Local Democracy Notepad

Professor George Jones panning the government’s new localism agenda:

“This move to pass governmental decision-making to a level below local government is ill-thought-out. We do not know what is meant by community associations, how representative they will be, their boundaries, nor their audit, probity and accountability arrangements.  Rather than setting up such amorphous entities, the Government should empower local authorities, to promote and support public involvement viagra uk purchase in their localities. After all local authorities already exist with their own ready-made governance structures, their own democratic mandate, and with 20,000 community activists called councillors in place.”

According to yesterday’s papers, the No10 Petitions website has been canned. I can understand that a cheap viagra 100mg lot of the people behind it saw it as a learning experience and it clarified a few things.

My problem with the whole project is that this is one area where politicians let themselves down. Civil Servants go on public management courses and would expect to do their political masters’ bidding on things like this more quickly than they would on areas where politicians can’t be expected to bring native expertise to bear. If they are asked to implement something that is plainly at odds with representative democracy in this way, it’s the politicians’ look-out.

I also understand that not every politician would be able to match the basic knowledge of someone with – say – a first degree in political science. But when a whole government can’t find two such geniuses to rub together (and I suspect that the last Labour government – which I supported – fits this description) you have to worry.

Now here’s

the next question: Will local authorities have to continue to impersonate No10 in this folly? (I had a post up here that outlined the various options for local authorities a while ago)

In other news, I was in Belfast at the weekend organising an unconference on Political Innovation and one of the attendees was the policy officer from the Northern Ireland Local Government Association. She was inspired enough by the event to go and set up a new blog called ‘Local Is Beautiful’ - one to add to your RSS feed. Welcome Karen!

Apologies for the light posting here lately – I’ve been busy with the Political Innovation project. There’s a series of posts buy viagra canada I’ve added there on ‘What Politicians need to know about social public information.’

I’ll be reviving this blog shortly. In the meantime, here’s something on electronic voting that I found via O’Conall Street.