I’d be happy to help.

The white paper is divided into 8 chapters, with the first introducing the political argument and the other seven covering separate major issues, so perhaps the easiest way it to divide it up along those lines and produce a critical series of articles with brief summaries, conclusions and any glaring omissions etc to spark off discussion.

In order, chapters 2-8 cover the issues of becoming active in your community; access to information; having an influence; accountability; redress; standing for office; and ownership and control of local services.

So, d’you volunteer any preference?

Those are some pretty big barriers to entry that the government themselves have erected. I take it Thomas has got a spare 33 quid, bionic eyes or a top-notch printer. I don’t, unfortunately.

How about this…

Why doesn’t Thomas think of a way of usefully dividing the white paper up and delegating the analysis? Do it through Liberal Conspiracy. I’ll put my money where my mouth is and objectively look at a chunk if it’s done in the right way.

It is up to us.

But then the discussion got to what’s next. And they began to tick off the academic disciplines that had just become “completed” which is a nice way of saying “obsolete”. Their work is done except for the memoirs. And they also began to talk about what it’s like not to be the opposition any longer. Then the more radical Marxists types took charge of the discussion (just like them huh?) and all of a sudden even Obama wasn’t enough. But the idea still remained that the outs are in and bricks are best thrown from the street not from inside the house.

So I wrote about the idea of “The End of Cynicism” and posted the article today. Very interesting to find similar thoughts here. Mine a re a bit more from the perspective of a “thunderclap” that I think is rocking the halls of the “institutions of voice” right now.

Doug Barone
http://www.dougist.com

Unity is simply wrong to state the SCA amounts to little more than warm words. In legislation words are important, and in this piece of legislation this is very much the case.

The main point to make is that it is NOT a consultation exercise. The government is obliged by law to work with local authorities to reach agreement, just as the local authorities themselves are obliged by law to reach agreement with their communities.

Think this is just empty rhetoric? Well, the lawyers of the Department of Communities and Local Government didn’t think so when we were negotiating in committee last year. They spent months trying to strip out all the language and replace it with civil service-friendly language about “consultation” (= cherry picking). The DCLG (not Blears herself I would add who has tended to be supportive) is also very shy of even mentioning the SCA beyond its statutory obligations. That’s why Unlock Democracy is having to work so hard on dissemination.

Those pointers, combined with the allergic, classic-Sir-Humphrey-style reaction that I’ve come across whenever I mentioned the SCA to a DCLG civil servant (usually involving several four letter words) suggests that it is, as Thomas suggests, a potentially powerful tool and a lot more than just nice words. It does however depend entirely on the enthusiasm, good will and ability of individuals to push their own agendas forward using it. That doesn’t sit comfortably with a political culture with is riven with cynicism, but nonetheless, if we can get a critical mass of people to engage with it, I have no doubt it will have a significant impact.

Addendum: we now have 22 local authorites and counting opted in, including huge councils like Sheffield and Birmingham. And that’s just a couple of weeks into the call. Can we build that critical mass? Yes, we can.

However, I gave you several perfectly reasonable examples of how mainstream politics has embraced blogging. I never said Obama beat Hill because of blogging, I said he used it to beat her – while also using many more tactics too.

So I really don’t understand why you have to pick thomas up on his point that blogging is becoming more influential (when it demonstrably is) – other than you trying to be a smarty pants.

If you have a problem with blogging per se, that’s fine, but this isn’t what this thread is about. Thanks.

At the risk of sounding cynical, while there are a lot of fine words in the SCA, I’ve personally been here several times before; Community Empowerment Networks, Community Challenge, New Deal for Communities, Local Strategic Partnerships, Local Area Agreements and so on, and so forth…

So not only is rhetoric all to familiar but I could give a masterclass in the various different ways in which initiatives like those set out SCA start out promising a lot and end up delivering next to bugger all and the many and varied ways in which the fine-sounding intentions of government are all too easily derailed in practice.

That’s doesn’t mean to say that we shouldn’t make an effort to use the provisions in SCA, in fact what we should do is make every effort to test the Act to the point of destruction but let’s also be clear what these initiatives are, which is what all the earlier ones were, carefully contrived substitutes for direct democracy which exist to create the illusion of democratic engagement without ever seriously threatening the established power structures and those who inhabit them.

Central and local government are all in favour of community engagement, just as long as that engagement validates their plans – it’s when communities see things differently and have different priorities that the problems emerge, the barriers go up and you find just exactly how little real power or control has actually been devolved to local level.

So, for all that Blears cites Porto Allegre as an exemplar, the government’s scheme for ‘participatory budgeting’ is but a pale shadow of both the democratic centralism of the Worker’s Party i the city or of its nearest right-wing equivalent, Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.

Power is never given away, it has to be taken, and our approach to the provisions in SCA has to be to push it as far as its possible to go, in order to identify where the barriers lie, and then work to push past those barriers towards a greater level of direct democracy at local level and an increase in genuine democratic control within local communities.

I like alot of what I see in the SCA, however I would say that there has been coverage on the Lib Dem blogsphere (not on mine but James Graham to name one did a piece) and the SCA doesnt make up for Blears being totally in the wrong about blogging…

The SCA essentially rewites the rules of local government, so any blogger who is interested in grassroots activism really ought to be aware of its contents. If for example you want to save your Post Office this gives you power to do so.

The SCA is the product of MPs on all sides of the house, so if we ignore it we also allow Labour to to claim all the credit for it when they use those powers to save plenty of Post Offices.

1. Bloggers were heavily courted by the candidates for Dep Leader of the Labour Party

2. Nick Clegg now gives regular audiences with bloggers, indeed the Lib Dems are treating their bloggers with increasing importance

3. Barack Obama used social media, including the influence of bloggers, to beat Hillary in the primaries

4. During the US elections, bloggers and online activists have increasingly replaced the mainstream media in fact checking the statements of political figures

5. The media now check the blogs for stories, and follow our lead. Especially industrious bloggers like Unity, who do research and check their facts

6. With newspapers using AP and PR guff more and more, blogs continue to grow and grow

Evidence for this bold and self-congratulatory assertion ?