The Office of the Public Guardian (OPG) neatly encapsulates much of how modern government is run, its weaknesses and the problems our democratic systems face in trying to control or improve bureaucracy.
The Office of the Public Guardian was created for the best of reasons following the 2005 Mental Capacity Act in order to administer a new Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) process by which people can lay down what should happen to them and who can make decisions for them if they lose the ability to decide for themselves.
Giving people more and clear control over their own lives is what government should do. Moreover, the OPG is, in theory, an accountable public body with annual reports, performance standards laid down by the Ministry of Justice and its operations open to questioning in Parliament.
But the reality of how it works also reveals the dark side of modern government.
Welcome, Daily Viewers, to January 15th – and a public engagement special.
A year ago today US Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing into New York’s Hudson River. Eyewitness Janis Krums took this famous photo of the plane (right) and immediately shared it with the internet via Twitter, thus proving the website could be used for so much more than telling the world what you had for breakfast. (The only twitpic photo that’s come close since then was of a fox on the London Underground, but I live in hope and carry a camera…)
By Alex Foster
| Mon 21st September 2009 - 7:45 pm
Whilst the LDV team is out tonight enjoying, in our various abstemious ways, the Liberal Drinks event at Bournemouth’s Goat and Tricycle tonight, we thought we’d bring you the tape of last night’s BOTY ceremony.
Sadly the audio version can not to justice to the range of visual feasts the evening provided. Stephen’s milliner will be most disappointed; the ice sculptors know their art is fleeting; and we have really only just rounded up all the flamingoes.
But it was a striking evening for a number of reasons, as we hope the …
Google’s Street View service got off to a bumpy start in the UK as privacy campaigners tried to block Google’s car-mounted cameras from photographing Britain’s streets. Now, Google is heading off the beaten track.
The internet company has loaded its 3-D Street View cameras on to rickshaw-style tricycles in an effort to capture national landmarks, monuments and sights that cannot be viewed from a car.
The pictures will form part of Street View, a mapping service from Google that gives 360-degree views of the country’s biggest cities, allowing people to take virtual tours from their computers or mobile phones.
However Lib Dem MP tom Brake is less-than-impressed:
Tom Brake has now managed to get in contact with Facebook who have advised him that his account was automatically suspended when their system detected an unusually large amount of traffic to and from his account.
Clearly, a social network originally set up for networking amongst university peers needs to evolve to cope with new types of users and their networks, balancing communications amongst large groups with safeguards against spam.
Facebook say they are working hard to get Tom’s account back up.
Tom Brake, Liberal Democrat MP for Carshalton and Wallington, has had his Facebook account disabled just hours after he used …
This years World Environment Day should provide the perfect launching pad for the Liberal Democrat’s vision for a sustainable and environmentally sound future. For a party like the Liberal Democrats who profess that there is a green thread running through all of its policies. World Environment Day 2009 and its theme of Your Planet Needs You-UNite to Combat Climate Change should be used as a medium through which worldwide awareness of the environment should be stimulated and political attention should be re-focused on the issue of the environment.
Climate Change is the great challenge facing the whole of the humankind. People need leadership to guide them into a sustainable future. Human nature often means that people focus on the short term and disregard what sacrifices need to be made for the long term. For instance people who in principal are all for conservation and support the fight against Climate Change, when faced with every day decisions such as the use of plastic bags and recycling choose the easiest and most convenient option. We need to make and enforce those hard decisions for them.
The Liberal Democrat Party has been at the forefront of the fight against Climate Change with Nick Clegg proposing the Green road out of recession in December.
That put forward such initiatives as a five year programme to insulate every school and hospital, funding insulation and energy efficiency for a million homes, with a £1,000 subsidy for a million more and building 40,000 extra zero-carbon social houses
Tom Brake, Susan Kramer and Ed Davey are all Greater London MPs with columns of zeroes next to their ACA claims, even though they are strictly speaking entitled to them. They join Sarah Teather, Lynne Featherstone and David Howarth who have already featured in the series.
Here’s an interesting thing: will Vince Cable be included in this holy parade? He too is a Greater London MP who doesn’t claim the ACA he is entitled to. I seem to recall
Sunday’s Observer quotes Lib Dem MP Tom Brake as pointing a finger at two plain clothes policemen he believes were acting as agents provacateurs at the G20 protests last month. Tom Brake was, as readers will recall, acting as an observer during the protests, and is set to give evidence at a committee on human rights today.
