Via Spartakan, I’ve just seen this outline of how local debate could be / is structured. And, initially, it looks fairly complete as long is it is covering only debate, as opposed to policy-making. I think it’s a useful diagram, and I don’t have the time to do this properly – graphic design is a [...]
Posts under ‘Local government’
Councillors and the snow
Here’ Dan Drillsma-Milgrom of the LGC on how Councillors should respond to the heavy snow that we’re seeing in the UK at the moment: “For those who know to look for it, Camden has an easy to use section of its website that directs residents to the nearest sand grit bins and shows the gritting [...]
The Conservatives’ £million question
I’m not a natural Tory (if you’ve met me, you’ll know that I’m quite the opposite) but I can’t help but be impressed with their grasp of a few of the opportunities offered by new (potentially) democratic tools lately. The first one is their use of Google Moderator in the Q&A that is embedded in [...]
Copenhagen Climate Summit widens rift between local and global approaches
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 [...]
A few words on governance
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 [...]
Local democracy and the strange case of speed humps and 20 mph zones
Speed humps: love ‘em or hate ‘em, here in the UK they’ve become a symbol of the traffic calming zeitgeist. Speed humps also pose a major challenge for local democracy. That’s because local authorities are legally hampered from taking full account of the commonly held view that whilst speed reduction is good, speed humps are bad. [...]
Democratic, decentralised and difficult
I attended an interesting seminar yesterday afternoon, hosted by the 2020 Public Services Trust. The topic was the future of citizen-centred public services. The two principal speakers both brought innovative ideas and a real vision, which is more than can be said for a lot of these public policy seminars. Ben Jupp, from the Cabinet [...]
E-spending
Liz Azyan picks up on some questions about e-petitions that were asked here by Paul a couple of months back. She doesn’t mention the fascinating word cloud that accompanies her article, called “E-petition verbs”. The biggest words are, on a quick skim, “prevent, save, reimburse, make, oppose, charge and introduce”. With my local government head [...]
Does twitter damage the quality of parliamentary debate – or improve it?
Kerry McCarthy MP tweeted last night that she will be going in to bat for tweeting MPs on Radio 5Live later today. Her adversary on the show will be John Pugh MP – and Torcuil Crichton explains the background: Dr John Pugh, the analogue Lib Dem MP for Southport, has a motion down condemning the [...]
We don’t want to read your website. We want to write it.
So: It’s now official. Local authorities are going to be obliged to promote democracy (and the bill is quite prescriptive about the role that the internet will have to play in this). It should make for an interesting seven months. There is often something of a dialogue of the deaf between those who have spent [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
