We did a good job and there’s still room for more additions. I’ve used the excellent wrangl.com to show what we came up with and allow the debate to continue.

Big thanks to John Popham who video the session:

John rather nicely interviewed me about the session as well!

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Via a number of sources including this article I learned that BT is planning a service which offers higher quality delivery service to content providers (such as the BBC with iPlayer).

Although I support the need for companies like BT to charge appropriately for services it’s clear that this service could create the two-tiered internet we fear. I can see two impacts;

1) Companies, such as the BBC, Channel 4, Sky, YouTube etc will be forced into a position whereby in order to maintain the quality of their current service they will have to pay substantial amounts of money to an already profitable BT Group. Sustaining could well mean raising prices, cutting costs (and we all know where..) or cutting the service altogether.

2) What I’m most worried about is the impact on local content. The recent Shott report clearly told the Government that local TV isn’t going to be delivered by 81 or 21 stations through masts, it will be over the web; “In the long-term, local TV looks set to be delivered through IPTV technology; therefore, any steps the Government takes through new regulatory interventions to facilitate local TV should have regard for this…”

Already several local ‘TV’ ‘stations’ have sprung up on the web including in David Cameron’s own constituency of Witney. There are similar efforts in Cornwall, Saddleworth (reporting on the Woolas by-election issue) and I would like to do the same in Lichfield.

I may find that The Lichfield Blog is priced out of providing good quality ‘TV’ services to residents though, thanks to this two-tier level of access to BT’s infrastructure.

For example, who is to decide whether programs from Sky’s on demand service are more important than a Lichfield-made documentary about the contentious HS2 issue or Friarsgate?

I hope you’ll put my argument to the minister responsible but also consider the potential impact on your constituents too.

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Dear Michael Fabricant,

I’m writing to ask for your help with raising two issues around public data within Government.

The first is about the new national address book (background at http://www.communities.gov.uk/news/newsroom/1786564). It makes perfect sense to combine the two, reducing costs for Government and business and is probably long overdue, so that’s great.

I wonder if you could raise it with the Minister concerned that there is no mention of making the new register available as re-usable open data with the ability to create derived data. Francis Maude, Nigel Shadbolt and Tim Berners-Lee are doing an excellent job of trying to make the UK a world leader for open government data. It’d be a shame if this clever move was left out of that.

Secondly, I wanted to raise the issue of how National Rail Enquiries (NRE) and the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) are handling the data around train times. Their policies around licensing the data (information which is essentially public and of great use to train commuters like you and I) is stifling innovation in this area.

They have recently withdrawn the live departure boards web service and requiring anyone wanting to use the data to create useful services to the general public to sign up to disturbingly prohibitive terms. I won’t go into detail as it’s more clearly covered here: http://mbarclay.net/?p=951

I’d appreciate if you could raise the issue with the minister in charge and also with Francis Maude and others mentioned above. I for one would like to provide users of The Lichfield Blog with a live departure board and updates on line closures (like the one we have today) but this step makes that impossible and denies residents a very useful service.

Yours sincerely,

Philip John

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So today, at Austin Court in Birmingham I had the opportunity to put this question directly to the Prime Minister, David Cameron;

With the Big Society empowering charities, private companies and social enterprises to take on public services what are you going to do to ensure that communities themselves can effectively hold those providers to account?

You can watch the whole questioning session in the video at the bottom, with my question and the PM’s answer at 45:55.

David Cameron takes questions in Birmingham

I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the answer, to be honest. I had contemplated adding a bit at the end about Freedom of Information Requests but I decided not to risk pigeon-holing the answer into one area and to see what the PM came up with.

He seemed to say that accountability would come from two places; take up of services and local authority oversight.

