Do good on the web

September 6, 2004 6:01 PM

Downing Street Says. 'Every day the British Prime Minister's official spokesman briefs a small coterie of political journalists'. This site feeds you summaries and lets you comment. (It's amazing what you can do with a quarter of a £mill chucked at you by John Prescott)

Other related worthy web projects: liftshare.com, timebank.org.uk, publicwhip.org.uk. And they want to 'identify, support and develop internet based projects that have real world impacts at very low cost per person helped'.
posted by iffley (7 comments total)

what's the deal with this Anti-Social Behavior thing?
posted by amberglow at 9:12 PM on September 6, 2004

Anti-social behaviour orders are 'aimed at tackling serious, persistent but relatively low-level disorder that can blight communities'. Problem: what to do about yobs who make a nuisance of themselves, but aren't doing anything you can lock them away for. Answer: make their lives a nuisance, in the hope it'll shock them out of their habits (or at the very least, give their victims respite).

To New Labour's enemies, it's a sign of the creeping nanny state: the measures are effectively imposed by police and local government outside the normal 'arrest-trial-verdict-sentence' cycle (although each ruling is run past a civil court). On the other hand, they make life liveable again for many law-abiding people who've had their lives made a misery. And I've heard anecdotal evidence that some completely disfunctional familes can receive a much-needed jolt away from the path of sociopathy.
posted by iffley at 11:42 PM on September 6, 2004

The comments are funny, considering it's about anti-social behavior.
posted by johnny novak at 12:43 AM on September 7, 2004

Well, why not call the cops on the people and give them tickets? You need new laws? Where do the people go?
posted by amberglow at 5:45 AM on September 7, 2004

lol - THAT comments exchange is PURE CLASS!
posted by benzo8 at 5:50 AM on September 7, 2004

There's a Welsh equivalent of the Downing Street site: Assembly Online. No Welsh language version yet (though it seems there's no shortage of volunteers to do the translating) so I assume they're not getting any govt. funding.

No posts since July, either.

This blog is a bit livelier, and at long last there are politically charged Welsh language blogs starting to appear.

(Sorry, a bit off topic, except for the first bit.)
posted by ceiriog at 9:25 AM on September 7, 2004

george dutton appears to be barking mad. Good to see that every site has its fruitcakes...
posted by dmt at 6:21 PM on September 9, 2004