Queen Edith’s by-election hustings – Thurs 09 November 2023

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From the Queen Edith’s Community Forum:

“Make a date to be in the audience next Thursday night (9 November) for the Community Forum’s traditional “Meet The Candidates” event. All four candidates (Cons/Greens/Labour/LibDems) for the vacant position representing Queen Edith’s on Cambridge City Council will be there:

The Queen Edith’s Community Forum have also kindly given me permission to run a pop-up book stall similar to the one I ran at the Greener Queen Edith’s event a few months ago.

Above – Pop-up book stall at Greener Queen Edith’s back in September 2023.

Books (Second-hand) will range from local history to current social issues (including several topical discussion books from local publishers Independence Educational Publications) and introductory guides to politics and government. Important to prepare now for the looming general election. (In my very biased opinion!) Please bring cash if you can – most of the books will be between £2-£10. I will include a couple of books published in the last decade that make the case for each of the political parties standing candidates.

“Who are the candidates?”

See the Cambridge Independent here.

Above – the links are to the Cambridge constituency parties (as it’s a Cambridge City Council by-election) even though Queen Edith’s is in South Cambridgeshire Constituency. See also Who Can I Vote For? for links to the individual candidates and any social media and web-links they may have put up.

Why I’m not standing again

I don’t think it’s right for me to be hosting events discussing local democracy and local issues while being an election candidate at the same time – especially as I have designed the events to be non-party-political. For me it’s a conflict of interest at a time when we need to strengthen our political systems, institutions, and structures. Furthermore, pulling in nearly 10% of the vote back in May 2023, I feel I’ve made the point I wanted to make. It would have been nice for another independent candidate to step forward and make the case for whatever local issues they wanted to make, but that didn’t happen.

The Great Cambridge Crash Course – three out of four introductory sessions complete

There is one final chance to attend the introductory session of my Great Cambridge Crash Course this month – it’s on Tues 07 November 2023 from 7:00pm at Ross Street Community Centre off Mill Road – free/donations. Also, participants will be invited to take away a book from the crate I bring along.

Above – “Participate and pick one!”

Over 30 people have taken part in the three sessions that I’ve run over the past few weeks – the vast majority of whom I have not been acquainted with. i.e. it’s not just ‘my mates being nice to me’ but rather people with a genuine curiosity to learn more. Because at the start of each workshop I ask people to state one word that indicates how they are feeling about the whole thing or why they are taking part. ‘Curious’ was by far the most common response – although a number of people also stated ‘confused’ – about the structure of governance in Cambridge’s local institutions, hence why they took part as well.

Although the content (such as the handouts) is the same, the discussions are very much led/influenced by where the people in each session want things to go. One group wanted to go into the detail of the local history, another group wanted to go into the detail of the Greater Cambridge Partnership, and a third group wanted to look at the impact of individual ministers and the impact of ministerial decisions. One piece of feedback was that we only touched on some of the issues that would make for a useful follow-up event, hence I’ve scheduled a session focusing on the impact of central government on Cambridge. This is on 11 November 2023 at Rock Road Library from 12:15pm – sign up here. Again, it’s free/donations.

A chance for a discussion series in Cambridge in 2024?

I blogged about this here. It’s not something I have the competence or capacity to organise myself, but there are a number of civic society organisations that might be willing to put something together as a series of weekly sessions. Cambridge residents can raise this with their city or county councillors either via https://www.writetothem.com/ or by sending in a public question to their relevant local area committee. The next set of area committee meetings (online) are coming up over the next few weeks (See Cambridge City Council’s event calendar here) after which they will be pausing.

Above – from the foot of the webpage here

“To pause Area Committees for at least 6 months to allow officers and members to work with a range of colleagues and partners to research, review and determine alternative approaches”

Cambridge City Council – Civic Affairs 18 Oct 2023 – paper 23/37/Civ

For those of you interested in the detail of local/neighbourhood level representation, see the paper from the city council here. It remains to be seen what the results of all of this will be. In the meantime…

Cambridge Citizens Pre-founding Assembly

At Long Road Sixth Form College, Wed 08 November 2023 from 6pm.

“This is the first Public Assembly of Cambridge Citizens.” – and you can sign up here.

People can find out more about the national body, Citizens UK here. “Citizens UK Charity is a registered charity, no. 1107264. Address: Jacquard Point 1 and 3, Tapestry Way, London, E1 2FJ”

A number of local community groups have already indicated they will be going along to the event on Wednesday. I’ll try to get there myself and write a short blogpost on it.

If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to: