Tag: local government
Dear Rowan, dear Laura
What sort of country do we want Wales to be in future? Rowan Williams and Laura McAllister have recently invited us to answer that question. They are the joint chairs of the Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales, a group set up in 2021 by the Welsh Government to come up with options […]
Cardiff libraries: a Council dispossesses its people
Cardiff is a thriving place. Big new developments are announced almost monthly. Recent ones include the new BBC Cymru Wales building near the station, the electrification of the Valleys railway lines and the massive Embankment complex. But while the Council pours resources into stimulating and supporting commercial growth, it leaves some of its basic public […]
Weddings, town halls and local democracy
Last weekend our daughter Catrin got married, in Islington Town Hall. It was a fine choice for a wedding. The Town Hall is a large neoclassical building facing the main street, opened in the mid-1920s. The exterior is plain and conventional enough, though its unusually large, long windows suggest an open and welcoming attitude. It’s […]
Is it true that public services can’t cooperate?
Richard Sennett’s Together: the rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation (2012) is one of those books that’s so full of acute observations, surprising examples and novel connections that it stays long in the memory and sparks all kinds of thoughts, months after an initial reading. Sennett is a distinguished US ethnographer, but part of the […]