Friday 11 02 2011

Heading down to Bradford this weekend to visit family and somewhat belatedly celebrate a birthday. Hopefully a pleasant weekend, spiced with the Manchester Derby on Saturday, will also involve sampling a Curry from our favourite restaurant Eastern Spice.

Doubtless we will raise a glass to multi-culturalism as we eat.

Bradford is also an interesting reminder of the history of that man currently in the news, The Right Honorable Eric Pickles.

Eric Pickles was of course leader of Bradford City Council. It is interesting to remind yourself of the controversy surrounding him in Bradford before he left having been elected as a Conservative MP.

Wikipedia offers a short biography of Pickles:

Served as leader of the Conservative group on the council ..... after .... the Conservative Party gained control by using the Conservative mayor's casting vote to become the only inner-city council to be controlled by the Conservatives.

Whilst at Bradford, Pickles announced a ..... controversial ..... five-year plan to cut the council's budget by £50m, reduce the workforce by a third, privatise services and undertake council departmental restructures.

Wikipedia cites Tony Grogan's book The Pickles Papers which was written about this period in Pickles's life.

It is interesting to notice how the Bradford experiment appears to have informed the approach that he and this Tory led Government has adopted with regard to the future funding of local authorities.

Apparently Twitter and facebook are now being seen as public forum's and therefore presumably anything published is subject to the same legal constraints as any other publication in Newspapers and magazines.

Rather than being afraid of this recently reported ruling it is perhaps useful to reflect on how it coud help facebook to take a new role in the public discourse about the kind of society we want to become.

Both facebook and to a lesser extent twitter have become in recent times the 21st century equivalent of the 'public square', the place and the forum where ideas can be debated and the public discourse progressed. If that is right then it is essential that the discourse is conducted in a civilised and courteous manner.

But it is also essential that much valued and dearly held beliefs are robustly defended.

So I will journey to Bradford with the sense that it is a rare privilege to be living in a multi-cultural society, which is a part of Europe and is one in which the weakest and least privileged are defended and respected as fellow citizens.

In 1985 I returned from a semester in Cambridge, Mass., and journeyed to Yorkshire to visit a friend. Turning off the AI towards Doncaster I was stopped by the police and questioned about the purpose of my journey, my destination and who I was visiting.

Hopefully today's journey will be without incident.