Sunday, 01 November 2009

Sign here if you want more petitions

As our governments grope ever more desperately for formal solutions to problems that require attention to informality, the difficulties they create as they go just serve to complicate things. Encouraging e-petitioning as if it embodies empowerment is one example. Here's Anthony Zacharzewski on the Local democracy blog the other day:

'I don’t have a problem with people saying that they want the council to spend more money – people do that all the time. It’s just very likely that the appeals to spend more money will push for higher and higher spending at a time when there’s less money than ever for doing new things.

'Easier petitioning means councils will need to get (even) better at saying no.'

Every time a council says no in a democratically accountable way it has an administrative cost.

1 Nov 2009 20:37:10 | Citizenship and democracy, Governance and participation

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Informal volunteering down five per cent The latest Citizenship Survey headlines for the first quarter of 2009 cover empowerment and participation, community cohesion, and racial and religious harassment and labour market discrimination. Julian Dobson has reviewed them and made some helpful points as always about the political context. I just have one point to add about some of the data that particularly intersts me, concerning 'informal volunteering': In April-June 2009, 57 per cent of adults volunteered informally at least once in the 12 months prior to interview. The report doesn't mention trends here, so I went back to the figures for the whole of 2008-09, and found that in that year 62 per cent of adults volunteered informally at least once in the previous 12 months. A five per cent decline is sharp and significant. Can it be attributed just to the effects of the recession? If so, will levels recover after economic recovery? Sorry to keep bannging on about this, but there's a scary informal care crisis looming with an ageing population, and reduced public spending ain't gonna help. There will be a growing shortfall of family carers and an imperative to promote care and support at neighbourhood level - ask David Brindle. He wrote a year ago: Difficult questions about family and community responsibilities are being ducked and the issues risk being overshadowed by a focus on personalisation of services. This statistic is a tiny marker of a major social problem.
PREVIOUS POST
There's no there, there The Sunday Telegraph has this story about a non-existent village in Lancashire, apparently spawned by Google maps. Just green fields. Maybe it's just as well. I seem to recall that one riposte to Gertude Stein's famous comment about Oakland ('The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there's no there, there') was something like: 'The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, it's there.'

Kevin Harris

Search

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments