Archive for the ‘Local government’ Category
Moderation, civility, and bipartisanship
Here’s US blogger Peter Levine on the various qualities that we can apply to political discourse:
“I would tend to favor viagra prescription online stronger, bolder policies. I think our actual policies are weak rather than moderate. I welcome a robust debate but I would recommend conducting that debate with basic
rules of civility even if one’s opponents fail to be civil in return.”
The penny drops at last!
It may have happened fifteen years later than it viagra lowest prices needed to, but at the annual MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, BBC Director General Mark Thompson – and, presumably, his colleagues in the corporation have finally woken up to the real threat that the corporation faces: the downward pressure that is being placed upon the producers of TV content.
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That BSkyB have been allowed a free pass to make a fortune without giving anything back apart from cash for their allocation of spectrum (like so many other corporations, they’ve been allowed to get away with being socially useless) – and in doing so, they’ve created in impossible ecology for content-producing broadcasters to compete in. It’s a race to the bottom. Understand this and you’re halfway there to understanding how Sky’s marketing budget is bigger than ITV’s production funds.
Thompson is onto a winning argument here: The argument that we need to continue to produce locally-oriented content in the UK – and that there’s an overwhelming democratic case for doing so.
It’s been an issue that was addressed at EU level in the mid-1990s, and British regulators and media commentators appeared to spend the intervening decade-and-a-half either pretending that the regulations didn’t exist or that they weren’t needed (with honourable exceptions such as the former MEP Carole Tongue)*. Read the rest of this entry »
Frank exchange is better than pussyfooting
The Political Innovation project I’m currently working on (more soon!) is going to be very focussed upon the political aspects of interactivity – with the premise that more, freer, better exchanges of evidence and opinion are a public good – and that not enough is being done politically to facilitate these.
Via Norm, who offers a good summary – here’s Michael Sandel on ‘The Lost Art of Democratic Debate’, making the case against pussyfooting around difficult moral issues. Do watch it all if you can – it
runs to 20 minutes, so maybe put the kettle on first?
Creating informed communities
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.
Covering the Local Elections on Harringay Online
This is a guest post by Hugh Flouch of Harringay Online
People love living in Harringay, but there are a few quality of life issues that won’t get the attention they need unless citizens and elected representatives enter into a democratic compact to fix them. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is the time to be having the conversations which can build towards that covenant. Local websites provide a great forum for them.
So, starting in viagra canada February, at Harringay Online we’ve been building up our stock of information on the local elections, from how they work to what we can find out about the candidates. I don’t want the elections to completely dominate the site, since by no means everyone is interested, but I do want to offer people, perhaps for the first time ever, an opportunity to find out who the local candidates are and what they might do if elected. Read the rest of this entry »
Copenhagen Climate Summit widens rift between local and global approaches
I thought I’d wait until you’re all back from the Christmas break before I posted about my trip to Copenhagen and it’s various climate events. Almost everything climate-related that happened in and around Copenhagen over those two weeks offers rich pickings for reflection on the changing relationship between democracy and climate change.
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I work for the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development where I’m just starting work on a new project on ’the future of democracy in the face of climate change‘.
In the coming months, we’ll be reflecting on the big question: what next? And we’ll be looking, not just at the critically important coming twelve months, but beyond, to 2050 and 2100.
This is a shorter version of a longer blog post that I’ve posted on my own blog. I wanted to highlight one or two elements because I think they are relevant to a local government audience – but please don’t let me stop you going and reading the whole thing if you want to.
Here, I highlight some of the ‘local democracy and climate change’ themes that emerged in Copenhagen. Read the rest of this entry »
A few words on governance
Local government governance guru Peter Keith-Lucas has
an article in this week’s Local Government Lawyer assessing the current state of governance in local councils.
It’s a good read – expert but not too technical. Keith-Lucas has plagues to put on the houses of both parties: the Labour party for watering down the proper role of scrutiny in its most recent green paper, the Conservatives for setting out proposals on Standards Committee issues that (he suggests) leave the door open for greater councillor corruption. Here’s his closing paragraph (but do go and read the lot):
For healthy local government, there must be corporate governance, there must be a balance between the power of the executive and the checks and balances, in terms of council and scrutiny holding the executive to account, and an enforceable set of minimum standards of conduct. I am seriously concerned that the checks and balances which were an essential part of the 2000 Act Settlement are under attack. That promises a prosperous New Year for lawyers, but not a happy time for local government.
Civic engagement during recessions
Strictly speaking, this post of Peter Levine‘s is more about volunteering than participation in policy making, but it’s worth a look.
“My best guess is that modern civic engagement depends on a funded infrastructure. You can’t tutor kids if the school lays off its literacy coordinator. You can’t read to kids if the library branch is closed. Thus, when the economy really gets bad, even though the need for engagement is high, opportunities suddenly dry up and civic health falls.”
On a tangential note, here’s a post on Boing Boing about Philadelphia’s libraries. Or lack of them (Via Bill Thompson).
“Picture an entire city, a modern, wealthy place, in the richest country in the world, in which the vital services provided by libraries are withdrawn due to political brinksmanship and an unwillingness to spare one banker’s bonus worth of tax-dollars to sustain an entire region’s connection with human culture and knowledge and community.
Think of it and ask yourself what the hell has happened to us.”
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 in local representation. (Shorter version: that councillors have to adopt a jurist role on the question of planning. If it can be demonstrated that they have a predisposition on a particular planning matter, this can disqualify them from deliberating on it).
It reprises a few old posts here asking about whether councils are advocates or jurors. I’m not going to comment on this one in any great detail apart from to observe that councillors now have a potential to convene and conduct conversations quickly and spontaneously in a way that they never used to be. This is what social media can do best: It can allow anyone to invite everyone to dump their evidence in one place.
This ability (when the bulk of councillors become accustomed to having it) hints at yet another role for the councillor to adopt. Not juror or advocate, but as the curator of evidence and opinion on local matters. In offline terms, think of the way that detectives setup an evidence board in the incident room that we’ve all become familliar with in police procedural TV programmes.
Either way, it points to a role where councillors are expected to be more inclusive and conversational and less adversarial.
To illustrate this, I’ve been racking my memory for examples of where someone has used lots of different social media and bookmarking tools to simply gather all of the information on a particular subject in a neutral and even-handed way so that visitors can get a good overview prior to making a decision. I know there are lots of examples, but I just can’t think of one now (help me out, willya?)
Petitions and e-petitions: A few observations
Alan Turing
Last week, the a 10 Downing St petition resulted in Alan Turing receiving the apology and recognition that he has long deserved. And petitions are likely to become a much more prominent fixture of public life in the next year or so.
My sources in Westminster tell me that the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill (pdf) (text version) is likely to get royal assent at some point in the autumn and will come into force in May 2010 with guidance potentially in place as early as February 2010.
That’s not as far away as you think, and looking through the bill, the team here at LD (Anthony and I, at any rate) think that there are quite a few issues that councils need to deal with as a matter of some urgency.
In some cases, this will involve a tweak to the existing procedures that allow for the consideration of e-petitions. In others, it may almost be a start from scratch. Either way, I’ve been trying to look at the bill and turn it into a decision flow-chart, but there are still quite a few questions that will need to be answered before spring 2010. Read the rest of this entry »