle, or the amount of times cars stop and pull off, which…errr…reduces pollution and improves air quality.

Building a new international airport on a man-made “Boris Island” was deemed practically impossible and a flight of fantasy - no mention of Hong Kong International Airport - and almost identical to the rejected Cliffe Airport plan, which was totally different, that idea being on an ancient village and green fields rather than the sea. Also no mention of how Boris Island would replace Heathrow and its flight paths, a major cause of London’s poor air quality.

In short, it was rubbish.

There’s a lot of fuss being made about the idea of Shared Space road systems, of which the largest so far in the UK has recently opened in Ashford, Kent.

There’s a Facebook group against it, letters wrote to newspapers and councils, jokes about it on Have I Got News For You, and Jeremy Clarkson has labelled its supporters as “idiots”.

Clarkson wrote in the Sun that “They’ve deliberately made the ring road narrower to create this shared space…where cars and pedestrians all get on in perfect harmony…in the same way that the keepers at London Zoo could put all the animals in the same cage and sit back hoping that the Baby Jesus will stop the lions from eating the goats. Someone is going to be killed…either because they walked into the road, not knowing it was road, or because a motorist drove down the pavement not knowing it was pavement.”

He then proposes a return to 1960s city centre planning policies: “Make the road as straight and as fast as possible so people can get to work quickly and keep the wheels of industry turning. And then build foot bridges and railings to keep the cars away from those who choose to walk.” As if pedestrians and motorists aren’t ever the same people, and faster roads with railings and foot bridges (great for wheelchairs, buggies and the elderly) everywhere would be better.

Most complaints about Shared Space focus on the increased fear factor, but it’s meant to do this! Having signs, markings, kerbs, crossings and railings create a false sense of safety that subconsciously leads to faster, less cautious driving and less observant pedestrians. The increased perception of risk makes us take more care, when a situation feels unsafe, people are more alert and so there are fewer accidents.

This explains why New Road, a fully shared space in Brighton, has seen a 93% reduction in motor vehicle trips (12,000 fewer per day) and lower speeds (to around 10 MPH), alongside an increase in cyclist (93%) and pedestrian (162%) use; why a scheme implemented in London’s Kensington High Street, has yielded significant and sustained reductions in injuries to pedestrians with casualties fell from 71 in the two-year period before the street was remodelled to 40 afterwards (a drop of 43.7%). And in Holland casualty figures at one junction where traffic lights were removed have dropped from thirty-six in the four years prior to the introduction of the scheme to two in the two years following it.

Now there are issues with adapting to the system for the blind which need addressing, but I find it hard to challenge the evidence that Shared Space works.

Meanwhile Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson has been named the man other blokes most admire in a poll featuring in it’s top ten Apprentice boss Sir Alan Sugar, comic Peter Kay, footballer David Beckham, and The Office creator Ricky Gervais. You really have to wonder who they surveyed.

Last night something truly shocking happened.

Eoghan got through on the X Factor again!

Despite making Busted’s original “Year 3000″ look like hard rock compqred to his version and slaughtering ABBA’s “Does Your Mother Know”, the teeny bopper defeated Diana Vickers and her rendition of Dido’s “White Flag” to win a place in the final for a £1 million record deal.

But did anyone else note the lyrics? ABBA’s “You’re so hot” became “You’re so cute” and Busted’s lyrics “Your great great grand-daughter is pretty fine” became “…doing fine” - doing fine with what, her GCSEs? Or doing fine in hospital? It just shows how ludicrous Eughan is as a finalist that they feel the need to change lyrics.

But it wasn’t enough in a way. How daft did he look singing the words “You’re only a child” - when so is he! - and “Does your Mother know that you’re out?” More to the point, does his? It must be a school disco.