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.

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 Government should empower local authorities, to promote and support public involvement in their localities. After all local authorities already exist with their own ready-made governance structures, their own democratic mandate, and with 20,000 community activists called councillors in place.”

The new team at HMG have created the Your Freedom site – a tool that is designed to crowdsource policy proposals – specifically requests to repeal unnecessary legislation, regulation or restrictions upon personal liberties.

It follows hot on the heels of the Treasury’s ‘Spending Challenge‘ – a site designed to ask people who work in the public sector for ideas on how they can curb costs. It is a fairly standard site developed originally – as it happens – by my mate Simon (who deserved more credit than he got for it), built to invite ideas but not to publish them unmoderated.

The treasury site’s findings will prove to be a slow burn, but as far as I can see, the idea of saying ‘OK, you work here, what could we do better’ has to have an appeal that goes beyond the small-state fixations of the governing coalition. No-one who is critical of British management standards can fail to see that there must be some benefit in asking the  workers what they would do better.

As my friend Big Pete put it in the context of postal workers a while ago….

“Most of the people who work on the front line are not obstacles, they are experts. Their knowledge is far more valuable than the snake oil of management theory. The denigration of the workforce and the elevation of the great talents who brought us the credit crunch into superheroes is one of the more unlikely episodes in a class war, one being waged, increasingly successfully, against workers, rather than by them.”

Your Freedom is a different matter. It uses a standard tool -the Dialogue App – developed by those good people at Delib.

Firstly, a bit of disclosure: I’ve found the meme that we have, somehow, been stripped of our liberties to be very problematic and I said why here a while ago. I’d go further. I suspect that the Conservatives will soon tire of it once their feet are fully under the table in the same way that they tired of the notion that we were an elective dictatorship at some point between Lord Hailsham’s pronouncement on the subject in the late 1970s (under a Labour government) and Mrs Thatcher’s massively-centralising rate-capping reforms of the 1980s.

All of that said, how have they done, and what could they have done better? Well Chris Applegate rather lays the boot in here, effectively endorsing the treasury’s approach rather than the ‘Your Freedom‘ one. Some of his suggestions raise way too high a bar:

“If you want people to propose changes to laws, then make the users think about those laws when submitting. There should be a mandatory field asking them to specify which acts or regulations they would want to change – e.g. “Terrorism Act 2000?.”

Surely the point of doing this is to circumvent the way that well-heeled pressure groups dominate public discourse? You’d need a team of savvy researchers to be able to meet that bar.

On the other hand, Chris also offers a load of good practical suggestions for weeding out the Clarksonism and his ideas on moderation and de-duplication are good ones. But I think that the real problem here is that it is the bolting-on of interactive tools to a government that isn’t fundamentally interactive in the first place. This isn’t a particular criticism of the Lib-Servatives either – Labour were significantly worse at this than the new crowd.

However, it has to be said that the government are trying – they’re doing something innovative that they will learn from – and that can only be a good thing. When I first saw the site, I used Twitter to float the idea that it would be better to create a tool that promoted collaborative authoring,  allowing a large-ish number of people to collectively describe the problem rather than to propose solutions. Replies suggested that this was too high a bar. They’re right, of course. I can’t point to many successful examples of people using collaborative authoring tools to describe a problem.

But there are some, and they show what is needed to succeed.

MixedInk has had a number of successes crowdsourcing a single description of something. They used weight of numbers plus fanaticism (in different cases) to get a good single document out of a lot of people – one where strong points were promoted and weak ones were exorcised. I like this idea because it is a good use of active citizens – it makes them the servants – rather than the masters – of elected politicians.

If a government minister were to find the right way to introduce a narrow-ish subject, I’m confident that a useable outcome would result.

Similarly, Debategraph has made a start doing similar things, but it is still in need of development in terms of usability. On the one hand, MixedInk, Debategraph and the various wiki tools (including MediaWiki – the tool behind Wikipedia) are no-where near as usable and accessible as Delib’s tool, and any politician who were to put all of their chips on following my advice – ‘crowdsource a description of the problem using collaborative authoring tool’ – they’d probably not last the week out.

But – on the other hand – if the government were prepared to invest a portion of that £1m that it offered for a public-policy website on usability specialists that would make collaborative authoring more attractive – perhaps it would be make enough of a difference. It may even be enough to simply signal that ‘a crowdsourced description of problems’ is their preferred means of consultation – perhaps that sort of clarity would unlock the necessary investment?

One of the best examples I’ve seen was the one introduced in advance of The Interactive Charter last year by Tim Davies. He managed to crowdsource the ‘50 barriers‘ wiki. Tim is a savvy guy who knows how to use participative tools.

