Keep up to date with the latest news and events from around the department and the wide-ranging projects our staff and students get involved with.
More news throughout the School of Government and Society
Latest news
- Description
- One thing about the BBC that really irritates me - up there with its inane Diamond Jubilee reporting, expensively inept management, and the Today programme's 'Thought for the Day' – is its pathetic practice of basing programmes on what it claims are new, exclusively revealed and/or cunningly researched data, when in fact they are nothing of the kind. Written by Chris Game
- Date:
- Monday 7th January 2013
- Description
- Earlier this month, a group from the Birmingham Social Inclusion Process (People Key Line of Inquiry) held a one day workshop with representatives from across the voluntary and community sectors in the city, to explore the notion of 'welcome'. As part of its Social Inclusion Inquiry (Giving Hope, Changing Lives), the partnership is considering options for making local communities more welcoming to new entrants (anyone moving into a neighbourhood), in a drive to improve levels of social inclusion. Written by Katherine Tonkiss
- Date:
- Tuesday 18th December 2012
- Description
- The ultimate Zombie Idea of Local Government lives on in the West of England but will budgetary and party political challenges spell an end for the directly elected mayoral model? Written by Thom Oliver
- Date:
- Friday 14th December 2012
- Description
- Students from the UK and around the world will have free access to some of the country's top universities thanks to FutureLearn Ltd, an entirely new company being launched by The Open University (OU). The universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, East Anglia, Exeter, King's College London, Lancaster, Leeds, Southampton, St Andrews and Warwick have all signed up to join FutureLearn.
- Date:
- Friday 14th December 2012
- Description
- The University of Birmingham's China Institute celebrates its official opening today in the presence of His Excellency Mr Liu Xiaoming, Ambassador of the People's Republic of China to the UK.
- Date:
- Friday 14th December 2012
- Description
- The University of Birmingham is now accepting nominations for ESRC funding starting in October 2013. The University of Birmingham ESRC Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) is one of 21 across the UK that has been accredited by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
- Date:
- Wednesday 12th December 2012
- Description
- In her recent blog on financially distressed councils in general and West Somerset DC in particular, Catherine Staite suggested that we should be talking more about "streamlining the machinery of local government … merging smaller councils", and in effect institutionalising some of the multiplying numbers of apparently cost-saving shared service and shared staffing arrangements. Written by Chris Game
- Date:
- Wednesday 12th December 2012
- Description
- Is there an ideal electorate system? As a recent Birmingham Brief demonstrated, we are often faced with a simple binary choice: do we want 'strong government' which can claim an empowering mandate, or do we want a government that represents, however messily, 'the will of the people'? If we want the former, in the UK at least, we have persisted with a first-past-the-post system. From time-to-time, though, we have had a dark night of the soul, wondered at the fairness of governments' claiming a mandate from a minority of voters actually supporting them, and flirted with alternatives.
- Date:
- Tuesday 11th December 2012
- Description
- Ahead of the government's Autumn Statement on Wednesday December 5, we ask six leading academics what they hope will be included and what the impact might be for everything from business and manufacturing to the high street and personal wealth.
- Date:
- Tuesday 4th December 2012
- Description
- Last month West Somerset District Council sent up a distress flare. They can't make ends meet and it is only going to get worse. At the other end of the scale, the Leader of Birmingham City Council has announced £600m of cuts and declared that the changes which are coming will be 'the end of local government as we know it'. LB Barnet's 'graph of doom' demonstrates how rising social care costs will eat up their resources until there is no capacity to do anything else but social care and emptying the dustbins. Written by Catherine Staite.
- Date:
- Tuesday 4th December 2012