Given all the talk of localism in recent months, it is pretty disappointing to see Caroline Spelman, the Conservative shadow Local Government minister, making the following statement (via the BBC) on Council Tax rises: At a time when millions of workers are facing pay freezes or unemployment this year, it adds insult to injury to [...]
Posts under ‘Democratic renewal’
Shift Delete
Local decision-making should be less constrained by central government, and also more accountable to local people. We will encourage democratic innovations in local government, including pilots of the idea of elected mayors with executive powers in cities. David Cameron’s green paper Shift Control, published yesterday? No, the 1997 Labour manifesto, and if you want a [...]
Conservative 'localism' approach announced
It is very hard to take the UK Conservative Party’s claim to be a localist party seriously today. Many of these steps will seriously weaken the powers and status of local elected representatives without providing any empowerment of ordinary citizens by way of compensation. All of the following issues are features can be portrayed as [...]
Getting the message out
Local government has been thinking a lot about community engagement and reputation management, and one of the unexpected side-effects has been an increased focus on how council communications support the democracy and participation message. Press releases are more focused on residents’ experiences, and repeat key messages about the council’s activities. Process description is kept to [...]
Signposts off
Three articles have caught my eye over the weekend: Wikipedia and the law: The libel laws haven’t yet caught up with the existence of Wikipedia. This is a problem – and it offers a huge advantage to those with the means to use lawyers to intimidate. The article itself is short and to-the-point, but Padraig [...]
Listening in – better than asking for opinions?
They say that eavesdroppers never hear good things about themselves. This may be true, but they probably get a more honest appraisal than the more direct forms of feedback can afford. For me, this raises the question: Should we be asking people what they think about anything? Or should we be encouraging conversations and finding [...]
The day democracy is celebrated everywhere
It’s not a question for today. The only reason I raise it now is because there are plenty of reasons to question the quality of liberal democracy found in the United States. The pressure groups are immensely powerful. The constitution imposes boundaries upon the voters that many find unacceptable. As the Democratic Society blog notes, [...]
Local authority systems lockdown
If you were to draw a Venn Diagram showing attitudes to the use of ICT tools for interactivity, putting Interactive Evangelists in one circle and local authority ICT managers in the other, I strongly suspect that you would end up with something that looks like a number. This number: 8 When I get time, I’d [...]
Eavesdroppable?
Here’s Suze, musing on the question of how far blogging is having a positive impact on journalism. Suze concludes that it’s too early to tell, but she says a lot of interesting things on the way. For me, here’s the big question: Does the emergence of a decentralised space with fewer barriers to entry (ahem: [...]
Ballot design
Before politics stopped being fairly boring in the late summer last year, the book of the year looked like it was going to be Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge. It’s still worth a look when you need a break from Robert Peston – and one of their areas of interest has been ballot design [...]
