Just a quick one to round the week off. I missed this post yesterday on Paul Waugh’s site. I won’t accuse George Osborne of cowardice for saying this because he’s hardly unique in this respect: But he left the best til last. When asked if there was any chance of following up this localist agenda [...]
Posts under ‘Local government’
Facebook for Councillors
Speaking to some Councillors in Kent today, I found myself answering a few questions about Facebook ‘dos-and-don’ts’ – I mentioned that there was bound to be something from the many social media practitioners that have written on the subject, and that a quick Google would turn up a handy etiquette guide. Looking around, however, there doesn’t [...]
Breaking the monopoly that civil servants have in describing government
Charlie Beckett has yet another good post up – this time, over at OpenDemocracy. The point of Networked Journalism is that the citizen as an individual and as part of these organisations is now part of the production of news communications. The relationships offered by networked journalism offer the potential for increasing trust in that [...]
Football phone-ins v consultation exercises
Matthew Taylor has a good post up about the architecture of morality, and it’s all the better for the fact that he’s chosen an important issue (football) to illustrate his point. Personally, I spend six days a week tut-tutting about the way that popular political discourse is convened and managed. Panel shows on TV and [...]
Cllr Smith, MP
In France, the Socialist party want to reform the practice known as cumul des mandats, where an MP or Senator also holds elected office at local level in his home town. The argument is that wearing two hats in that way distracts national level politicians from their main jobs, and promotes cronyism and pork-barrel spending [...]
Six minutes a month…
Because the average member of staff who has access to a PC is spending six minutes a month on Facebook, Portsmouth City Council have decided to ban access to it. Predicatably, this has been welcomed by The Taxpayers Alliance: The Taxpayers’ Alliance said the move would stop the “waste of public cash”. Mark Wallace, from [...]
Local newspapers v council newspapers redux
My recent sojourn in the west of Ireland has made me look at this whole newspapers v councils issue in a new light. Roy Greenslade, it seems to me, is thinking inside a very English box. On the Guardian blog, he accuses Darlington councillor Nick Wallis of disingenuity in his dealings with a local journalist [...]
Pravda Press
Having posted yesterday on the question of local council-produced newspapers, I’ve just seen a piece in London’s Evening Standard by Andrew Gilligan. “In the past few years, a total of nine London boroughs have ditched low-key, factual publicity material and started high-frequency, in-your-face tabloids, full of good news – even if, as we shall see, [...]
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 [...]
Who will cover the cost of ‘scrutiny’?
Anthony has beat me to a response to the new Green Paper today, so I thought I’d develop his scepticism about the appetite for ‘scrutiny’. For me, the interesting question is – as ever – around the whole notion of representation. Town Hall Matters has lighted on this question and that post returns to a [...]
