According to yesterday’s papers, the No10 Petitions website has been canned. I can understand that a lot of the people behind it saw it as a learning experience and it clarified a few things. My problem with the whole project is that this is one area where politicians let themselves down. Civil Servants go on [...]
Posts under ‘Constitutional issues’
Electronic Voting
Apologies for the light posting here lately – I’ve been busy with the Political Innovation project. There’s a series of posts I’ve added there on ‘What Politicians need to know about social public information.’ I’ll be reviving this blog shortly. In the meantime, here’s something on electronic voting that I found via O’Conall Street.
Political Innovation No1: Towards Interactive Government
This is a guest cross-post by Tim Davies – originally posted on the Political Innovation site here: The communication revolution that we’ve undergone in recent years has two big impacts: It changes what’s possible. It makes creating networks between people across organisations easier; it opens new ways for communication between citizens and state; it gives [...]
Informed public = better democracy?
As Churchill* once said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” This article in The Boston Globe makes the argument that democracy is actually damaged by the way that people respond to being contradicted by evidence (they dig in rather than adapt to it). It uses this satirical post [...]
Crowdsourcing policy? Politicians do this better than apps
The new team at HMG have created the Your Freedom site – a tool that is designed to crowdsource policy proposals – specifically requests to repeal unnecessary legislation, regulation or restrictions upon personal liberties. It follows hot on the heels of the Treasury’s ‘Spending Challenge‘ – a site designed to ask people who work in [...]
Coalitions and representative democracy
Not being a supporter of either of the coalition parties, the current range of opportunities to accuse them of betraying their manifesto commitments are very tempting. It’s hard not to relish a few years of Nick Clegg having this video replayed constantly in the light of Tuesday’s budget VAT hike. But taking the partisan hat [...]
The mother of invention?
Necessity, that is. It’s Budget Day and the cuts are in the post. My incredible predictive powers tell me that government spending may be under a bit of pressure shortly. If you’re not a regular over at William Heath’s Ideal Government blog, this post is a good introduction to his general themes. In his overview [...]
The reification of the 2010 election result
So what mandate does the new government have? K-punk (in a wider, very good post) quotes Melanie Phillips saying that “no-one voted for a hung parliament.” Before the election, there was a persistent rumbling around Gordon Brown’s legitimacy as PM (he didn’t win a general election) that seems strangely lacking around David Cameron – arguably [...]
Swedenise us!
I was very sad to hear – via Slugger – of the passing of ‘Horseman’ – one of the better (anonymous) bloggers that I have in my RSS feed. Being busy, I missed his last posting on his Ulster’s Doomed! blog – a terrifically good one at that. Writing about our image of politicians, Horseman points [...]
What kind of election was it?
The Election 2010 blog is asking ‘what election was that‘? “The opening book in the ‘Nuffield’ election series – The British General Election of 1945 – lists a series of ‘named’ elections: 1874, when the Liberals went down in a flood of gin and beer; the Midlothian election of 1880; the Khaki election of 1900; [...]
