{"id":1078,"date":"2009-01-14T23:41:04","date_gmt":"2009-01-14T22:41:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/2009\/01\/14\/1078\/"},"modified":"2009-01-14T23:41:04","modified_gmt":"2009-01-14T22:41:04","slug":"council-areas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/council-areas\/","title":{"rendered":"Council areas"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/duncan\/117759742\/\" title=\"photo sharing\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm1.static.flickr.com\/35\/117759742_5ae3d34ed9_m.jpg\" alt=\"\" style=\"border: solid 2px #000000;\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;\"><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/duncan\/117759742\/\">map of scotland<\/a><br \/>\nOriginally uploaded by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/people\/duncan\/\">duncan<\/a><br \/>\n<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<p>The Herald today was full about some ideas they&#8217;ve got about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theherald.co.uk\/news\/news\/display.var.2481485.0.Is_it_time_to_redraw_the_council_map_of_Scotland.php\">redrawing the council area map of Scotland<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Basically, they want to reduce the number from 32 to 10.<\/p>\n<p>However, the resulting councils would still vary wildly in size &ndash; the largest (Greater Glasgow) would be the size of a small country with more than a million inhabitants.<\/p>\n<p>Brian Taylor of the BBC has written some <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/blogs\/thereporters\/briantaylor\/2009\/01\/redrawing_the_boundaries.html\">good comments<\/a>, pointing out that it is necessary to look at the tasks the councils have to perform before it makes sense to decide on how many are needed.<\/p>\n<p>I also think one should be wary of making them too large, or there will suddenly be a demand for a subdivision of them, and all the savings will go out of the window.<\/p>\n<p>I think the best size is one which will make a good democratic unit, in that it has a clear centre, a physical size that makes it possible to attend meetings in one place, and a certain degree of uniformity so that people can agree on priorities.<\/p>\n<p>Because of this, I&#8217;d tend to prefer more councils rather than fewer, perhaps around 100.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>map of scotland Originally uploaded by duncan The Herald today was full about some ideas they&#8217;ve got about redrawing the council area map of Scotland. Basically, they want to reduce the number from 32 to 10. However, the resulting councils would still vary wildly in size &ndash; the largest (Greater Glasgow) would be the size of a small country with more than a million inhabitants. Brian Taylor of the BBC has written some good comments, pointing out that it is necessary to look at the tasks the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,130,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-politics","category-scotland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1078\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}