Tonight in Belfast, we’re running the second in what I hope will become the annual ‘Slugger Awards‘. These awards – previewed here on the Amnesty blog – are something of a departure for political weblogs. It would be fair to say that politicians are – for the most part – less than thrilled by the [...]
Posts under ‘What makes a good representative?’
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 [...]
Why bringing politicians and the public closer to each other is important
Here’s Peter Levine on the study of deliberation: “The other main source of evidence in Neblo et al is a field experiment, in which people were offered the chance to deliberate with real Members of Congress. They were more likely to accept if they had negative attitudes toward elected leaders and the debates in Washington. [...]
Open minds – the councillor-curator?
Kevin Harris has forwarded this article about the role that councillors are obliged to adopt in relation to planning. Nothing in it will come as a surprise to anyone familliar with the role of a modern councillor, but it’s a nice round up of an issue that will continue to perplex anyone with an interest [...]
Glum councillors
As the silly season draws to a close (it is Friday as well), those nice people over at the internet have brought the ultimate in municipal-porn-meets-pavement-politics: the Glum Councillors. For some time, I’ve thought that the LGA could prove it’s worth to the nation by doing a Calender Girls type fundraising exercise for charity featuring photos [...]
Should MPs and councillors take up cases on behalf of individuals?
Chewing over Parliamentary reforms, here’s Jenni Russell from the Guardian last week: “One experienced Commons civil servant is blisteringly critical of the way in which most MPs have accepted the culture in which they now operate. While some committees and chairs are excellent, many MPs can’t be bothered. “They’re just not interested in the core [...]
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 [...]
Reputaton management
Conall McDevitt has an interesting post up about CEO reputations: “Communicating frequently with their employees. Certainly with their customers too, but not to forget their employees. At a time of uncertainty employees are hungry for information. CEOs need to take responsibility. Apologize if they are wrong. If they don’t know the answer, say they don’t [...]
"…a symbol of how we see ourselves"
This is a really good post about a perceived restructuring of the UK cabinet to reflect three key themes. I won’t spoil the wider article for you except to say that one of the issues that (according to the author) is a priority is that of constitutional and democratic reform. This is very perceptive: “….the [...]
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 [...]
