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Welcome to my blog. Im always looking for new ways of bringing people together to build campaigns. Im always amazed by the energy and passion of the people I meet and the different skills they bring to making change happen - the ideas we try out, the campaigns we work on, the relationships we build together. I want to share those stories with you. I hope you enjoy them!

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in government we trust?


Something that stood out from the debate "in government we trust?" was the question - what happens when we unleash the free market? Think about the pharmaceutical industry and you'll see that the market there will always survive, but in many cases customers don't (like if we don't provide free access to generics). The private sector will always walk away, but the government can't and the citizens are stuck either way. I'd also like to pull my woolly hat off to the man like Crudddas - great facilitation of the debate, almost like being in his surgery, with the added populist bonus of a vote at the end. Next time, let's push people out of their narnian comfort zones and move beyond the nationalisation-privatisation debate (which the speakers did, although the audience did't follow them, I guess Narnia's a warm place to be in the winter...). Let's ask how much centralised nationalisation do we really want without it smothering the space for innovation and the human touch by staff and the users they work with? Even if we have FDR style infrastructure projects, it's very likely that "public sector industry" multinationals will just walk away with the cash and come back when they've spent it all on peerages or consultants. This also brings us to the debate around public sector ethos and how it's being pervaded by the private sector (esp now with the financial sector having swallowed itself up). If we get stuck at stopping public services getting privatised, then we end up with the NHS which has been nibbled at through new public management & efficiency savings right through to slowly but surely putting all the pieces to the privatised jigsaw that the NHS now is. We need to look at how we can embed public service values of equality, quality and care. We need to start with the people on the ground, not with the Whitehall/Westminster/Treasury "menage a trois" of choosing between privatisation & nationalisation. A story brings this to mind. Personalised budgets for social care do individualise people's risks and even destinies. However, many of the "service users" have pooled these budgets together, not because they want to be seen to be progressive, but because they don't want to get ripped of by private care suppliers and actually instinctively feel the need to come together with people in their situation to collaborate. Equality, fraternity, liberty - we ain't supporting these values all the time in public services, but they're fighting for it anyway.

And I got some great video clips for the How to Live in 21st Century competition on some cracking issues - criminal justice, allergies and ID cards...

Thanks to zero spin for the photos used under Creative Commons licence.

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