As an individual, Tim knows how to do it and has developed the a range of personal skills that he needs. There are lots of ways of weeding out useless commentary, but the bottom line is that the best application for doing it isn’t any kind of script: It is, instead, a carbon-based lifeform – one that has been elected and has the executive power to take high-quality input from the public and do something useful with it.

At the end of the day, there is no substitute for getting actual politicians to develop interactive skills and do this themselves. So many initiatives will only back-fill until the time that this is accepted.

Not being a supporter of either of the coalition parties, the current range of opportunities to accuse them of betraying their manifesto commitments are very tempting. It’s hard not to relish a few years of Nick Clegg having this video replayed constantly in the light of Tuesday’s budget VAT hike.

But taking the partisan hat off, the upsides for the quality of democracy are hard to avoid as well. I’d broadly agree with Lib-Dem blogger Mark Thompson in this ‘campaign in majoritarian, govern in coalition’ post that the experience of participating in – or watching – coalition government will bring a number of improvements to the way that political discourse is conducted in the UK. If it results in more equivocal value-based electioneering, it can only be a good thing.

The thing is, all political parties are coalitions anyway. They’re clusters of smaller social interests that oppose the other clusters more than the rival components of their own. Our First Past the Post electoral system usually promotes coalitions within political parties rather than between them and any significant change to that system will probably result in a re-alignment of those components.

When election campaigns – and the conversation inbetweentimes becomes more of a pluralistic struggle about values, we’ll have something that misrepresents the decisions that governments have to take a good deal less. This can only be a good thing, surely?

It’s almost self-evident that a manifesto stuffed with pledges will reduce the scope for pragmatism. Election campaigns where parties pledge to take particular decisions have always resulted in broken promises and poorer policies. They also reveal a fatally compromised approach to policy that can’t be commensurate with good governance. They represent an attempt to buy-off vocal and active pressure groups at the expense of The General Will.

In 1983, Labour fell foul of ‘The Longest Suicide Note in History’ – I posted elsewhere on how an obsession mandates damaged Labour at the time. In 1997 – and in subsequent elections – Labour also succumbed to the temptation of using pledges to counteract its problems with the media – at best, fair-weather friends – and it’s overwhelming sense that the public didn’t trust it. The relationship with the press was never addressed and one can’t really conclude that the public trust Labour (or politicians in general) more now than they used to.

There’s a good post up here on Conservative Home about what advice MPs should take seriously. I had one here a while ago about personality types – it would be good to do anything that could be done to weight these models – help the poor buggers to work out how they should be behaving at the moment.

“Well isn’t this an exciting moment?”

I got ‘the fisheye’ when I said this earlier today to a bleary-eyed crowd of people who had been canvassing for different parties in Northern Ireland.

Some of them were into their thirtieth hour without sleep. There’s a time and a place for train-spottery musings about constitutional permutations.

Electoral reform looks like it’s on the cards though. Whatever the Lib-Dems say, I doubt that they will exit a moment where they can exert leverage without firstly securing a commitment to PR – probably of the STV variety.I’ve tried to stick to observations on this blog that I’ve not heard widely elsewhere, and my two points for today are…

• Everyone seems to be saying that the Lib-Dems will do a deal with the Tories. They are obliged to run this by their membership (remember the ‘Cyberlock‘?) and I’m not sure that they will stomach a deal with the Tories that readily. Also, the electorate seemed to be quite keen on a Lib-Lab deal
• On the other hand Labour has a minority of MPs with a visceral hatred of PR and they may struggle to honour any deal they offer the Lib-Dems

We’ll see. On the issue in question, I’m undecided whether PR is a good thing. OK – it may secure a more proportionate representation from the available political parties, but does it give us a government that more accurately represents the General Will? Political parties are, after all, largely coalitions of people who come together to game the voting system.

Can more people tick of more comparison points within the government that match their own views? And more importantly, can the government be said to be hitting any kind of sweet spot in representing the material interests of the nation? Carrying out the wishes of the public – expressed and implicit – are surely what democracies claim to do?

So PR? Not sure. But voting reform? That’s a different matter. There are two obvious benefits, I think?

Firstly, I think that STV elections will be more frank and less groupthinky – less of a scrabble for the middle ground. In ordering our preferences there seem to me to be two advantages: The discourse will be more flexible and inclusive. If someone who has views outside of the hotly-contested centre ground is going to have their votes re-allocated, more of the parties will court their vote and seek to compromise with them.

