Politics

6 days to stop MPs concealing their expenses

A quick repost of an important message on the MySociety blog:

Uh oh.  Ministers are about to conceal MPs’ expenses, even though the public hasjust paid £1m to get them all ready for publication, and even though the tax man expects citizens to do what MPs don’t have to. They buried the news on the day of the Heathrow runway announcement. This is heading in the diametric wrong direction from government openness.

You can help in the following three ways:

1. Please write to your MP about this www.WriteToThem.com – ask them to lobby against this concealment, and tell them that TheyWorkForYou will be permanently and prominently noting those MPs who took the opportunity to fight against this regressive move. The millions of constituents who will check this site before the next election will doutbtless be interested.

2. Join this facebook group and invite all your least political friends (plus your most political too). Send them personal mails, phone or text them. Encourage them to write to their politicians too.

3. Write to your local paper to tell them you’re angry, and ask them to ask their readers to do the above. mySociety’s never-finished site http://news.mysociety.orgmight be able to help you here.

NB. mySociety is strictly non-partisan, by mission and by ethics. However, when it looks like Parliament is about to take a huge step in the wrong direction on transparency, we’ve no problem at all with stepping up when changes happen that threaten both the public interest and the ongoing value of sites like TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow.

I’ve sent an email via WriteToThem to my local MP, James Plaice. Here’s the text I sent (mainly copied and pasted from other sources) – feel free to re-use it for your efforts:

I am writing to express my concern at the recent decision to conceal the details of MPs’ expenses. I do not understand why it is necessary for MP’s to be the only paid public officials who will not have to disclose the full details of their expenses and allowances.

After all, members of the Scottish Parliament have to declare all oftheir expenses – why does the British Parliament need to be different?

As my local MP, I hope you will be lobbying against this concealment and that you will also be of those enlightened MPs who, knowing that they have nothing to hide, are willing to publish the full details of their expenses anyway.

Blogpolitic

Oliver Kamm in The Guardian:

In its paucity of coverage and predictability of conclusions, the blogosphere provides a parody of democratic deliberation. But it gets worse. Politics, wrote the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, is a conversation, not an argument. The conversation bloggers have with their readers is more like an echo chamber, in which conclusions are pre-specified and targets selected. The outcome is horrifying. The intention of drawing readers into the conversation by means of a facility for adding comments results in an immense volume of abusive material directed – and recorded for posterity – at public figures.

The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted – overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.

A remarkable view for a political blogger to hold, unless Mr Kamm considers himself a Proper Journalist these days.

It’s early days yet. Political blogging has only really taken off in the last couple of years in the UK. Sure, much of it is unbearably negative and full of inaccuracies, but the same could be said of pamphleteering.

Just because some political blogs aren’t particularly edifying, it doesn’t make the blog format a Bad Thing. In time, some balance will be restored, and as always, the quality will float to the top.

In the meantime, we will just have to trust ourselves to be able to distinguish between fact and fiction.

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Open Source Politics

Great article from David Wilcox:

Does it matter whether politicians who talk up the Internet’s potential for re-inventing politics, education, employment actually use it hands-on for the purposes they present, and join in? Or should we just be grateful if they have a good script from their researchers, have met the right people, and can engage in sensible conversation about social networking? What coverage do they get with that good script, but no online presence?

LibDems launch Manifesto Conversation

The BBC points out a new site the Liberal Democrats have set up to discuss their manifesto for the next election.

MP Steve Webb, running the web-based project, said it would help frame “detailed policy”, but that the party would retain its core principles.

Subjects discussed so far include whether to scrap short prison sentences and how to reform inheritance tax.

Members of all parties were “fed up with being taken for granted”, said Mr Webb, who is writing the manifesto.

The Liberal Democrat Manifesto Consultation site is open to the 67,000 party members, with 20,000 being emailed this week.

The aim is to produce an online manifesto at least several months before the next general election, which has to take place by 2010.

Even better – the site is running WordPress!

[tags]liberal democrats, manifesto, steve webb, wordpress[/tags]

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