Empowerment White Paper powers up

Inflated expectations
It’s the first birthday of the Other Taxpayers’ Alliance today, and they have an amusing “Which”-style comparison guide if you aren’t sure which one you ought to support. The original TaxPayers’ Alliance were quoted in a blog post I was reading earlier, from Thomas Byrne, who said, by way of an argument for cutting top public sector salaries: While there is no systematic data on executive pay in the public sector, there is stron

Comment is Fascist, but votes are representative
While researching the latest fraud woes of the UK Independence Party, I came across this article in the Times. Reporting on the alleged OLAF investigations being conducted on UKIP MEP Michael Nattrass, it has received just five comments in the nine days since it was put online. This perhaps shows the public’s level of interest in the affairs of the European Parliament, but what’s more interesting is what those comments say. One of them is pro-UKIP – it roughly says that fraud is OK if it’s done by people you agree with,

The decline of the Wiki volunteer
I spent a little time this afternoon at FutureGov’s Crowdsourced Council event in London. A wide range of engagement projects were demonstrated, from improved consultation methods (Consultwise – no website at the moment) to more citizen-created approaches (QuietRiots). There were lots of good projects there, but I don’t think I saw anything that passed the Wikipedia test – projects that would survive and thrive if they very suddenly became very popular. I think this is an important test for online debate tools because you don’t want to create communities that c

Democratic, decentralised and difficult
I attended an interesting seminar yesterday afternoon, hosted by the 2020 Public Services Trust. The topic was the future of citizen-centred public services. The two principal speakers both brought innovative ideas and a real vision, which is more than can be said for a lot of these public policy seminars. Ben Jupp, from the Cabinet Office, and Christian Bason from the Danish reform institute Mind Lab, set out a vision that I might crudely summarise as: We need to understand that public service goe

Security problems
The blog was hacked earlier on today, so we’ve had to restore it with none of the theme or other customisations. All the content should be here, though.