Local government governance guru Peter Keith-Lucas has
an article in this week’s Local Government Lawyer assessing the current state of governance in local councils.
It’s a good read – expert but not too technical. Keith-Lucas has plagues to put on the houses of both parties: the Labour party for watering down the proper role of scrutiny [...]
Posts under ‘Neutrality’
A few words on governance
Transparency v Objectivity
As local newspapers retreat from providing anything like a good quality of news coverage, local authorities are wondering what their response should be.
On the one hand, there’s the model that Birmingham City Council have taken – providing a much more user-friendly information gateway that is designed to provide resources to citizen-journalists and bloggers.
Other options include [...]
Adversarial politics, transparency and independence – some questions.
Here’s a good post from an Australian blogger on the question: Is adversarial politics damaging to our democracy? (It’s actually an update on a previous post with that title). Here the adversarialism is opposed by a more attractive ‘deliberative’ model of the kind advocated here. The flipside of this argument is put very well by [...]
Does the idea of 'impartial journalism' deserve challenging?
I’d like to look at how the requirement that is placed upon public broadcasters to be impartial impacts upon the quality of democracy in the UK. It’s a complex question, and I’d like to explore it over a few posts.
‘Impartial’ can mean many things. The most obvious expression of it is in the guidelines that [...]
How can politicians resist the pressures that stop them from governing well?
This time last year, Sir Christopher Foster – a long-standing government adviser on economic policy was much in evidence. There was this interview in the Telegraph, and I heard him on BBC Radio 4. The link to the programme is no longer available, but I made notes at the time. The Telegraph piece makes some [...]
MPs websites – politics on the rates?
As there are a couple of good posts in the mainstream political blogosphere touching upon the qualities that are needed to promote an effective representative democracy, today is a good day to start a blog on the subject. This post will focus on the most topical:
Both Puffbox and Spartakan are chewing over the fact that [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
