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Posts under ‘Being a politician’

Crowdsourcing policy? Politicians do this better than apps

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 [...]

Lists and lessons

Mark Pack has a very good post up on Lib-Dem Voice – advice for budding politicians: ‘30 things every would-be politician should do this summer‘ (he was inspired by a similar post for aspiring journalists elsewhere). Thirty is a big number – too big for me. But I’ve got a few observations that I’ve been [...]

Swedenise us!

I was very sad to hear – via Slugger – of the passing of ‘Horseman’ – one of the better (anonymous) bloggers that I have in my RSS feed. Being busy, I missed his last posting on his Ulster’s Doomed! blog – a terrifically good one at that. Writing about our image of politicians, Horseman points [...]

More on what MPs should do

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 [...]

MP personality types – have I missed any?

As a prelude to a bit of election-related fun research, I’m compiling a list of the different attributes that we expect to see combined under the bonnet of the perfect MP. Just for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t expect any candidate to fit firmly into any of these categories – I’m going to be [...]

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 – [...]

Choosing who to talk to

Sandwell Councillor, Bob Piper, has a good post here about his recent trip to Bruges, raising questions about graffiti. It seems there may be a case for a high level of short-term investment to make the problem go away? “One aspect of the City that distinguished it from so many places I have visited in [...]

Niall Connolly – democracy expert

Niall Connolly appears to regard himself as an expert on democracy. Wonder if he’ll stand for election?

Does twitter damage the quality of parliamentary debate – or improve it?

Kerry McCarthy MP tweeted last night that she will be going in to bat for tweeting MPs on Radio 5Live later today. Her adversary on the show will be John Pugh MP – and Torcuil Crichton explains the background: Dr John Pugh, the analogue Lib Dem MP for Southport, has a motion down condemning the [...]

Voters as ‘cougars’?

It seems that Madonna isn’t the only one who is taking an interest in attractive young men. The voters seem to be following suit as well with all of the political headlines being made by younger men. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is brutal way that the Lib-Dems ditched Menzies Campbell last year, [...]