Interest in politics is often confined to those “big” political events around elections, and major votes or decisions. This unfortunately means that both MP’s and the electorate don’t pay much all that much attention to each other outside of those periods, beyond what they’re required to do. Bumbling through a few constituency surgery’s is certainly good, but the electorate who don’t have pressing matters also need to remain properly vocal about what matters to them, to ensure we have a functioning democracy at all times.
The mysociety.org project has a new – and as usual brilliantly executed – effort, the Your Constituency Mailing List, which aims to encourage MP’s to explain what they are up to, and enable an open and informative forum of debate to be opened with their constituents, through e-mail. The clever bit is that as more and more people sign up from a particular constituency, the folk behind the system will notify the MP that there is a growing queue of interested, and engaged, constituents. 100 people is easy, perhaps, to ignore, but as it approaches 200, 300, 400 then 500, it’d be a resolute MP in a very safe seat who’d ignore it.
So, the more people who sign up, the more pressure for MP’s to publicly and openly justify what they do with their time, and engage with their electorate.
It’s another remarkable project from mysociety, so it’d be great to see a wider take-up to ensure our MP’s are kept honest and truly represent their constituents, rather than following the party line all the time.
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