Citizens’ Charter dot com?  

Remember John Major's Citizens' Charter initiative?  An attempt to empower people against the vast, faceless bureaucratic state, you'd be forgiven for not even being aware of it at the time it was launched in the early 1990s. Today the Coalition outlined plans to "radically decentralise power".  How are today's plans so different from what we saw twenty years ago?   While John Major relied on telephone "hot lines" to keep officials on their toes, today the government wants to use the power of on-line.  There will be a website so we can all peer upward as Sir Humphrey is measured according to his own yardstick. Gosh.  That's the transparency box ticked. To make sure that there's accountability, each Whitehall department is now going to produce a monthly progress report - and the secretary of state "will have to account to the...