I attended the CoFoE’s 2nd plenary today, I used the livestream feed which I don’t think had language translation, nor live captioning; I also finished my review of the Digital Platform contributions in the Democracy stream. Here are my notes from the day, my analysis of the Digital Platform will come later. See "Read More" for more ...
Lewisham Labour is going through its candidate selections; and it seems they are actually asking about policy positions. I went back to the 2018 Manifesto, which I decided to mirror, just in case it disappears. 🙂 …
I am considering again, the role of Presidents of presidential republcs. Democracy means that the voice of the governed is heard, and is ideally final, that programmes are accountable to the people and the rights of the minority respected. Presidents, Leaders. or General Secretaries with weak mandates have the power and inclination to ignore the majority of their demos. Trump’s presidency among others proves that the argument, “that’s how it works” leads to crisis. Democracy is more than an arithmetic concept. …
At Labour's conference, the Left won policy, the right won the card votes, famously in the case of re-writing the Leadership election rules, by getting Unison to break its mandate; it’s not the first time, a Union has broken its mandate at Conference; see Unite in 2018, MSF in 1993 , and the AEUW in 1968, the first and last being to sink open selection and mandatory reselection, same thing, different names. The article talks about the Sunday Afternoon rules debate and its atmosphere, which included the adoption of new disciplinary rules inc. changing the MP selection trigger ballots. I also comment on some press reaction. To see the article in its full glory, ... read more, ...