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Renewing participatory democracy Multiple Differential Uncertainty
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Week 25 Milburn Mystery 
Why did Milburn go? He suffered ambition burnout - that's my theory. As young politicians reach the top of the pole earlier and earlier, and as families are formed later and later, we are witnessing a new motivational cocktail - the side-effects of which blew Milburn away.
Reshuffle Madness What a cafuffle about the re-shuffle! I thought Blair did well, delivering the long knife to the Lord Chancellor's office in the process. Both dear Mr Gilbert and dear Mr Sullivan will be well pleased. Milburn's departure was undoubtedly a real shock for Blair - but I thought he handled the aftermath very well.
Locus Pocus 
I visited 10 Downing Street this week, for
the first time in my life. It was just before the re-shuffle. The occasion was the launch of a new
communitarian Fabian leaflet, Communities in
Control, by a rising Blairite Minister Hazel Blears.
The PM was in France, patching up relations with Chirac, so our host for the
evening was David Blunkett, on his way to his
lecture outlining plans for elected local Police Boards. There is no doubt
that Government Ministers would like to make "localism" (in health, in
policing, in education, in childcare, in care for the elderly) the
distinctive theme of Labour's Third Term. David Blunkett said just that,
last Wednesday - his remarks were picked up by the perceptive Guardian.
PS Full review of Communities in Control to follow, next week..
Exaggerating Jobs Dishonest machinations 
My time as Swansea Economic Development Officer (1979/85) came back to haunt me this week. The National Audit Office has taken a close and critical look at the claims made for job creation grants (“Regional Selective Assistance” in the jargon of the trade). The NAO found that the claims were frequently fragile and unsubstantiated, often plainly inaccurate. I felt a real twinge of conscience. Because everyone within the system, both on the private and public side of the equation, has always known the system to be defective, often dishonest. But as with so many bureaucratic wrongs, it is quite simply in nobody’s interests…. Cities should The over-centralised UK Government is desperate for competent constitutional partners. Yet they have none, except the "mirror Westminsters" of Holyrood and Cardiff Bay. What we need is the regeneration of our forty cities and their regions. 
The sale of post-sale maintenance contracts is a seedy business. Dixons, as one of the UK's seediest companies, has made £-millions from this shady practice. It consists of persuading unwary customers to pay for "cover" which they already enjoy, as of legal right... Labour’s Do you share my revulsion at Labour’s New Barbarism? At every turn, Labour Ministers demonstrate that they are out of touch, losing all sense of what a liberal democracy means.
Special Footnote I love the online newspapers, which are my access to the world - share them with me - click through to their Homepages from here -
Try BBC News, the public service website for the best and quickest access to the news, as well as a huge political data resource, the BBC is unbeatable
My diary Now up to date! I have re-structured my Diary to give you a day-to-day means of looking back, throughout the year What are your thoughts? Drop me a line Follow my August 2002 Russian Tour Diary, now unfolding in splendid technicolor - St Petersburg Novgorod Moscow Tallinn (2)
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Today's the day!
Memo: Urgent
You should remove all residual rent controls for newly-built property, give the property investment industry a free hand to build anew, granting them juicy tax privileges for as long as they remained residential landlords. Thatcher's 1980s reforms were not enough to bring investors back into the new-build rented sector. Yet all investors are now desperate for "sound" new projects, as the conventional Stock Market flounders. What could be better than to get them all investing in bricks-and-mortar? That is what General De Gaulle did, in 1958.
Defeat for 
I have encouraged you to back the cause of Annette Carson, the 62-year-old British pensioner who emigrated to South Africa and lost the right to have her Old Age Pension indexed, in line with payments to UK resident pensioners, after the date of her emigration. Some 500,000 UK pensioners find themselves in the same position. I have condemned my own Party and the hapless Ian McCartney for their political failure to put this right. But my arguments were political. Wearing my barrister-hat, I never did consider that Annette Carson would be successful in her appeal to the UK Court of Appeal. Indeed, I made myself quite unpopular among the campaigning pensioners (particularly the Australians) for explaining my legal Opinion. It gives me no comfort, therefore, to report that Annette Carson duly lost again, this week. There was a depressing inevitability about the legal logic, which denied her the victory she morally and politically deserved. But the Judges were only doing their job: blame lies with Parliament and the politicians. She lost before the High Court, and she has now lost before the Court of Appeal. I hope she will not be forced to try again, traipsing through the House of Lords and the Strasbourg Court.
Shelter I feel homeless. John Naughton advocates a new form of political dating-agency, capable of assembling anti-Bush forces in the United States, through the Internet- he writes in The Observer. I feel a similar need, for those despairing of Tony Blair, yet quite unable to stomach the retrogressive Old Labour dirges emanating from Tribune, the Morning Star, the "new" TU leaders and the old IS Left, now peppered throughout the Labour Party. I hang on within the Labour Party, hoping that new leaders will emerge, with some glimmer of political imagination. I have no doubt that the future lies with a new genre of Liberal Socialism, forged as an individualist philosophy with sub-text of public cohesion, democratic, passionately egalitarian, human-rights-based, espousing and developing the open multicultural society - that is the way forward, even though Blair has currently lost the plot, no doubt disoriented by his own awful errors of judgment over Iraq. Barefoot Advocates
Yet that very demand has priced these two professions out of the reach of ordinary people. I advocate the creation of a third, less highly-qualified profession, that of public advocate. The accountancy, medical and teaching professions are all developing ancillary professions. City v. Province
Public interest companies
Other recent topics
Multiple Differential Uncertainty Saturday |
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Created by GMID Design & Communication COPYRIGHT NOTICE
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New
I am sure
you will want to
keep in touch with what Steve Bell is drawing, in
I love stamps...
Royalty should stay firmly on the postage
stamps,
Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury,
joins us today, here in Mumbles, to receive the Freedom of the Community
of Mumbles. He will walk through the streets of the town, from Parish
Church to Norman Castle, honoured by his own Welsh community, proud that he has
risen to the one of the highest offices in the land.
And the weather is forecas to stay fair..
To Gordon Brown:
You want to transform the flexibility of our housing market, as part of your
preparation for the Euro. You should tread another Third Way path and unlock
the resources of the property investment sector. 
My first choice of profession was that of
advocate - as a Barrister, a profession which was in 1961 quite small, some
3,500 souls. They worked with 35,000 Solicitors. Today, these
professions have expanded massively to meet growing demand, particularly in
the corporate and commercial sectors. 
I would not ordinarily trouble you with Welsh tea-cup storms. But
the Swansea Airport Case one exposes a key faultline in Labour's devolution of power to Scotland
and Wales. In neither country
did New Labour's Constitution take
proper account of the country's great cities - Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff,
Swansea. Relations between these cities and their new provincial masters are
fraught with tension and apprehension.
I
am proud to say that an idea which started on my desk, in my Swansea attic,
is set to reach the statute book - next year! It was last April (2002)
that I came up with the idea of creating a new "company kit", for use in the
third sector, which would make it easier for non-charitable projects to get
established and to develop - the "public interest company". The
Government has now taken up the idea, and has an excellent website on the subject,