Dear Eceni
Dear Eceni
Dear Eceni
I was listening to your podcast this morning, about how to build the future; and I had to stop listening, and start to write.
On Local Government in Scotland
On Local Government in Scotland
[This is another in a sequence of essays broadly in response to the Scottish Government's extremely hasty and ill-conceived plan for local governance reform. It is not yet finished.]
Echoes of Dachau
Echoes of Dachau
This essay began as a thread on Mastodon, which is here.
Dachau is a small town in Germany. It is twenty kilometres from Munich. The Duke of Bavaria — one of the seven Prince-Electors of the Holy Roman Empire — had a palace there; but until 1933, that was the only thing that was particularly notable about the place.
Of size, and governance, revisited
Back in 2007 — almost twenty years ago — I wrote a rant about the extraordinary size of 'local' government regions in Scotland. Today, I'm doing it again. I'm doing it again because our Scottish National Party government, whose ineptitude and incompetence knows no bounds, are now proposing that existing councils could be merged. So let's compare the sizes of local government divisions across the EU, and add Scotland and our near-neighbour nations, Iceland and Norway.
Note that I've sorted this data by number of inhabitants. Note also, however, that I haven't added England. England is, uniquely, even worse than Scotland. But do we really aspire to be more like England?
Exploration of what happened on 26th June this year
Back in June this year, the Meteorological Office posted a blog post that really alarmed me. Since then, I've published a series of blog posts: