Several years ago (at my age, I now find that precise historical details are a bit vague) I was fairly active politically. I was a signed up party member, I stood for election to the local council (failed to get elected), and beat the streets delivering leaflets and knocking on doors. During one week before a general election, I was part of a team of people that arranged private meetings with each local candidate to quiz them on various issues.
Each of the three meetings I went to was very enjoyable and entertaining, but for entirely different reasons. The sitting Member of Parliament knew he was about to lose his seat and decided to amuse himself by having some fun with us. He suspected he had got nothing to lose by telling us what he really thought, and so he did. He also decided it would be amusing to try to get us drunk, so he kept bringing out more and more wine. We had a very enjoyable and slightly bizarre evening.
The next meeting was with a candidate who knew he didn’t stand a chance of getting elected. He was young and very articulate. Although we asked questions about sensitive issues, he was fearless and passionate in his answers. You may not have agreed with him, but you gained a real sense that he had convictions that he was not ashamed of. He was not saying things we wanted to hear to court votes. Although from a different political party, I left the meeting admiring him.
The third meeting was with the man who was about to regain the seat he had previously lost to the first candidate. He was polite and keen and very nervous. He thought for a long time before answering each question. We all formed the impression that on many issues he would probably have disagreed with us, but he was trying to frame his answers so as not to give too much away. In a way, he came across as a classic “sitting on the fence politician who is trying hard to please everyone and gain votes by keeping his real convictions secret”. We kept pressing him for some sort of clear ground, but to little effect. He lost a lot of my respect.
If I were ever to repeat such a meeting with the third candidate who has been my Member of Parliament for a long time now, I would go armed with a wealth of information gained from a wonderful website I recently discovered - TheyWorkForYou. Such a site would have enabled us to judge what the man was saying to us against his former record in Parliament. Browsing through the site I was reminded how useful the Internet is becoming for political activism in at least two ways.
First, there is now a wealth of uneditorialised information available to inquirers at the press of a key, which would have taken weeks to assemble before, even supposing that people were willing to release it and had the time to provide it. Sites such as TheyWorkForYou make the work of elected representatives much more open to scrutiny. It will be harder for them to say what a particular audience wants to hear, and harder for them to say one thing and vote in another way.
Yesterday, when I spent about twenty minutes looking at what my MP had been up to, I was able to find, without much difficulty:
- how many times he had contributed to parliamentary debates
- what subjects he had spoken on
- what he had actually said (as recorded in Hansard)
- how many times he had signed early day motions and what those motions were
- how he had voted
- what he had declared on the register of members’ interests
- how much his office expenditure had been
And I can even get a daily email report of his activities and words.
All the statistical information about performance was provided with average statistics for all MPs so that an individual could be compared with his or her peers.
Secondly, the Internet has not only opened up information sources, but it has also facilitated access to representatives. Formerly, if you felt strongly about something, you had to sit down, write a letter, and then post it. Now, it is quite common for sites addressing particular issues to have on-line “Email your MP” forms built in. This is resulting in MPs getting more direct contact from their electorate. Because some sites are running league tables about which MPs respond and what their response time is, responses to such emails are going up and the response time is getting faster.
TheyWorkForYou site reports 44% of people who used WriteToThem last year had never written to a politician ever before. The net can connect normal people with the political process, not just extend the power of those already in the know.
I received a free gift yesterday. It was a heavy tome that would have cost me at least £5.00 to buy. I received it from my MP who included a letter thanking me for me recent email. I had contacted him asking him to support the abolition of the blasphemy law in the UK (see Libelling God). He sent me a brief letter stating his agreement with the abolition and the Hansard report of the parliamentary debates for the day in question. I was able to read the full debate and his contribution to it. I was grateful.
I am not sure he would have sent the Hansard report if his views had been different from my own though. I suspect he knew he was safe on this one.
Like you, I emailed my MP on the blasphemy amendment. Unfortunately, the government wimped out and the amendment was withdrawn. According to my MP, the government has promised to reintroduce it, after consultation with the C of E (if it’s consulting them, why isn’t it consulting Muslims, Buddhists, Baha’i and Uncle Tom Cobbly and All?), but I will believe that when it happens.
More on topic, yes, I think online access to facts and figures about, and channels of communication with, our representatives is a very good thing. It needs to be bruited about so that more and more people get to hear of it and to use the facilities.
There is of course a danger that the traffic will increase so much that eventually MPs will not be able to keep up with it and our emails will simply become background noise to be ignored. We will have to wait and see. In the meantime, let’s make hay while the sun shines.
SilverTiger:
I may be wrong about this, but I think that the government is going to consult the C. of E. because technically the tenets of the Church of England are also protected by the blasphemy law. (It was amusing in the debate to see that a former C. of E. curate admit that he didn’t know what the tenets of the C. of E. were, and he suspected that most other people didn’t know either!)
I agree that MPs are likely to get swamped, but I suppose that I suppose 1000 emails on a topic creates a much greater sense of how important a topic is in your constituency than 100 letters. And faced with league tables about MP response rates and times, I am sure that there will be pressure not to ignore the emails. Perhaps the ‘ultimate solution’ is for MPs to have a database that automatically replies to the email with a standard answer relating to the topic in question. I am a sure it will come. When that happens we will have to develop new ways of cutting through the communication barriers. Video texting seems a nice idea for future development.
There are some good web sites in the USA that provide information about members of Congress, etc. They’re very helpful. Before each election, I gather information about candidates and issues, print them and give them to my family members to read. The Internet really can be a useful tool.
Thanks for this information. This will be very handy for me to know, of which I shall discuss seperately with you at some point.
Once again, a very interesting post.