Local Democracy Notepad

Cllr Mary Reid (a Kingston-Upon-Thames Lib-Dem) has a short  post up about percentages of councillors blogging. Cutting to the chase….

flagyl pricing

In the UK …

• 7% of all Liberal Democrat councillors have websites/blogs.
• 2% of all Conservative councillors have websites/blogs.
• 1% of all Labour councillors have websites/blogs.

The Lib-Dems plainly value interactivity more highly than the others, and this should be seen as a mark in their favour.

Seasoned political watchers, however, will have come away from the Lib-Dem conference last week with one abiding impression: Of a party that values it’s independence.

Where the leadership were keen to push populists lines of attack, they were very clearly clipped back by indignation from middle-ranking party figures complaining about top-down policymaking.

First question: Is there a correlation between the interactivity of a party’s grassroots and the relative lack of willingness within the party to adopt collegiate positions? I would suggest that there is.

Next question: In the current climate, is a willingness to adopt collegiate positions an essential pre-requisite to electoral success? Again, purely on personal experience, I’d say that there is.

Labour was blessed / cursed with a herd of independent minds rich diversity of internal debate in the 1980s – an experience that shaped the 1990s predilection for ‘control freakery’ in the party.

There is another way of looking at this though: David Herdson makes a strong case here, arguing that the Lib Dems steady progress – it’s slow upwards trajectory – is down to the party’s niceness – and that it is a fool’s errand to even try to behave like the Government-in-waiting.

Last question: Is Cllr Reid wise to be pleased about all of those lib-dem blogging Councillors?

Using the revealed preferences of the voters, I’ve been trying to compile the profile of local elected representatives that the public want – in the cops do in police procedural dramas. I’m not sure that they’re ready for interactivity.

As a further observation, is it the case that party division is really unpopular with the public? Or is that political journalists are so lazy that any easy-to-find evidence of a schism is likely to get a disproportionate amount of press-coverage – and that this issue then adds to the impression that open debate is electorally risky?

Following the Daily Mail’s crusade against council employees using Facebook, Sunny, here, (in the comments) thinks it’s time for everyone to write to their local authority to find out how long council employees are spending on the Daily Mail website.

This is what FoI requests are for, isn’t it?

order viagra from canada

Ryanair: Business model coming to your town hall soon? (Click for pic credit)

viagra uk cheap

Nick Clegg has gone on the attack. His target is the London Borough of Barnet’s easyCouncil model of service provision.

There are a number of ways of portraying Barnet’s idea, but I’ve not seen many that appear to be very kind. As a Barnet resident who has to use Ryanair in his line of work, I should probably leave it to others to comment on the politics behind this - I suppose the most neutral one would be to call it a freemium service.

I’ve posted on ‘cognitive polyphasia’ before (broadly, it’s the phenomenon where voters want Scandinavian welfare systems on US tax-rates), and this idea seems to be another attempt by politicians to get the public to believe that they can have the best of all worlds.

Barnet’s approach – like Ryanair’s – appears to be based upon the idea that a service can be packaged as being more attractive than it actually is – hardly a revolutionary concept in politics.

I doubt if Barnet will be as brazen as Michael O’Leary’s outfit are either. Ryanair tell us that you can fly to Perpignan for only £5. But then, once you start buying the ticket, you find that the figure multiplies if you want optional extras. Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies to anyone who thinks that a blog about local democracy has been hijacked and turned into one about how the internet effects newspapers. In defence of this focus, I’d argue that the way that local issues are reported (and how the internet changes this) is one of the big issues that will shape local democracy (and how the hyperscrutiny of the internet will change the character and nature of our local elected representatives is another)

Here’s how the whole question used to look….

buy viagra cheap online

From 1981 (via SacredFacts)

PINing - the arms race continues (click for pic credit)

buy cialis professional online

E-mail has transformed the way that senior politicians behave. Fifteen years ago, almost all conversations between politicians, lobbyists, civil servants and everyone else were either verbal or on paper. Technology has made recording easier. Written communications are infinitely more index/searchable.

It would be an understatement to say that the situation has been transformed as a result of digitisation and FOI legislation. It has also transformed the way that representatives behave. One MP is now offering a ‘lifestream’ from her website!

We can speculate all we like about how this has impacted upon the quality of governance, but rightly or wrongly, politicians are constantly trying to evade this scrutiny – using different email addresses or other off-record channels.

In the US, it seems, the main worry is that it allows politicians to collude with lobbyists to an even greater degree than they do already. And in order to continue doing this, they are resorting to ‘PINing’.

The full story is here.

Just a few interesting things I’ve seen over the past few days that impact further on this councils v local newspapers issue. The first is that – when councils decide to factor in ad-revenue into their communications budgets, it adds a significant amount of uncertainty – because ad revenue can go down as well as up.

viagra overnigh

Not only are councils seen to be competing with local newspapers by launching their own, they are giving free ads to local businesses.

Here’s Paul Canning on how councils are likely to start learning from commercial websites about how usability and site-optimisation can increase the effectiveness of their websites. I mention this because it impacts on that question of how council can promote democracy online.

And Paul is really busy with his blog at the moment – here he is on the ‘tea party’ movement in the US.

Then there’s the Local Government Knowledge Hub.

Party Conference season: Vital equipment.

