I thought I’d wait until you’re all back from the Christmas break before I posted about my trip to Copenhagen and it’s various climate events. Almost everything climate-related that happened in and around Copenhagen over those two weeks offers rich pickings for reflection on the changing relationship between democracy and climate change.
I work for the [...]
Posts under ‘Pressure groups’
Copenhagen Climate Summit widens rift between local and global approaches
Transparency for lobbyists
Like a minority of people who have watched what will surely be 2009’s official leitmotif – the demand for full disclosure from MPs – play out, I’ve wondered when similar demands will be applied to those who rival MPs for power.
This phrase of Larry Elliot’s – explaining the roots of the current economic crisis – [...]
Bloggers and transparency
One of the recurring themes of this blog is the way that weblogs are (as Charlie Beckett put it in that book review that I pointed to the other day), reconfiguring journalism and political discourse.
The most prominent examples of this in the UK have been the war of attrition that right-wing libertarian bloggers have conducted [...]
Campaigns
Here’s LD’s co-blogger Anthony writing (or rather, quoting) from his main blog on the growing ‘pressure group industry’:
“The flourishing of associations is the denial of mediation. Taken to its logical conclusion, the slogan of the movement is: for each individual their own association, and by that very fact, no association at all.”
It’s often easy to [...]
Political parties & active citizens
If there is a point at which most of the authors of this blog (I can’t speak for all of them) differ from most of the sites that we link to, and that link here, it may be on the queston of ‘active citizenship’.
Where it seeems to be an almost unexamined given to argue that [...]
"We need an algorithm that works"
I don’t know about you, but this term ‘Goverati’ makes me slightly nervous.
“What is the goverati? It is made up of people with first-hand knowledge of how the government operates, who understand how to use social software to accomplish a variety of government missions, and who want to use that knowledge for the benefit of [...]
The lust for certainty – a sin?
In a very good edition of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Analysis’ programme towards the end of last year, the columnist David Aaronovich recounted a programme that he produced in the 1980s featuring the Archbishop of York, John Hapgood.
The Archbishop, as far as I can see, had the kind of views that would appeal to a Guardian [...]
Guidelines confetti – a few observations
I’d been planning to do this blog for years, but the thing that finally nudged me to get on with it was this story (my first post) about how an MP’s online allowance was docked by the Parliamentary authorities because he used it in the way that you would expect politicians to use such an [...]
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 [...]
How to live in the 21st Century
Labour-leaning ginger-group Compass is inviting policy proposals to be submitted and debated on this site and at meetings around the country.
The site says that the proposals will then be voted on by the Compass membership – forming the policy priorities for the organisation to campaign on. The successful polices will sit alongside the narrative 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? 
