There's a general election on and you haven't blogged about it?  What's going on?!

Well, that's been intentional (of course).  We don't see the involvement agenda as party political per se.  And we have consistently recognised that involvement and democracy are a curious mix - to paraphrase some of the reaction to announcements this week - 'why do I need to get involved when we have elected politicians in Whitehall/Westminster/The Civic Hall?'.  And that would be to illustrate why we have broken our silence now....

There is no mistaking that the word involvement is on a well-thumbed page in the political lexicon just now - but its a page which is well-thumbed because lots of different meanings are being applied.  The Tory Manifesto published this week talks of using citizen control, from a base in the concept they call 'Big Society', as an alternative to local or national government or its agencies running those services, not integrated with those systems.  The Labour Manifesto uses the work 'involvement' four times (in relation to inputs to housing, professional sports (football) clubs, National Lottery decision-making, and social enterprise development), so some sort of concept is alive there, but as you can see the spread is wide and the meaning unclear.  The Lib Dems are also on the trail, with elected Health and Police Boards -again, the emphasis is on substituting control and accountability mechanisms for the few, not on integrated forms of governance and true engagement, and in a select few services.

We welcome the focus given by the political roadshow of the moment to the involvement agenda.  But it's a focus defined in 'their' terms not 'ours'.