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.

cheap celebrex

For some councillors, this may be their first proper look at how their party works. My own tip is to find out where the journalists are hanging out and to go there – it’s a lot easier to get bought a drink under those circumstances, that’s where the gossip can be had and the movers-and-shakers can be found.

If you haven’t got your accomodation booked already, I’m afraid you’re in for a few hours commuting each day. And if you haven’t got your pass yet, expect at least six hours queuing.

If you have got digs, remember that high expectations lead to disappointment. A rumour went around the Labour Party in the mid-1990s that Blackpool would not be hosting any more of their conferences because Peter Mandelson was told that he shouldn’t have stirred his tea if he didn’t like sugar in it.

Also, prepare for a bout of ‘conference flu’ on Tuesday or Wednesday morning. A good fry-up will either kill or cure this ailment, and every chemist within walking distance will be sold-out of Resolve.

Note: Bring your own packet from home

But for now, if you’ve not got anything better to do, you can nip over and read my friend Sadie’s Dean’s guide to bag-carrying at party conferences. And here’s some advice for MPs (much of it transferrable to councillors) on how to deal with a new enthusiasm for teh interwebs. The rest of Dean’s guides are here, the slightly less serious part of the Working for an MP website W4mp.

Final advice: Here’s a warning from the past about what sort of thing you may see if you go to a disco at a party conference.

You have been warned.

Hollywood Bvd: The Boulevard of broken dreams? (Click for pic credit)

next day viagra

Douglas Carswell MP and Daniel Hannan MEP, along with a few others, may wish to have a glance at Tim Garton-Ash’s latest – this time answering the queston ‘why has California got itself into such a mess:

“…its prisons are overflowing; the energy-guzzling way it meets its water needs takes a staggering 19% of the state’s now expensive electricity; it has six of the 10 worst cities in the US for air pollution; its public finances are a disaster. Year after year, its legislature has failed to agree a budget. Its deficits make Italy look like a paragon of fiscal prudence. And this summer, it generated incredulous headlines around the world when the state started issuing IOUs. The government of one of the most richly endowed territories on earth, home to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, a crucible of innovation and the eighth largest economy in the world, was broke.

Why has California got into such a mess? Some analysts say: “Too much democracy!” In California’s eccentric version of direct democracy, all kinds of extravagant public spending are mandated by so-called initiatives, proposed by anyone who can gather enough signatures, and passed by a simple majority of those who bother to vote on them, while the state’s revenue-gathering possibilities are curbed by the same method.”

Do go and read the whole thing if you can? My one quibble is with the term ‘too much democracy’ – there seems to be an underlying assumption that direct democracy – something that, in practice, excludes the vast majority of the population from any kind of influence – is somehow a higher – if overly idealistic – notion of democracy.

California has become totally unmanageable – arguably because of this assumption. Here’s what would be in the post if Messrs Carswell and Hannan get their way….

Local democracy: Not being pitched very hard on council websites

kamagra for sale

It seems that The Electoral Commission have decided that it is a basic human right for us to have ballot papers that make sense to us. Usability – not just regulatory box-ticking is, it seems the key here (I posted on ballot design here a while ago)

Measuring usability may also be the key to ensuring that a big opportunity on the horizon is taken seriously.

As I mentioned the other day, the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill (pdf) (text version) is likely to get royal assent in the not-too-distant. I covered the question of petitions the other day (and I’ll come back to this element briefly in a moment), but there is a bigger – even more interesting question about how far local authorities may thwart this obligation by a resort to box-ticking.

In summary, councils have to promote an understanding of…

• the functions of the authority and other local authority bodies that are connected to it
• the democratic arrangements that govern it
• how members of the public can take part in those democratic arrangements and what is involved in taking part
• how to become a councillor
• what members of the principal local authority do
• what support is available for councillors
• the functions of authorities which are connected with the principal local

It’s something of an indicator of the level of self-confidence within local government that such a role should be mandated by central government, and I suspect that – when we look back on how these obligations have been implemented in a few years time, we may see just how enthusiastically local authorities actually embrace this opportunity. Read the rest of this entry »

In the latest round of the local authorities v local newspapers saga, Scottish newspapers appear to have regained some of the classified ads that they lost to the MyJobsScotland site (“Local government jobs – all on one site!”).

This is an interesting one. Now that the c-word is out in the open, surely government should simply be advertising all of it’s vacancies on it’s own site and avoiding advertising costs?

best price for propecia online

A number of right-wing bloggers have – for some time – been urging an incoming Tory government to put all government jobs online in order to shaft The Guardian newspaper Save Taxpayer’s Money.

MyJobs Scotland: Public subsidy for local newspapers reinstated?

Sure, there are equal opportunities issues, and there’s clearly a case for advertising some posts in minority newspapers, but beyond that, it’s hard to see how newspapers can expect the sort of cuts that they’d demand elsewhere to not impact upon them?

The Scottish decision has a whif of political cowardice and special pleading hanging over it – and I suspect that it illustrates the way that press influence can often be used to promote the business interests of press-owners.

There is the question of how local journalism can be made commercially viable – and it’s clearly an issue that needs to be addressed with some urgency in the interests of our democracy. We plainly need more / better local journalism than we have at the moment and a way of funding this needs to be found – this is one of the jobs that ‘Digital Britain’ have been charged with.

But this is, surely, not the same as offering a public subsidy to the handful of near-monopolies that dominate the local news market in such a careless way?