That calculation in which I asked how far governments reflect the expressed wishes of the public would seem to work out OK under STV. More people will vote and politicians will be sent clearer messages and engage in more debate (which is good, right?). And remember – after the last few weeks – other forms of gauging opinion are not very reliable. Remember Cleggmania? Where did that go?

Secondly, politicians will know what they’re being told. Today, Nick Clegg – despite a fairly poor showing – will decide who will form the next government. He can’t reliably ask those who voted for him (remember, opinion-polling sucks!). Lots of his voters were Labour tactical voters, and some were Tories gaming the system to keep Labour out. Some were bona-fide Lib-Dems. And with all of that scepticism about polling, a new version of a poll like this one (!) would be interesting.

OK, we’re still left with the fundamental problem with elections in that they don’t allow us to weight preferences in the way that we do when we tell bookies what we think will happen. But you can’t have everything.

So I’m quite keen on STV. It only leaves me with one question on which I don’t know the answer: Will it foreground the representative and diminish the powers of political parties relative to MPs?

Anyone know the answer to this one?

I think that a lot of election commentary is missing something important about how we vote. As some commenters here have said, in the past, ‘at elections, we order our preferences’.

That makes this really interesting. Nick Clegg doesn’t seem to be strongly objected to in the way that Gordon Brown and David Cameron are. Could the Lib Dems win my a landslide?

Digest these figures……

Update: What if Clegg could convince a significant number of us that he was winning.

I’ve tried to boil down the killer argument in the whole ‘blogger v journalist’ debate, and it runs something like this:

Take the best article you’ve read in a newspaper recently. The one that was well-written and argued and the one that met a particular need that you have personally. You can be almost certain that a better article was written somewhere on the blogosphere. The only problem is finding it. As social bookmarking and ‘collaborative filtering’ improves, you will increasingly be able to access a personalised stream of these articles that will partly negate your need for a newspaper.

To illustrate the point, here’s a great post by James Cridland on how you can weave your own personalised radio station together. That’s the sort of innovation I’ve been awaiting for years (more in ‘innovation’ below). And then, to add a bit of flavour to the argument, here’s something on how journalists can build their own reader-communities. And while we’re on the question of the media, here’s some breaking news; Murdoch’s paywall idea isn’t suicidal after all. Murdoch isn’t stupid and isn’t afraid to think differently and take on big beasts. Who knew?

So. Great blogging: take the last couple of days as an example. I’m interested in how far politics is about the clash of social forces rather than the public discourse around the ishoos. Here, Peter Hetherington (admittedly, writing for the evil MSM) has a post on how local v central is a cross-cutting issue. Ingrid has a very perceptive question: Hang on, isn’t there a local election happening at the moment as well? And wasn’t teh Hinterwebs supposed to create a space that allowed the local to re-emerge? My only quibble with Ingrid is buried in the notion of the availability bias.Surely well-targeted local coverage is only seen by local people? It reminds me of the popular misconception among politicians about Facebook. It looks like a mirror – after all, you only see your friends – people who wish you well. So for Labour politicians, it looks like The Guardian and for Tories, it looks like The Telegraph. But, it’s actually a two-way mirror with all of those vindictive Express and Mail readers behind it – rubbing shoulders with … well, the list that Fremania has draw up (see below).

Hugh Flouch of the verygood Harringay Online will be partially addressing this question on these very pages shortly.

The other day, Chris Dillow highlighed David ‘Two-Brains’ Willetts really fascinating-looking book on an inter-generational conflict of interests. Chris’s concluding question ….

“Isn’t there an unavoidable tension between intergenerational justice and democratic politics?”

… is, I suspect the mask for a much much bigger question. Insert ‘long termism on climate change’, ‘global social justice’ or any one of a dozen other issues to see what I mean.

Oh – and in my highly-cultivated collaboratively-filtered stream of bloggery and journalism, I’ve noticed that there is an inverse relationship between the focus on Climate Change and the nearness of the election. What does that tell us (apart from something about the failings of my own filters)?

What else? Oh yes: The Power 2010 campaign. I have no words the express my irritation at the quality of demagogic simplification that underpins this whole campaign. Think Martin Bell in his white suit tied to Esther Rantzen and times it by ten. Thankfully Sadie – a returning exile from the blogosphere – has dug into the whole question. Warning: There’s wit as well as wisdom in that one.

