Hi Good luck with this one. A few comments:
1. I wrote to my MP about the digital economy bill and received a very prompt but standard reply from my Tory MP (Sir George Young) by post, mainly pointing out there were some inaccurate rumours and the bill was being rushed, but not responding to whether he supported the principles or not. So I would suggest that as best practice every communication from an MP should end with a statement whether they currently support or do not support the issue in question. Saying 'this is very important .... ' is worthless - I just need to know the yes / no answer 2. as best practice, if communication is received by email it should be responded to by email. My letter was two pages on thick paper, so I almost felt guilty at the cost to the environment of my registering a view 3. the attendance was stupidly low. Why is there not a principle that: a) MPs must register their vote electronically; b) they should record a vote for at least 80% (or a significant number) of the bills each quarter; c) bills can only be recorded as voted for if 90% of the votes have been recorded (i.e. a majority of 1 is fine, providing most of the MPs registered a vote); d) the public can pre-register their votes electronically, so there would be stats available comparing the MPs vote with their constituents' preferences. 4. there should be a simple summary available for each bill that shows: registered conflicts of interest; who proposed it; timescales; core bill objective; core points; voting records of each MP and (when available) public views by constituency 5. it should be stated govt' policy that all publicly-funded organisations store their data in open standard formats IMO the party system is fundamentally flawed as it casts aside local views. Note the public leaders debate which is useless to me because none of those three will be on my voting slip. So should I listen to their views or my local candidate's ones? Hope this gives something geek-related to go on. Any more, I'm happy off-topic. Cheers Ed
-- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
