Local Democracy Notepad

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?)

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 tasks of parliament, scrutinising legislation or working in committee. It’s too much hard work – they’d rather be social workers for constituents. …… They don’t spend three hours in the House of Commons library reading bills or papers themselves; they wait for Greenpeace or Liberty or a lobby group to tell them what to think. That whole culture of thinking, challenging, debating – that’s what’s been discouraged. Because, for them personally, what’s the point?”"

There are a number of conclusions one can draw from this, some of which could be justifiably homicidal. Other trades have a set of professional ethics that would, for instance, preclude them from relying upon lobbyists for information, or coming up with a transparent means by which they conduct their research. Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC website has a nice post up about how the question of politicians being ‘in touch’ isn’t a straightforward one. It sort-of reprises a few points that I made in this post here a while ago – that no-body really agrees with anyone else about very much, and that – under such circumstances, politicians are in a bit of a cleft stick. On of my ongoing questions here is to ask what kind of politicians do we actually want? A few weeks ago, I asked if we really want paragons of virtue? And does a private personal wealth allow people the luxury of looking virtuous that their poorer rivals can’t benefit from?

My next question is this:

Do we want politicians to behave like jurors?

We may actually have an answer to this question within the next year or so. I say this because ‘The Jury Team‘ are hoping to field candidates at the next election and they have a rather nice website up here. They are plainly enjoying the way that MPs are being exposed for their venality, or – let’s face it – their downright dishonesty in recent weeks. Read the rest of this entry »