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 [...]
Posts under ‘Labour’
Proportionality and voting reform
“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 [...]
Voting against
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. [...]
‘Empowerment’
For me, this post by Kevin Harris sums up what happened over the past decade, where new Labour’s lightly held good intentions met their managerialst bent and the two cancelled each other out: “Round about 2003, the field of social inclusion and new technology became counter-productively transformed when government started putting up huge chunks of [...]
Centralisation: A turning point?
For those of us who would like local politics to be more highly valued, two slightly conflicting observations were made by prominent political bloggers last weekend. The first was by the ever-perceptive Potlatch writing about James Purnell, and digging into the question of ‘professionalisation’ of politics: “Purnell – like Ruth Kelly and Ed Balls – [...]
Beta legislation: Changing the concept of ‘leadership’?da
The January 2010 issue of Wired Magazine has a bunch of policy-related proposals under the slightly familiar heading ‘Let’s Reboot Britain’. It’s always a slightly trying time, reading Wired when it strays into politics and public policy. For an example of what I’m talking about, this article (Synopsis: I know! Now somebody’s invented teh internet, [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
