When I was an MP (nearly ten years ago now), my main line of communication to my constituents was via the very vibrant local Cornish press. I would issue a press release saying what I had done, with a quote from me, and a local journalist would then find a quote from someone else on the same issue and write a story around the two points of view. If I was lucky, the paper might just print the release unedited and unsupplemented with anyone else’s response!
Now things are quite different. Twitter is hugely important to MPs and candidates, and increasingly constituents expect instantaneous direct communication through this and other social media. As Lord Norton of Louth has recorded here, MPs’ mailbags are getting lighter but their email inboxes (and those of Peers) are getting more and more bloated.
In the main these are great advances for democracy. The elected are challenged daily and immediately by the electors. Points of view unmediated by journalists, can be presented direct to those who will choose between perspectives when they vote. Yet this new era of immediate, often very short-hand communication presents a challenge to our democracy too.
Edmund Burke said of representation “it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention.” Digital democracy lends itself very happily to that, nearly 240 years later. What is more difficult is his contention (and mine) that “government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men [people!] deliberate, and another decide.”
Having worked on the Transparency Bill since July last year, I am now particularly familiar with the dichotomy between quick-fire messaging at the institution of Parliament (see Tuesday’s full page, 73 word appeal to Peers in national newspapers) and the detail of the debates within the two Houses.
What has frustrated me is not that we have had disagreements of fact with those opposing the Bill, but that the nature of the campaigning about it has been so polarising. Digital democracy usually refers to the power of technology to empower citizens and to link them to their representatives. But it can also take on the other meaning of digital: to turn something complex into something binary.
I received an email from one of the campaigners yesterday recording that the defeat of two quite technical amendments to the Bill (one of which simply didn’t work, whatever the arguments of principle) represented “losing the vote on the gagging law”. This is totally inaccurate not least because the votes were not on the law itself but only on two remaining points of detail.
None of these very polarised statements is representative of the very constructive relationship that Ministers, MPs and Peers alike have built up with the groups who were concerned by the Bill. Yet when this process is packaged up as a 200 word email to two million people, all the genuine process of dialogue is lost in one binary shriek. I do not expect the Bill’s detractors to dance in the streets, but it is counterproductive and damaging to their cause to pretend that the campaigns have been ignored. The Bill has after all changed substantially during its passage through Parliament.
I know that my MP colleagues work very hard to keep up with their Twitter and their email correspondence. In return for these efforts, it seems only right that those leading campaigns on issues, and particularly about complex legislation, actually acknowledge what they achieve. Without that two-way street, the risk is that digital democracy becomes a dialogue of the deaf. This would merely reinforce a negative impression among citizens that campaigns don’t get anywhere. In fact the public, through modern communication, is more potent in its influence over Parliament than ever before.
to turn something complex into something binary.
No less complex just more lengthy, and infinitely easier to transmit, and translate.
The real meaning of digital democracy seems to be lost on 999% of people who use the term. To me it means VOTING online, and with a pinsentry distributed to every man jack and womanjill in the country, when they are of voting age.
RANDOM security means total security.
On a slightly different topic, the NO votes of referend-ums, are so frequent, I wonder whether somebody will come up with the bright idea of asking a negative question so that the answer comes out from the plebiscite of
YES! most of whom are unable to distinguish a double negative when they hear one.
“Should we not have an English legislature?”
An instant NO from everybody because it is a referendum, therefore
the plebiscite has decided to have an English legislature.
All this of course done with a randomly secure pin sentry gadget and internet voting.
Have you considered that Parliaments Royal House serves a form of democracy that has been lost to the Commons? When you quote wisdom from a bygone era both houses had dignity and independence. Parliament gave the electorate no political reason to veto or distance itself from democracy as it does now.
The members of the House of Lords for historical reasons are not allowed to vote in General Elections. But in 1911 the House of Lords acquired a political reason not to participate.
In the Commons there are good MPs’ and there are outstanding MPs’.
The parties cannot rely entirely on very ordinary people like you representing constituencies because governments require specific skills and expertise for ministerial posts. Again, we have good ministers and we have outstanding ministers.
The House of Lords serves with dignity and knowing the value of their counterparts in the Commons and how its members rely upon their £66,396 soon to be £74,000 annual salary, raising family and funding house and home, how with dignity could such a house participate in an electoral process that prospectively would see the ruin and bankruptcy of the very people they hold in such high regard.
This is the politics of House of Lords non participation in the democracy of General Elections; a noble cause.
To say that the electorate places no value on what MPs’ do in Parliament would be a total lie. They value their work just as much as the House of Lords. But they have a problem: knowing how difficult well paid work is to find, how could right minded, honourable people engage with a form of democracy that would prospectively ruin those that serve the nation so well in Parliament.
Parliament thus affords both young and old alike a political reason for voters to abandon the democratic process. After all, where is an MP, a very ordinary person to find a job paying £74,000 pounds a year after they have left Parliament?
Those that return members to the Commons time and time again are neither afforded the dignity nor the independence of Parliament’s Royal House. They return them not because of democracy but out of a misplaced loyalty that wishes to avoid a conflict of interest between dignity and honour.
Voters deserve both the dignity and independence of a traditional English democracy. The very thing enjoyed by the House of Lords.