Local Democracy Notepad

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 at the viagra lowest prices moment.

OK, this is a hasty post – and one that is subject to this caveat.

It’s far too early to trash the Big Society initiative, and as someone who doesn’t support either of the parties behind the incoming government, it’s quite painful to see them picking up so many ideas that are basically great ones – and ones that Labour failed to prioritise in thirteen years of government. Read the rest of this entry »

The Election 2010 blog is asking ‘what election was that‘?

“The opening book in the ‘Nuffield’ election series best price propecia – The British General Election of 1945 – lists a series of ‘named’ elections: 1874, when the Liberals went down in a flood of gin and beer; the Midlothian election of 1880; the Khaki election of 1900; the Chinese Slavery election of 1906; the People’s Budget election of 1910; the ‘Hang the Kaiser’ election of 1918; and the 1924 ‘Zinovieff letter’ election.”

The Internet election maybe? Well, no. I was at the Personal Democracy Forum GE 2010 event at the RSA the other night. It was a great panel, but it says a lot about the way that the blogopsphere has amplified so many voices that there wasn’t that much that was said on the stage that those of us who follow these things hadn’t heard before. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a

quick one: Make sure you don’t miss Radio 4′s ‘Democracy On Trial‘ series, hosted by Michael Portillo. It’s worth catching.

That’s all. Carry on with what you were doing.

Apologies for the very obtain viagra without prescription light posting here in recent weeks. When you blog about politics and elections a lot, you probably have the excuse that you are doing rather than blogging during elections, and this is true of some of our contributors. In my case, a tide of work that was only indirectly related to the election hit me about five weeks ago and I’ve been drowning in it ever since.

We have a plan to crank viagra tablets up the volume here, and you’ll hear more about it shortly. But filling our recent silence has been an unprecedented volume of quite excellent blogging on the subject of the election and the constitutional issues that arose from the inconclusive (by UK standards) election result. The 2010 Election Blog has been very good, and I hope the continue it – if they’re looking for a longer-term home for it, modesty forbids me from mentioning the perfect blog for them to do this on.

On the longer finger, Peter Levine has offered this collection of posts that I’m linking to in the right order with his subheadings.

• Creating informed communities (part one)
  • Strategy 1: A Civic Information Corps: Using the nation’s “service” infrastructure to generate knowledge
• Creating informed communities (part two)
  • Strategy 2: Universities as Community Information Hubs
• Creating informed communities (part three)
  • Strategy 3: Invest in Face-to-Face Public Deliberation
• Creating informed communities (part four)
  • Strategy 4: Generate Public “Relational” Knowledge
• Creating informed communities (part five)
  • Strategy 5: Organize People to Defend the Knowledge Commons

Stay tuned. We’ll be back to our usual posting-rate shortly.

“Well isn’t this an exciting moment?”

I got ‘the fisheye’ when I viagra for sale cheap said this earlier today to a bleary-eyed crowd of people who had been canvassing for different parties in Northern Ireland.

Some of them were into their thirtieth hour without sleep. There’s a time and a place for train-spottery musings about constitutional permutations.

Electoral reform looks like it’s on the cards though. Whatever the Lib-Dems say, I doubt that they will exit a moment where they can exert leverage without firstly securing a commitment to PR – probably of the STV variety. Read the rest of this entry »