I’ve been trying to find out the level of response Blears has recieved for her efforts in promoting consultation on this white paper in the three months since it was launched, and it seems she generally prefers to avoid feedback.

Of note is an interesting article in the FT today http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/684e7962-aeb2-11dd-b621-000077b07658.html which shows the government spent £62,900 on public consultations on proposed legislaton for its forthcoming Queen’s speech.

The 62 regional events had total attendance of 1,200 and recieved less than 700 comments or suggestions generated for the 18 bills (though whether restricting comments to max500 characters was a factor is unknown), Harriet Harman ‘refused to comment on the quality of the submissions, or to state whether any had had a material impact on the proposed legislation’.

Furthermore, its more likely to have been written by a civil servant than Blears herself. So let’s not try and trash it before the project has begun.

If I was back in England I’d contribute, but I can’t until next week I’m afraid.

2. As far as publishing anything under the LC banner, at this stage let’s just run with volunteers unpicking each of the chapters and use comments to open up a debate. Once that’s done, then we can have an internal conflab about what, if anything, we carry forward as a response.

That’s more or less how the position on the abortion debate evolved – we held the debate out in the open, worked out any kinks that emerged behind the scenes and wound up with a fairly cohesive collective position.

If we can do that again, then we have a model for manifesto building that should serve us pretty well

Indeed. Something to look into over the coming week(s). Let’s see where we are in a few days with volunteers and then we can see about setting something up.

As I’ve said elsewhere on here, I think this is a great idea.

I’d be happy to tackle Chapter 4, if you like – ‘Having an Influence’. Though my entire thrust is likely to be that ‘Having an Influence’ is actually not quite enough. So, I agree with the main thrust of Justins’s comment at 3.

I’m quite happy to put up a critique, but there needs to be an internal (LC) coming together before anything was published under the LC banner, I’d have thought. Quite how that works out, I have no idea!

So yes, thanks, we just need to drum up a couple more volunteers.