Link: Brum deal: A second city with a third-rate reputation

They point out that there are some great things about this city:

• The Cotswolds aren’t far away
• High speed rail may soon allow us to get to London in 49mins

Um… thanks. To be fair there were shout outs to the BRB and CBSO massives too.

Features quotes from Siôn Simon, Adrian Goldberg, Clare Short, Helga Henry, Khalid Mahmood and Trevor Beattie.

Building it up

I like this from Si Jobling (one of Multipack‘s founders). He’s miffed that the Midlands are often overlooked when people talk about the Web industry in the UK, so:

Throughout the Summer months, I’ll be visiting a variety of design/Web/creative agencies around the West Midlands as part of a Design Tour of The Midlands to promote agencies in the region and find out how they work.

Knocking it down

Literally.

• Ed Vaizey (Conservative)
• Siôn Simon (Labour)
• Lord Clement-Jones (Lib Dem)
• Marc Reeves (TheBusinessDesk.com)

Journalist, broadcaster and author, Rosie Millard will chair the debate.

The politicians on the panel are, or have until recently been, party spokespeople for arts and culture. Marc Reeves has recently advised DCMS on new models of independent news provision. They’re all busy people at the moment so pinning them down can’t have been easy.

What would you want to see them asked? How far spending cuts are going to go? Whether encouraging philanthropy is going to help anyone other than large venues? What the heck they were thinking with the Digital Economy Act?

You can watch follow the debate on CiB below and chip in with any thoughts or comments as we go along. The liveblog has a page of its own here too.