Someone (not sure who) has set up a Wrangl board on the pros and cons of filming council meetings. Have a look!
Posts under ‘Local government’
Council meetings – blogging and web-casting
The news that a blogger who filmed a meeting of a local council in Carmarthenshire was arrested for “breaching the peace” raises an interesting question that could have a slightly unfashionable answer. My friend, David Allen Green, writing in the New Statesman has a supplied a detailed trawl of the legal evidence along with some [...]
The character of local government
It’s Friday. It’s 3.30pm. It’s time for a nice entertaining post about the character of local government. Oh! Here’s one – on a blog that’s generally worth keeping an eye on. Along with the Glum Councillors tumblog, we’re seeing the culture of local government being ever-so-slightly lightened and humanised by the blogosphere.
Mulling over a ‘right to manage’
Wonderful pop-up social enterprise thinktank Popse (possibly the first pop-up thinktank ever, but certainly not the last) popped up in London’s Exmouth Market from 9-13 May. Among other hot topics was a proposal from the Waterways Project that a community ‘right to manage’ (or a ‘presumption in favour of community management’) should join the existing proposals in the [...]
Why ‘Microparticipation’ is so important
My friend Mick Phythian picked up a very useful motto/warning for anyone promoting e-government projects a while ago. To government, your time is worth £Zero – and this is why e-government fails. This explains why a very sharp idea that Dave Briggs has been working on recently – promoting the notion of ‘Microparticipation’ with a [...]
Why referendums should be banned
Apologies again for the light posting. I’ve written an extensive round-up of the main arguments (that I can think of) against referendums. The full post is over on Slugger O’Toole and a slightly edited (shorter) version is on Liberal Conspiracy. Both were published yesterday.
“Local authorities already exist with their own democratic mandate”
Professor George Jones panning the government’s new localism agenda: “This move to pass governmental decision-making to a level below local government is ill-thought-out. We do not know what is meant by community associations, how representative they will be, their boundaries, nor their audit, probity and accountability arrangements. Rather than setting up such amorphous entities, the [...]
Moderation, civility, and bipartisanship
Here’s US blogger Peter Levine on the various qualities that we can apply to political discourse: “I would tend to favor stronger, bolder policies. I think our actual policies are weak rather than moderate. I welcome a robust debate but I would recommend conducting that debate with basic rules of civility even if one’s opponents [...]
Imbyism?
Here’s Rory Sutherland on the Spectator blog: “….here lies the central challenge of the ‘Big Society’. In Britain our spectacular capacity for collective action in opposing things (Nazism, new housing, nightclubs) is matched only by our inability to harness any will or consensus when it comes to doing something new. Worse, our resistance to change [...]
The penny drops at last!
It may have happened fifteen years later than it needed to, but at the annual MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, BBC Director General Mark Thompson – and, presumably, his colleagues in the corporation have finally woken up to the real threat that the corporation faces: the downward pressure that is being placed [...]
