It’s Friday. Time for a bit of a laugh. This ‘Yes Minister’ clip provides a rough outline: And on the wider perception of councillors, here’s Vic & Bob’s take: Joking aside, if there is one thing that desperately needs rebranding, it’s the very idea of the Local Councillor.
Posts under ‘Being a politician’
The lust for certainty – a sin?
In a very good edition of BBC Radio 4′s ‘Analysis’ programme towards the end of last year, the columnist David Aaronovich recounted a programme that he produced in the 1980s featuring the Archbishop of York, John Hapgood. The Archbishop, as far as I can see, had the kind of views that would appeal to a [...]
'We don't need your stinking checks and balances'
A while back, I noticed a nice short post from Aussie blogger The Mild Colonial Boy quoting De Tocqueville: “It may easily be foreseen that almost all the able and ambitious members of a democratic community will labor unceasingly to extend the powers of government, because they all hope at some time or other to [...]
Eavesdroppable?
Here’s Suze, musing on the question of how far blogging is having a positive impact on journalism. Suze concludes that it’s too early to tell, but she says a lot of interesting things on the way. For me, here’s the big question: Does the emergence of a decentralised space with fewer barriers to entry (ahem: [...]
Weblog awards and repeat voting
There’s something of a tactical voting campaign going on to ensure that Melanie Phillips doesn’t win a UK blog award. It’s hardly a life-or-death issue and I’m sure that Melanie’s people are doing the same thing, so good luck to them. The same award scheme is in place in the US, and only one of [...]
Guidelines confetti – a few observations
I’d been planning to do this blog for years, but the thing that finally nudged me to get on with it was this story (my first post) about how an MP’s online allowance was docked by the Parliamentary authorities because he used it in the way that you would expect politicians to use such an [...]
Adversarial politics, transparency and independence – some questions.
Here’s a good post from an Australian blogger on the question: Is adversarial politics damaging to our democracy? (It’s actually an update on a previous post with that title). Here the adversarialism is opposed by a more attractive ‘deliberative’ model of the kind advocated here. The flipside of this argument is put very well by [...]
The Elevator Pitch: No1 – Steph Gray
This is the first in a new feature for this blog. I’ve approached some of my favourite democracy / participation bloggers and given them a choice of a few questions. The first to step up to the challenge is Steph Gray. Steph blogs at Helpful Technology, and offers a fantastically informative round-up of the things [...]
2009 predictions from elsewhere (and one of my own)
My friend, former Hansard Society e-democracy watcher Ross Ferguson says: A local government will fall head-over-heels in love with the promise of eDemocracy and launch into an ambitious project to put digital front-and-centre of its democratic processes and service provision. It will be facilitated with next-generation municipal ICT and it will capture our imaginations but [...]
