Politics

When Dave Briggs asks ‘how close is local?’ on the Local Democracy blog, he asks a very important question about democracy. If democracy is to be the rule of the the people, asking ‘how close is local?’ is asking the perennial question of democracy: which people? Knowing who is governed is as important as knowing that those people govern themselves. Our democracy is stratified like a company organisational chart. A simplistic drawing would show Government at the top and parish councils at the bottom and a myriad of other organisations with decision-marking powers over any number of areas of our daily lives arranged on the intervening levels....

It’s been a busy fortnight for open-information projects and campaigns. Widely announced and re-announced were the winners of the Show Us A Better Way (SUABW) competition, sponsored by the Government, which sought new solutions to perhaps unknown problems. SUABW asked people what web-based tools they would build from public data-sources that would improve the way public information is shared and presented. The winners are: Can I Recycle It? UK Cycling Catchment Areas Location of Postboxes Loofinder The BBC PM report referred to a court case being thrown out because a piece of law that the case was built on had been taken off the statute book....

What factors are increasing the price of oil, recently over $135 a barrel? Is it the speculative ‘unregulated’ oil trading that William Pfaff, writing in the IHT, criticises? Certainly the black magic of contract trading is a factor, a parasite on the ‘real’ market for the commodity. According to the BBC, OPEC has so far blamed price rises on speculators and says there is no shortage of oil. Likewise, Pfaff considers the present situation with rising prices dissimilar to the 1973 oil crisis, when OPEC announced that they would no longer supply oil to nations that supported Israel in its conflict with Syria and Egypt. Paul Krugman, also in the IHT, is somewhat naive if he thinks that we are entering merely an era of scarce, expensive oil. This is more than an era. The buried sunlight that we like to burn is running out. Scarcity is the true reality. It’s more than Half Gone. Not only is the raw material that we are critically addicted to becoming more expensive as it becomes increasingly scarce, feeding our addiction in consuming oil is one of the major causes of global warming. ...

UK Citizens Online Democracy’s (UKCOD) main activity is running the mySocietyproject, building websites which “give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives.” MySociety are the people behind the great web tools TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem, PledgeBank, HearFromYourMP and FixMyStreet(a project similar to one comwifinet were hackingup in the distant past…)I’ve just been emailed about [UK Citizens Online Democracy’s (UKCOD) main activity is running the mySocietyproject, building websites which “give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives....

Barry Gardiner (MP Brent North) was previously Minister for Competitiveness at the Department of Trade � Industry and met with Post Watch back in 2006 to discuss Post Office closures. He also voted with the Govt for the euphemistic motion cited above. What we will see over the coming weeks is a flood of photo opportunities in front of Post Offices… All you need to remember is that Dawn and Barry vote with the Govt on ‘national issues’ then campaign against the Govt on ‘local issues’, even when they are the same issue....