"Wasteful, not environmentally friendly...

...and no longer relevant" That's what (Tory) councillor Gordon Buchan said in his 2011 motion to ban election lamp-post posters in Edinburgh. Despite concerns about the impact on local democracy raised by Labour and the Greens the motion passed with support from the SNP and Lib Dems and as a result we no longer have election posters up in the week before an election. Impossible to quantify but I suspect it doesn't help the turnout, especially in local elections which get little attention in the media.
 
Contrast the mess of posters across the city centre during August. If it was a problem for a week at election times, why isn't it a problem for more than a month in the summer?
 
On my way to a summer Soc Cafe at the new Futures Institute. We discussed the value of keeping functionally useless objects for sentimental reasons, whether the crackdown had stopped the riots and if Led by Donkeys were fair to publicly ridicule Liz Truss recently.