For those of us who would like local politics to be more highly valued, two slightly conflicting observations were made by prominent political bloggers last weekend. The first was by the ever-perceptive Potlatch writing about James Purnell, and digging into the question of ‘professionalisation’ of politics: “Purnell – like Ruth Kelly and Ed Balls – [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Decentralisation’
Sustainable Communities Act 2007: business as usual or unusual government?
So it seems that a government advertising campaign is to target climate change sceptics. Certainly, policymakers appear to be hitting problems in bringing the public along with measures to address this issue, and it’s not very likely that ‘business as usual’ within the democratic process will deliver sustainable development. So there are great hopes pinned [...]
Reductio ad absurdum
Continuing Brendan O’Neill’s theme about the reduction of politics to the question of how efficiently politicians can tick the ‘democracy’ box, Simon Jenkins picks up on the calls for fewer MPs and councillors: “The difference is that most democracies have many tiers of representation on which voters can vent their rage. The Germans run almost [...]
Trust, marketing and centralisation
The other day, I posted on how the ‘level playing field’ demanded (partly) by marketeers was a significant contributor to the centralising tendencies of the previous half-century. As a short follow-up, Seth Godin picks up on the widespread and increasing distrust in big marketing. I don’t know if you would reach the same conclusion that [...]
Political parties and decentralisation
So much is changing so quickly. Newspapers and broadcasters are changing. Governments now communicate using radically different means to the ones that were practiced a decade ago. Here’s Exhibit A. We now have free interactive tools that enable us to hold huge multilateral conversations based upon collaborative filtering and reputation management. We can find useful [...]
Cognitive polyphasia
These couple of sentences leaped out of an article by Polly Toynbee recently: It was pollster Ben Page who first used the phrase “cognitive polyphasia” to describe what pollsters find all the time: most people hold several entirely contradictory beliefs at once. They want local decision-making but are adamantly opposed to a postcode lottery…. Another [...]
Can journalism save democracy?
One of the founding questions behind this blog is this: Is the decline in local journalism damaging local democracy? Well, the consistently good Polis blog managed by Charlie Beckett is addressing it with some energy here. Charlie worked at ITN, C4 News, LWT and the BBC. The post linked to here is a guest post [...]