Not content with a brief return, Sadie is also on Left Foot Forward here writing the post that this blog should have carried about the objectively anti-democratic nature of the superficial Tory appeal to invite us all into government. Freemania goes one step further and lists the specific individuals within Cameron’s proposed new government that he specifically objects to. Again, funny and perceptive stuff. It includes…

My boss

My boss’s boss

Kerry Katona

Piers Morgan

Cab drivers

Estate agents

Bankers

Disgraced former MPs

Nick Griffin

My weird neighbour

That kid I hated at school

Those bastards who still haven’t been convicted of Stephen Lawrence’s murder

People who find the ITV early evening news too complicated to follow

People who apply for all those incomprehensibly-titled public sector jobs in the Guardian but get turned down because they’re too petty-minded

The tenor in the Gocompare ads

… and many more.

What else? Oh yes – there’s a couple of good points about the impact that social media is having on public debate – one from 21cfix and one from Hopi (again) – that last link is on the diminishing power of journalists.

Changing the subject, here’s a great report my Martin of Currybet on what people really want from the word ‘innovation’:

“People don’t actually want innovation ….. everyone thinks they want a hover board, but actually they want the same thing they had before but actually works.”

Read it all though.

Back to the MSM (just to prove that I have lingering doubts about my own arguments here) Jenni Russell has an excellent article on Ed Balls’ disgraceful treatment of Sharon Shoesmith in Haringey. This raises a massive question for me: If Balls had refused to respond to the tabloid witchhunt, would Shoesmith still be in her job? Would Balls? What are the implications for the whole ‘politics should be about ishoos and not personalities’ question?

And there’s loads more that I’ve not included, but that I have read and enjoyed. I’ve spent the last couple of days traveling without the need to buy a newspaper. You can see what I read and shared on my phone on these two feeds.

Confused? You will be! Stay tuned to the next exciting episode from the bloggers. Better than the newspapers since people started using Google Reader properly….

Here’s a reminder of how it works if you’ve not tried it:

The Tories have launched their manifesto today with a lot of the material from their 2009 Shift Control document [pdf] making the final cut.

It may be worth pointing to Anthony’s detailed crit of this document (below) as a good deal of it is relevant today.

• Shift Delete
• Command backspace
• SysRq F12
• Home PgDn
• Escape End

I’m looking forward to reading a few crits of what has made the final cut, but in the meantime, here’s a purely personal observation on this:

I’m no Tory myself, and it would be unfair of me to present myself as any kind of neutral on this question, but the Tories’ plans for local government are easily the most worrying aspect of their policy development in recent years. Sir Jeremy Beecham highlighted the threat that this has presented to representative democracy at the time:

The truth is that the effect of these proposals would be to undercut representative local democracy and diminish the appeal of service as a local councillor.

For me, one of the biggest local policy foul-ups has been the implementation of choice in local schools – where pushy-parents can game the system to ensure that their kids end up in schools that are more socially exclusive than the old Grammar Schools. As far as I can see, so many of aspects of public policy today seem to be about finding ways of getting people who could be paying tax into a position where they aren’t – and where they are the key beneficiaries of those who do pay it.

Is every aspect of local public spending going to be gamed in this way? I think that this is what the Tories have in mind, and we should be worried about that.

Sustainable development, and party politics in the UK, are both fond advocates of localism and decentralism. In the case of the UK Conservatives, party leader David Cameron promises no less than the most “radical decentralisation” seen in a century if his party is elected.

There is something of an environmental zeitgeist in this language too. One of the most visible meta-signals in the aftermath of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit was disaffection with national and international level government solutions on the part of environmentalist civil society groups, and a corresponding emphasis on the importance of local activism and bottom-up solutions to the challenges of climate change.

Community-based activism on issues such as energy and food seems never to have been so vibrant as it now is in the UK. The phenomenal rise of the Transition Town movement and local ‘climate action networks’ around the country are just two examples.

I’ve been meaning to write this post since the launch of the Hansard Society’s 2010 Audit of Political Engagement on 3rd March, because that shows a worrying counter-current. Consider the following extracts: (on pages 24-25 of the printed version of the Audit)

..there appears to have been a significant change in the public’s knowledge of local government over the past seven years. In the first Audit study [2004], 38% of the public claimed to have ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ of knowledge about their local council. This figure had climbed to 47% in the fourth Audit report. But this year that figure has dropped back to just 40% claiming the same….

…it is perhaps not surprising that declining levels of perceived knowledge about local government are matched by equally declining levels of interest in local issues in recent years. Whereas those reporting to be ‘very interested’ in national issues has declined moderately  from 25% in the first Audit to 22% this year, in comparison 32% of the public claimed to be ‘very interested’ in local issues in Audit 1 but only 19% claim the same in this year’s report…

Signs of a general loss of interest in local issues linked to declining knowledge of local government should be extremely worrying: not only for David Cameron and his team, but also for anyone concerned with sustainable development.

[NB: this post also appears on http://www.fdsd.org/category/blog/]