“The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” George Burns Over the next few weeks, my MP (a newly-elected Tory) will go through the parliamentary lobby in support of a range of bills that he knows little about. Sure. He may have a few reflexive opinions on the [...]
Posts under ‘Leadership’
Lists and lessons
Mark Pack has a very good post up on Lib-Dem Voice – advice for budding politicians: ‘30 things every would-be politician should do this summer‘ (he was inspired by a similar post for aspiring journalists elsewhere). Thirty is a big number – too big for me. But I’ve got a few observations that I’ve been [...]
Democracy mirroring social media activity, party whips and ‘ishoos’
Firstly, Catherine has an interesting post up here. No conclusions yet, but definitely worth following. Secondly, Tom Watson – in one of the final votes of the last Parliamentary session – rebelled against the government for the first time in his career over the Digital Economy Bill. I’d say I’m in a minority in admiring [...]
Centralisation: A turning point?
For those of us who would like local politics to be more highly valued, two slightly conflicting observations were made by prominent political bloggers last weekend. The first was by the ever-perceptive Potlatch writing about James Purnell, and digging into the question of ‘professionalisation’ of politics: “Purnell – like Ruth Kelly and Ed Balls – [...]
Beta legislation: Changing the concept of ‘leadership’?da
The January 2010 issue of Wired Magazine has a bunch of policy-related proposals under the slightly familiar heading ‘Let’s Reboot Britain’. It’s always a slightly trying time, reading Wired when it strays into politics and public policy. For an example of what I’m talking about, this article (Synopsis: I know! Now somebody’s invented teh internet, [...]
Change from the bottom up?
One of this blog’s new contributors, Halina Ward, is currently in Copenhagen at the Climate Change Conference. The main reason she is there is to write a post for us (ahem). One thing she has passed on to me is a scepticism about the problems surrounding ‘bottom up’ solutions to the problem of carbon emissions. [...]
Open minds – the councillor-curator?
Kevin Harris has forwarded this article about the role that councillors are obliged to adopt in relation to planning. Nothing in it will come as a surprise to anyone familliar with the role of a modern councillor, but it’s a nice round up of an issue that will continue to perplex anyone with an interest [...]
The birth of cool?
Last week, the Guardian carried a feature on ‘The Coolest Mayor in America‘ – John Fetterman of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Fetterman’s success raises a few slightly trivial aesthetic questions about what it takes to be a successful politician. It also raises bigger, more profound ones as well. Fetterman doesn’t look like the traditional buttoned up political [...]
To the barricades!
The #rebootbritain hashtag on Twitter went haywire on Monday as over 700 people attended the event – I spent over an hour on Tuesday night searching through it and the earliest session I could get to in that time was a 4pm one – it actually challenged #michaeljackson for prominence on Twitter’s trending indicator. Because [...]
A think tank of your own
Here’s Joanne Jacobs on the Australian ‘Government 2.0 Taskforce’ making a fairly universal point: Even where a public fund is used to identify new tools, the majority of these will either slip into obscurity after launch or will be greatly applauded for a while but not widely adopted or contributed to, by the policy makers [...]
