It’s Friday, and the party conference season beckons. One or two of you may have already been in Liverpool for the TUC, and there is quite a little community of people that have to go to all of them.
For some councillors, this may be their first proper look at how their party works. My own [...]
Posts under ‘Political parties’
Party conferences for councillors
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 [...]
Political parties & active citizens
If there is a point at which most of the authors of this blog (I can’t speak for all of them) differ from most of the sites that we link to, and that link here, it may be on the queston of ‘active citizenship’.
Where it seeems to be an almost unexamined given to argue that [...]
The consequence of a retreat from politics?
It’s an interesting twist to the question I’ve been asking, on and off, over the past few weeks: What kind of representatives do we want?
So far, the options have included jurors, rogues and public paragons of virtue. But over on Spiked Online, Brendan O’Neill suggests a somewhat alarming possibility: Maybe we need people who are [...]
Political parties and decentralisation
So much is changing so quickly. Newspapers and broadcasters are changing. Governments now communicate using radically different means to the ones that were practiced a decade ago. Here’s Exhibit A.
We now have free interactive tools that enable us to hold huge multilateral conversations based upon collaborative filtering and reputation management. We can find useful strangers [...]
Caroline Spelman fails a localism test
Given all the talk of localism in recent months, it is pretty disappointing to see Caroline Spelman, the Conservative shadow Local Government minister, making the following statement (via the BBC) on Council Tax rises:
At a time when millions of workers are facing pay freezes or unemployment this year, it adds insult to injury to drive [...]
Are interactive media experts really improving the quality of democracy?
OK, in recent posts, I’ve moaned about the demands for political transparency that are being fuelled by new interactive media applications. Let me try and put this into some perspective:
In my opening ‘defending political parties‘ post, I acknowledged that there are a few early knockout punches that could be delivered to the argument that political [...]
Will Victor be the eventual victor?
This blog is here to explore the concept of a more inclusive means of forming policy at a local level. So let me offer you two examples of the kind of people that we need to include in such processes.
Our first case in point – let’s call her Mrs Meldrew (though it’s not really a [...]
Two party systems
There’s a very good article over at Westminster Wisdom about the longevity of the US two-party system – a dominance of only two largely unchanged political parties since 1860 – “a record unmatched by any other Democracy.”
A comparison with the UK, in which the period from 1945 until the late 1960s marked a fairly rigid [...]
Escape End
Time for one last look at the Conservative party’s local government green paper Shift Control. A quick canter through chapters four and five, and then some conclusions.
Chapter Four is about spending. It says a Conservative Government will:
give local people greater control over how central government funds are spent in their area;
phase out ring fencing, so [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
