Who wants to be...

I am tempted to blog an analysis of Charles Kennedy's performance on the charity "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" programme tonight drawing wider political conclusions, but that would be, well, silly. Suffice to say, if you saw it you'll know what I mean. ;-)

We've Cancelled Christmas

Yes, I and my fellow Luton Councillors are so concerned that Christmas, with its pagan symbolism and its stated objective of ramming Christian theology down people's throats, will offend people of other religions or no religion at all have decided to stop the whole thing. So anyone attempting to celebrate Christmas tomorrow be warned, council officers will confiscate your mince pies.

...er...except we haven't and we won't.

Luton has not cancelled Christmas nor have we decided to "change Christmas into a Harry Potter festival by renaming its festive lights 'Luminos'" as various newspapers have reported. I have watched with increasing frustration as my town has got caught up in one of the most ridiculous media invented moral panics that I think I have witnessed.

I suppose I have become used to the right-wing press, often in collusion with fringe pressure groups, generating these scares every so often, and various commentators and politicians jumping on the bandwagon. So in recent years I have tended to shrug my shoulders and say "there they go again" and ignore the whole thing. But this one actually did wind me up. Mainly because it had virtually no foundation in reality what so ever. The media has spent a huge amount of air time and paper promoting, I suspect often consciously, a story that was almost entirely invented.

There were a few voices crying out "hang on a minute". I'm particularly grateful to this article in the Guardian which helped put the record straight about Luton's Luminos;

"Luton does not have a festival called Luminos. It does not use any alternative name for Christmas. When it did, once, five years ago, hold something called Luminos one weekend in late November, the event didn't even replace the council's own Christmas celebrations, let alone forbid anyone else from doing anything."

But with a few exceptions the media seem to have blindly accepted the concept of a "PC Crusade against Christmas". Yesterday I came across by accident this letter from the Islington Gazzette where a reader reacts against a classic example of this type of nonsense;

"It would appear 'the political correctness gone mad lobby' have, er, gone mad!".

Quite.

Anyway, at the risk of offending you all: Happy Christmas!

The Local Government White Paper: A review

One of the things I have managed to do in the last few weeks is to sit down and take a proper look at the recently published Local Government White Paper and come to a considered judgment on it.

An awful lot of the proposals in the White Paper are essentially about making local government better able to fufill the Government's policy objectives. New Labour are struggling with "delivery". They know that they rely on local government to provide a lot of that "delivery" but have found that many of the ways they have been "encouraging" councils to do this task haven't been working as well as they would like. Slowly they are learning and so the White Paper contains some sensible reforms improving the way local government works towards delivering the governments agenda.

You will have of course spotted the illiberal flaw in this, that this is not about better ways for local councils to deliver their own agenda. The White Paper has almost nothing to say about the democratic renewal of local government and with it coming out, ridiculously, prior to the Lyons Report has nothing to say on local government finance. Hardly the "radical" document they claim it to be.

Indeed parts of it betray a basic lack of knowledge about how local government works. To illustrate I reproduce the following diagram from the document (which I acknowledge is Crown Copyright) which illustrates the process of their proposed "Community Calls for Action".

"Problem Solved" - I wish!

However, worse than this are the proposals for executive arrangements within councils. The paper proposes that councils will be forced to choose one of three leadership models; an elected executive mayor, a separately elected leader and executive, and a leader elected from the council for four years with all executive powers. These changes, including a move to an elected mayor, would no longer require a referendum, just a decision by the council. Aside from the practical difficulties with each of these models, the whole direction councils are being forced to follow just emphasises how deeply the government has developed its obsession with the idea of the strong leader.

This goes beyond displaying a lack of knowledge about how local government works into displaying a lack of knowledge about how democratic politics works! Have years of "presidential" personality cult sofa politics under Blair has left New Labour politicians unable to imagine the possibility of forms of collective leadership?

Good news from Winchester

I read news that Martin Tod has been selected as PPC for Winchester.

This is A GOOD THING.

Congratulations to Martin who will be excellent as a candidate and when succesful very sound as an MP.

No posts, business, bears and lemurs

I note that it has been just over three weeks since I lasted posted on this blog. Looking back over that time causes me to reflect on a very busy couple of weeks.

So what have I been up to? Well for once quite a lot of productive "real" work getting to grips with various websites and business things. But also a fair amount of proper Lib Dem stuff including two days of excellent "Next Generation" training (which I ought to properly post about at some point), the East of England regional conference, and our local party AGM.

The Council is keeping me busy of course. We are heavily into the budget process at the moment. Which is always more of a trial than a pleasure. This is the third budget that I have played an active part in putting together and every year I get angrier about just how mad the system is. Discount any talk you hear about central government valuing local government or even about working in partnership. He who pays the piper plays the tune - and that tune is a rather off key jig that makes the dancers jump through very large hoops.

However, I do notice that I've spent a rather a lot of time on events and meetings associated big picture economic and housing growth stuff. Something else that deserves a proper post at some point.

But I note with concern not enough campaigning. I even missed the planned trip to help in the Camden by-election that a few Luton activists made last Saturday. Which meant that I missed out witnessing the encounter my ward colleague Clive had with a bear at Kentish Town Station. Clive assures me that the bear was drunk; "you could tell by his glassy eyes".

However, all is not lost. I did get to meet some lemurs last week.

A lemur!