Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 toContinue reading “Queen Edith’s by-election hustings – Thurs 09 November 2023”

I attended the early afternoon sessions of their event in Cambridge and was ‘disappointed but not surprised’ at how over-centralisation continued to prevent counties, towns and cities from improving their public transport networks. Some of you may recall my earlier blogpost on who does what on regional transport back in September. I stumbled across theContinue reading “Whitehall’s stranglehold is preventing radical improvements to local transport in England”

And it pre-dated the 2019 General Election according to Dominic Cummings Image: How to be a minister – Hutton & Lewis Which then makes you wonder who were the individuals and which were the institutions responsible for putting that shower of scoundrels and knaves into government in the first place – and/or rather, what theyContinue reading “Covid Public Inquiry confirms what we suspected – an utterly dysfunctional central government operation at the very moment we needed the opposite”

The University of Cambridge published the results of its early independent research on how it engaged with ‘the wider Cambridge community’ (see here). What improvements do the colleges and university institutions need to make to ensure their words result demonstrable positive changes? Image – from the quickly-forgotten Civil Society Strategy from Theresa May’s Government inContinue reading “How far has Cambridge University progressed in solving the “Papua to Pampisford” challenge?”

Did Thatcher’s ideology create an inflexible and rigid system of contractual accountability at the expense of democratic accountability? And thus make it harder for local residents to hold councils to account for local services? The academic thinking behind all of this stemmed from the ideology of Margaret Thatcher’s Government in the 1980s – as isContinue reading “Outsourcing as a barrier to better governance and new ideas”

A couple of new Cambridge-based discussion groups have emerged on Meetup – does this reflect an untapped demand for debating and discussion space in and around our city? You can see the groups on Meetup that cover: People can search for other groups in and around Cambridge here. Note I’m not a member of theContinue reading “A Civics Discussion Series for Cambridge & Cambridgeshire”

The Cambridge and County Folk Museum quotation applies again: From Papua to Pampisford. Can Cambridge University’s researchers apply the lessons from their research for the improvement of city, district, county, and sub-region? That was the challenge from former Councillor Sam Davies MBE – whose vacancy is now up for grabs in Queen Edith’s. You canContinue reading “Bristol Ideas 1993-2023 – assessed by the University of Cambridge: Anything our city can learn as well?”

An additional constituency, boundary changes, new communities with new households in, and the reallocation of an additional city council ward (Cherry Hinton) from the Cambridge City constituency to the re-oriented South Cambridgeshire constituency means dozens of city centre debates won’t serve the public interest – or the interest of the public! Image: Cambridge Electoral ServicesContinue reading “General Election hustings on Cambridge – can we do things differently to 2015?”

Ministers may as well blame an unexpected furniture-based crime wave given the litany of excuses they’ve given about the pounding in the polls the voters of Tamworth and Mid-Beds gave them. The Chairman of the Conservatives did the media rounds following the election drubbing last night. He told Sky News – no longer in Rupert’sContinue reading “Tories lose two more safe Parliamentary seats”

The issue of public education campaigns on how our city and county function also came up. Click here to watch the debate. Be under no illusions: overhauling local government is not for the faint-hearted. So I was glad that a number of the very complex issues that tripped up previous generations were raised by councillorsContinue reading “Cambridge councillors highlight the challenges of designing a single tier council”