2009/10/6 Philip Potter <[email protected]>: > > I can see the argument for eg a civil servant. Civil servants are > supposed to be apolitical; they advise their political masters through > their jobs; they are paid from the public purse to do this job. If > they were to advise an opposition party, they would be seen to be > political in this action, and if they did it on public paid time, it > would surely be wrong and a disciplinary matter.
Interesting point and one I profoundly disagree with (which may explain some of the difference). In my view opposition parties ought to be getting advice from civil servants and if they did they'd be doing the job of opposition much better and as a result government would be higher quality. One roll that I think My Society fulfills is exactly that: to supply those opposing government (whoever they may be) with better tools for holding government to account than they are given by the government. My understanding is that some democratic states do exactly this. Obviously if I would be happy with civil servants advising the Tories I'm going to be much less worried about Tom doing so. > > However, AFAIK Tom is not a civil servant; he is not being paid by the > Tories (and so has no immediate financial interest in seeing the > Tories win), and frankly, although one can infer that the Tories may > have more influence over Tom than they did before, I think it is more > important that they get good, sane IT advice than it is that Tom be > protected from ever meeting a politician. Agreed. > Sadly, this is clearly not the case. I know people who would always > hate on a Labour/Tory/Lib dem government no matter what they did. (See > Obama in the US for a prominent example.) That would be a pity but one would hope that those of good will and intelligence (on this list for example) would not think that way. -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
