Current affairs

The minor issue of scaling up by 267 million percent

Submitted by Anthony Zacharzewski on 11 August 2010 - 1:39pm

Julian McCrae at the Institute for Government PWC citizens' jury in Coventry recently. His take on the key points:

"Firstly, people can accept the case for difficult decisions when they are engaged in a meaningful discussion about the options.

Place Survey, we hardly knew ye

Submitted by Anthony Zacharzewski on 10 August 2010 - 11:32am

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, so as the Place Survey gets consigned to the dustbin of policy, it's worth thinking about what we're losing now it's gone.

The Place Survey was designed to provide councils and residents with comparable information on their performance. Even if councils continue doing some sort of opinion polling (and I suspect most won't) any results won't now be able to be compared between different authorities.

Your Freedom should be supporting users more

Submitted by Anthony Zacharzewski on 20 July 2010 - 2:27pm

The Tumblr site YourFreedumb might be devoted to picking stupid or offensive content out of the Your Freedom consultation, but that doesn't mean they can't write a perceptive critique of why it hasn't taken off in the way I hoped it might.

Big Society needs Big Democracy

Submitted by Anthony Zacharzewski on 19 July 2010 - 9:48am

What's wrong with the following sentence?

"The Government held a Big Society reception at 10 Downing Street last week, with a list of invited dignitaries."

Of course, you spotted it. The Big Society is meant to be a flourishing of something beyond the traditional forms of government, a system which empowers the unempowered, and yet an early event is a meeting of the already-empowered over canapes in the nation's symbol of executive authority.

Reflections on the Big Society open evening

Submitted by Anthony Zacharzewski on 7 July 2010 - 4:29pm

In a very hot room at the bottom of the Communities Department, about sixty people met last night to talk about, and start to define, the Big Society.

Your Freedom: Government asks well, but can it answer well?

Submitted by Anthony Zacharzewski on 1 July 2010 - 10:29am

The Government today launched Your Freedom, a discussion site where people can make suggestions on civil liberties issues and legislation they want to see repealed. good site, but can Government live up to its rhetoric and answer as well as it asks?

Striving for comment perfection

Submitted by Anthony Zacharzewski on 30 June 2010 - 7:41am

The Daily Mail, as you might imagine, is not that impressed with the new "Don't lock 'em up" policy of Ken Clarke, announced today. Given his party affiliation, they say that the policy is "sure to raise eyebrows" rather than "sure to create rioting on the streets and the mass rape and/or murder of everyone over 40", which would have been their line before 6 May.

Introducing TalkIssues

Submitted by Anthony Zacharzewski on 6 April 2010 - 3:24pm

After a few weeks of being too busy to blog, I'm very pleased to be able to introduce our new project, TalkIssues, which we're undertaking with Kevin Anderson, Suw Charman-Anderson and the FutureGov team.

TalkIssues is a blog, twitter tag, and all those modern social media things, designed to get people talking and thinking about the real issues behind the election, rather than the personalities and the horse race.

Burning cars then, ignoring ballot boxes now

Submitted by Anthony Zacharzewski on 25 March 2010 - 4:51pm

In an analysis today, Le Monde reports that voter turnout in last weekend's regional elections was particularly low in the troubled inner suburbs of Paris, with abstention rates above 70%.

These are the same suburbs that saw rioting in 2005, and the author, Luc Bronner, makes the point that the turnout rate was an even more serious marker of disaffection, because it was more widespread. He writes:

Sign and Co-sign

Submitted by Anthony Zacharzewski on 23 March 2010 - 8:15pm

Here's a neat little trick. Those who signed up to Barack Obama's campaign website (as I did to take a nose around, even though I'm not a US citizen), have just received an email asking them whether they want to "co-sign" the healthcare reform legislation that President Obama signed up to this morning.

"OK," I thought, "must be some sort of in-advance petition effort to hinder any attempts to repeal the reform." I clicked through the link (to this page) and was rather surprised to see:

Syndicate content