The BBC website has a nice post up about how the question of politicians being ‘in touch’ isn’t a straightforward one. It sort-of reprises a few points that I made in this post here a while ago – that no-body really agrees with anyone else about very much, and that – under such circumstances, politicians [...]
Posts under ‘Being a politician’
Whiter than white?
Do we really want politicians to be public paragons of virtue? A good deal of what I read tends to work on the assumption that we do. Take this, for example: “As technology evolves, the same public information laws create novel and in some cases previously unimaginable levels of transparency. In many cases, particularly those [...]
We know what you don't want. Now what DO you want?
The Guardian’s Catherine Bennett is right to be worried about the impact that a climate of hypercommentary on personal tics will have on politics: “With the internet demanding ever-improving performance skills from its principal actors, Westminster can only become less hospitable to people who look more like Menzies Campbell than Ant and Dec. Unless, that [...]
Policy v Character
Chris Dillow is probably the best political blogger in the UK. Here he asks whether we should judge politicians by their policies or their characters? More on this here shortly.
Ken – speaking his mind
Iain Dale has a roustabout interview with Ken Livingstone. Here’s a snippet: “…although there will be mistakes, a real, massive devolution would start bringing good people back into local government, but there’s got to be financial change as well. 97 per cent of all tax collected in Britain is collected by Gordon Brown. When I [...]
Live-in Councillors?
I’ve just discovered the Local Government Officer’s blog. It’s a really good blog that does (as a visitor remarks) what blogs do best – anonymous low-horizon perspective commenting from an insider. The latest post asks the question: Is it better for Councillors to live in the area that they represent? Or, more accurately, how much [...]
Opinion v Knowledge
One of my favourite political bloggers, Shuggy, has a short post up here about opinion and it’s validity (or lack of). My own favourite variation on this is the view that ‘opinions are like a*seholes – everyone has one, but no-one really wants to hear them.’ (an aphorism that I can’t recall the source of [...]
Better than sitting in a draughty library, providing a surgery that no-one attends…
Here’s Wandsworth’s Councillor James Cousins on the value of interactivity for councillors: “What is surprising is not just how many local people were tweeting, but how many were eager to engage and use Twitter to communicate with their councillor. While I often sit in a draughty library with no-one attending my surgery it is quite [...]
Even Obama gets locked down
My friend Will has e-mailed this from the Washington Post to me – It may cheer Steph up a little to know that he’s not fighting a purely British problem…. “Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
