Wednesday, 15 September 2010

Silly bagger

Robbie told this story how he saw a fancy carpet on a clothesline, rolled it up and made off with it on his bike. This was over Eastleigh way, you know where the new houses are, well not so new, and how he was so neat going across the big field there, it was all wasteland then, said he carried his bike for a bit then put the rug down and rode over it so his tyretracks wouldn't show. And the same on the fields coming back past your end, where it's muddy in the dip.

The sort of thing he did, he wanted to be a proper criminal. Robbie took it to the feller in that used-stuff store down on Paisley Lane, he said that's not a carpet lad it's a curtain, could you not tell the difference? There should be two. And they both should be clean.

 


15 Sep 2010 08:21:50 | Vignettes

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Minister helps to create safe, tolerant and inclusive communities We have a Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, who leads a team of ministers with the following responsibilities: creating safe, tolerant and inclusive communities building better homes and neighbourhoods promoting strong and accountable local government improving local services and environment regenerating and investing in our towns, cities and regions. The Planning blog has an entertaining slant on Mr Pickles's splendid achievements since coming to office, including of course the crucial identification of the need for a portrait of the queen at CLG headquarters and the crowd-pleasing requirement to have English county flags displayed outside the building. Among the comments, this one will hardly seem eccentric: 'I’m trying to give this government a chance but I’m running out of patience. Why is this pickled egg arsing about with flags and pictures of the queen!!??' Well all politicians get a little flak from time to time. What worries me is that he's probably doing his best.
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Community development and Small State 'Big Society' is an imposed brand and for me gives rise to the same sort of resistance that a commercial advertising campaign would generate. But those who claim that it is nothing more than branding are not quite right. In spite of the coalition's coyness about policy, there have been policy assertions and it's appropriate to examine them. CDF's Mel Bowles has rolled up her sleeves and done just that from a community development perspective, in a measured, questioning recent paper available (if barely discoverable) on the CDX site. She quite rightly highlights the distinction between politicised and non-politicised community work. Community organisers under Small State will not be expected to support local people in fighting to protect or gain access to existing services: ‘Neighbourhood groups will be expected to develop (additional or alternative) public services and bid to provide them... Community organisers – and others – will be expected to support them to do so. The policy context requires intermediaries... to refocus their attention on developing new community groups that are willing and able to develop and deliver public services…’ She goes on to note that: ‘none of the policy material to emerge thus far addresses the extent to which community organiser support should focus on bringing people from different backgrounds together or on supporting vulnerable citizens and groups to get involved.’ Discussing opportunities for CD, the paper concludes that social action in the context of Small State looks likely to involve 'hybrids of community groups, social entrepreneurs, public services and private contractors overseen by citizens, as well as local governments’. And among the challenges, the big one: ‘ensuring active citizens are not solely providing services, but are also able to make demands upon authority and power.’ Which reminds me, back in April before the election, I wrote: 'start from the recognition that community action is fundamentally, insecapably political, and get used to it. Attempts to depoliticise it will be self-defeating and may lead to a revival of confrontational radicalism'; and Julian Dobson wrote: 'If we want community activity that won't frighten the horses and will leave most of society pretty much as it is, and will give you social action without having to worry about social justice, this kind of set-up may be a good bet. Those who want more substantial change may well find themselves suffocated in such a network.' Which in turn invites the familiar point that much of the debate about Small State has taken place in the blogosphere, none of it included in Mel's cited sources. We continue to see two literatures on public policy, the traditional one ignoring the upstart.

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