The Wardman Wire

I’m back!
After a long break from the blogging world, I am back from today with my weekly column and, no doubt, the occasional rant here and there…
Is the tide turning?
The winter months have shown some stability in the polls with the Tories seeming to maintain a solid double figure lead. However, as with the [...]

“Oh, the cleverness of me” is, of course, a quotation from that exemplar of immature arrogance, Peter Pan, who really can’t quite cope with emotions, and endlessly defers the complexity of growing up. It struck me looking at this extraordinary piece in the (London) Times, that it’s remarkably appropriate as a summary of so much Dawkins.

Back on 11 March 2008, Tom Watson, then a Parliamentary Secretary at the Cabinet Office with a special interest in Digital Media, consulted on his blog to create a set of guidelines for Civil Servants who were active online. Tom’s original post is here – note especially the conversation in the comments.

For newcomers, it will give you a bit of an idea about how blogs work to know that this came a few days after the “Civil Serf Incident”, when an anonymous blogger writing an unauthorised blog about frustrations with the civil service firstly hit the national papers, then deleted the blog (on 8-9 March 2008) to dodge the subsequent “investigation”. In a further blogger style act, Simon Dickson put an account of the incident back at the location from where the Civil Serf site had vanished, here.

There followed debate by a range of bloggers (samples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), and subsequently the code appended to this article was published. Tom’s code was treated as an extension of the existing Civil Service Code specifically for the online environment. The approach was what I call “principles based” rather than “practice based” – in short, asking Civil Servants to “behave like this” rather than “do these things“. It would fit on a single sheet of paper, and was exactly 379 words long.

The reason I’m posting about this now is that the bodies which run the Methodist Church in the UK are creating a similar code for their employees, Methodist Ministers – of whom there are around 3000-3500, and members active online, and there’s a debate going on amongst Methodist Bloggers. This debate has been triggered by Pete Philips, who blogs at Postmodern Bible, with contributions by – amongst others – connexions, Fat Prophet, Steve Jones, Big Circumstance and Methodist Preacher. I’ll aim blog about the Methodist process next week, but in short some people – and I agree with this approach – prefer a shorter document that follows the Civil Service approach.

So I thought I would revisit the Civil Service Guidelines, and see whether they had been effective. I was interested to see whether a single page code had worked well across such a large and diverse organisation.

Our marriage preparation course starts in a couple of weeks time, so I’m a bit more tuned into political debates on the family and family support than normal. Yesterday the Conservatives published their ‘Draft Manifesto on the Family’. That’s not quite as grand as it sounds – a 4-page excerpt from their draft manifesto, which is been released in bite-sized chunks on what seems like a daily basis.

Here is what I understand to be the aspirations, and concrete Conservative policies, for families.