“When I was in the middle of the crowd, two people came over to me and said, ‘There are people over there who we believe are policemen and who have been encouraging the crowd to throw things at the police,'” Brake said. But when
Over at The Times, Lib Dem MP Tom Brake reflects on his experiences as an independent observer on behalf of Parliament at last week’s G20 protests. Here’s an excerpt:
There is a minority in some protests that does not mind causing trouble, and a smaller number that will actively seek violence, vandalism and aggression, thus stealing the headlines away from issues such as climate change, Third World debt, employment or the world economy. Anyone who has been to a protest, music festival or a football match accepts and understands that crowd control cannot be the easiest of jobs. It is a thankless task, with little praise when things pass off peacefully, but dominating headlines when tragic and appalling incidents such as that of Ian Tomlinson’s death occur.
On the day itself, I was rooted in one of the police “kettles” for five hours. I witnessed the professionalism of many police officers, as well as their final failure to tackle the situation properly and instead fan the flames. … “Kettling” is a tactic that should come under review. At the first sign of difficulty, the police present a wall of riot shields and batons around protesters — the peaceful alongside the problematic — and slowly squeeze them into a tighter space. People are allowed in, but absolutely no one is allowed to leave.
Slowly the number of inmates increases. No access to food. No water. Young trapped with the old. Journalists trapped with anarchists. People, like an elderly couple I spoke to, who simply did not want to be there at all. It is not surprising that under such conditions an otherwise overwhelmingly relaxed and peaceful crowd can become agitated, then angry, and then violent. The tactic proved misguided and counter-productive. It served to alienate a whole mass of peaceful protesters. …
There is now a different public mood to contain — one that wants to know why a man died. And the public will not be silenced this time by backing them into a corner.
You can read the article in full HERE. And you can watch Tom’s 2-minute video from inside the ‘kettle’ here:
I’m all for encouraging gardening. More gardening can make people healthier, benefit the environment and improve the local area. And, far more importantly, for many people it’s a great source of enjoyment.
I’m also relaxed about the idea of government in some way being involved in such encouragement; for example, by local councils running gardening courses.
But I really can’t see how the government can claim with a straight face that encouraging more gardening is one of the objectives for the 2012 Olympics. For as the Financial Times reports:
Ministers sought to dig themselves out of an allotment-sized hole on Friday to
Braking news (sorry, sorry) reaches my sofa that Tom Brake, attending the protest as a legal observer, was among those not permitted to leave the City cordon zone operated for several hours by police yesterday.
See the tardily-uploaded CNN report here. (Watch out also for the economically literate and articulate protester on just before Tom – quick, send that man a copy of The Storm and a membership form!)
“I’m envious of my colleague who can ask her MP, Tom Brakes , to look into matters of irritation at Carshalton station. He does it, and registers that he has on his Facebook status. She feels she has a personal relationship with her MP, something a thousand doorstepping exercises would never achieve.”
Mark posted recently about MPs’ uptake of various internet tools, and the fact that there are many to choose from.
Yesterday we at LDV Towers received an embargoed press release containing the details of Britain’s Sexiest MPs, as determined by a representative panel of Britain’s electorate using STV Sky hacks using the back of a fag packet.
And there’s good news for Lib Dems, with a high showing in the top ten including our dear leader himself, Julia Goldsworthy at number five (down three from last year) and with fruity blonde Lynne Featherstone leading the charge at number 2.
Further information on the embargo-busting Adam Boulton Blog, including a handy link to a batch of photos that allow you …
Taxpayers face a multimillion-pound maintenance bill at the Olympic Park after organisers admitted that they had failed to find a commercial operator to take over the main venue after 2012. … The Times has learnt that the Olympic stadium will cost at least £800,000 a year to keep open. Projected revenues from athletics events and a proposed sports academy will leave a big funding shortfall at the venue, where building costs have already spiralled from £282 million to £547 million. There are fears that the final bill could be much higher.
Praise for Tom Brake and how he uses Facebook to engage with his constituents in Carshalton and Wallington:
Tom Brake, LibDem MP for Carshalton and Wallington, uses Facebook. Not especially as an ordinary member, in terms of ordinary (mundane) status reports or poking or that sort of thing, but as an MP … This is a perfect example: Tom updates his Facebook friends on the weather reports and is thanked by five for doing so. It is part of the job of the modern day MP, but it also builds up a link between him and constituents, perhaps earns a degree
cim This is where Coalition comes in. Sure, you didn't make a lot of centre-left voters very happy by backing the Conservatives, but more importantly you went into ...
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