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 [...]
Posts under ‘Lib-Dems’
Coalitions and representative democracy
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
Interactivity v political success
Cllr Mary Reid (a Kingston-Upon-Thames Lib-Dem) has a short post up about percentages of councillors blogging. Cutting to the chase…. In the UK … 7% of all Liberal Democrat councillors have websites/blogs. 2% of all Conservative councillors have websites/blogs. 1% of all Labour councillors have websites/blogs. The Lib-Dems plainly value interactivity more highly than the [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
