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 [...]
Posts under ‘Political innovation’
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 [...]
Bloggers and transparency
One of the recurring themes of this blog is the way that weblogs are (as Charlie Beckett put it in that book review that I pointed to the other day), reconfiguring journalism and political discourse. The most prominent examples of this in the UK have been the war of attrition that right-wing libertarian bloggers have [...]
Strengthening local democracy, kinda
I’ve just read through the new Strengthening Local Democracy Green Paper, and I can’t sum it up better than Talking Heads did in their 1977 hit, Psycho Killer. Not the refrain “better run, run, run, run away”, but the verse: You start a conversation you can’t even finish. You’re talking a lot, but you’re not [...]
Bloggers Circle
Apologies for the very light posting this week. Hopefully something approaching normal service will be resumed next week. In the meantime, check out Matthew Taylor’s ‘Bloggers Circle‘ – if you have a site of your own, it’s well worth visiting it and joining. Here’s the drill: Receive an email at about lunchtime when blogposts have [...]
To the barricades!
The #rebootbritain hashtag on Twitter went haywire on Monday as over 700 people attended the event – I spent over an hour on Tuesday night searching through it and the earliest session I could get to in that time was a 4pm one – it actually challenged #michaeljackson for prominence on Twitter’s trending indicator. Because [...]
Schools design a new Parliament
If you’re hanging around Westminster between 7 and 17 July, pop into Westminster Hall to check out what sounds like a fun exhibition. The Royal Institution of British Architects have run a competition for schools to design a new Houses of Parliament. The nine shortlisted entries will be on display in the oldest part of [...]
A think tank of your own
Here’s Joanne Jacobs on the Australian ‘Government 2.0 Taskforce’ making a fairly universal point: Even where a public fund is used to identify new tools, the majority of these will either slip into obscurity after launch or will be greatly applauded for a while but not widely adopted or contributed to, by the policy makers [...]
Denham: Going centralist?
Over on the LGIU blog, Jonathan Carr-West is not impressed with John Denham’s conditions for the devolution of powers to local government: “So we find ourselves re-rehearsing the chicken and egg of earned autonomy. Councils need more powers to deliver better services and increased public confidence, but to get more powers they need to deliver [...]
Getting the politics right for reform
Matthew Taylor, former No 10 policy wonk, has an interesting article on his blog about public service reform. He rightly says that finances over the next few years are both a huge challenge to public services, but also an opportunity to make real change happen. That won’t come about, he says, without a change in [...]
