Local Democracy week

Well....
Here I am writing a blog. Not something that I ever thought I’d do! I have often been exhorted to get myself into the blogosphere, “...this is the modern way to reach the electorate...” etc., but I’ve never been convinced. I’m still not, if the truth be told. I know that many of my political colleagues do it, some of them exhaustingly! (Where do they find the time?) But are people really interested in every utterance, opinion, social occasion, when I have a cup of tea or visit the ‘loo (or is that Twitter? I can’t really tell the difference, Rene Kinzett and Peter Black could probably tell me). I know that I am a very interesting person, with a life jam-packed with incident and fascination (I wish), but do you really care? I rather think you don’t – and that’s not simply my innate modesty!
I believe that we politicians tend to take ourselves rather too seriously, we think we’re important (no, we are important, dammit), so you should too! The truth is that we are generally, quite ordinary, normal people doing an extraordinary and unusual job (some more ordinary or extraordinary than others). I suppose that it’s true to say that we don’t feel very loved most of the time. Perhaps that should be the theme of Local Democracy Week – Hug a Councillor! Perhaps by the end of this week – I’ll either be bitten by the blogger bug or I’ll stop doing it to the relief of a grateful nation.
[It really is quite easy to witter on]
This week is quite quiet in meeting terms, so is not especially representative. I have (as at this afternoon) 16 council related appointments this week – and over half of those tomorrow. Generally, it’s nearer twice that. I recently completed a survey on the amount of hours I work as a councillor/Leader of the Labour Party and it was well over 60 a week on average. I am not asking for your sympathy (I do this voluntarily) – but that’s the reality. So I’ve got a week of Planning meetings, tenants associations, Scrutiny Board, Training, school governor meetings, special Council Meeting and the Standards Committee (to talk about democracy!) So I suppose that gives me some time to complete this blog.
Email takes up a lot of time – I get over 50 a day. And the time taken to deal with all of them is considerable – and mostly uncounted. I am still trying to catch up on the backlog that developed from my recent holiday. I’ve got it down to just over 500, but that’s still a long way to go. Are all of these emails necessary – well, no they’re not – but I still have to respond to them. I do think that email can also be quite tyrannical – correspondents have now come to expect instant replies that they wouldn’t with a proper old-fashioned letter. [Erm...I knew that I’d eventually start to sound like an High Court judge or a correspondent to the Daily Telegraph!]
I don’t know whether these blogs can be opened up to contributions – if they can I think I will do it. Besides liking a good argument (in the academic sense), it will give me something to write about/respond to. If it goes well enough, I could get you all (if there is anybody out there) to write it for me!