Firstly he said that the Government would pay on results and so public service providers would have to get the users to justify the funding suggesting that those providers not doing a good job would lose users and thus funding. The big mental barrier I have with this – and the whole big society idea (which I generally welcome) – is how it works in practice. For example, if Lichfield District Council outsource bin collections to a private company who do a rubbish (‘scuse the pun) job where do I go? Will I actually have a choice of who collects my bins without moving outside the area? What if the schools my nephews go to are taken over by a local charity who do a poorer job? My sisters won’t be able to move to another catchment area for a different school so my nephews will be stuck with a lower standard of education because of where they live and no chance to improve their prospects.

The second was more worrying. “Empowering local government” and making sure they have an overseeing role just sounds very thin to me. There was no mention of how local government would actually oversee those providers and ensure they are accountable to the community. More, that didn’t really answer the question because local government is not the local community and I asked how the community can hold providers to account.

I was hoping he’d go further, but he didn’t. I was hoping to hear that the FoI Act would be expanded to include all public service providers, regardless of sector. It wasn’t forthcoming and I’m still left with the same feeling.

That the Big Society sounds like it could really work. Devolving decision making power and making Government less controlling and more supportive. But it doesn’t feel like the implementation of the idea has been thought through, and I get the sense that too little has gone into thinking about the consequences of what the shift in power could really mean.

At least if central Government is more proselytising we know who to shout out if it goes wrong. If power is in the hands of many though, who do we turn to when we need to question that authority?

I’ll be writing to my MP about this to see if he can shed any more light. In the meantime I’d appreciate your thoughts, too.

Number 10 have taken the video down, sorry.

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Let’s face it, they’ll be no LibLab coalition – they just don’t have the electoral mandate. They’d need too much support from nationalists who would soon drop their support when their primary aims comes up. Neither Brown nor Clegg could ethically claim to be PM and putting in David Milliband or Harriet Harman would prompt “unelected PM” outrage.

So we’ll either have a LibCon coalition or a minority Conservative government, the way I see it.

In order to get a LibCon coalition, though some massive concessions need to be made. Cameron and the Conservatives are desperate for power under a majority Government. Nick Clegg who is showing himself to be a man of massive integrity, holds the keys and probably has more bargaining power.

It seems to me the concessions would mostly have to come from the Conservatives and that would not go down well. To the point where the coalition would either be very shaky or not go ahead at all. If such a coalition fell apart we’d see another general election in which both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats would be punished. We’d probably get a majority Labour government with a landslide victory and the LibDems would go back to being nobodys.

I believe that Nick Clegg should go in tough, sticking to his four campaign priorities as non-negotiables. If the Conservatives don’t concede on electoral reform they will have to form a minority. Clegg’s integrity will be intact and he’ll keep the support of his party as well as those who voted for him (and all those who voted tactically to keep the Tories out).

By the next general election (which may follow the collapse of a Conservative government) we could well have electoral reform and Clegg’s action will likely reward him a much greater share of the vote and push him and the Liberal Democrats into opposition, if not Government.

So, don’t do it Nick – stick to your guns, let’s get electoral reform!

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Let’s put this vote in context first of all. In Lichfield, we’ve had Michael Fabricant as our MP since the constituency was re-established in 1997 and before that as MP for Mid Staffordshiresince 1992. I have no doubt that he’ll get re-elected and, where it concerns Lichfield, I’m quite glad – he’s a good MP.

So why vote Liberal Democrat?

I first took a proper interest in politics during the 1997 general election campaign. I wanted Tony Blair to win. He’d managed to impress a 12-year-old boy, six years away from being able to vote that he was the man and Labour were the ones to run the country. Of course my judgement back then was probably based on very little! 8 years later, aged 20 and feeling let down I voted Liberal Democrats. By this time I had become convinced that the electoral system was flawed and needed changing with Lib Dems, despite my euro-skepticism, looking the obvious choice.

Probably the biggest realisation for me came when I was pointed in the direction of a little-known piece of draft legislation called the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. In short, it was intended to cut down on unecessary regulation with ease but it was so poorly drafted that it gave ministers far too much power, including the ability to repeal legislation and create new criminal offences without Parliamentary scrutiny. In response, I started a blog and soon joined forces with another campaigner and together we formed the Save Parliament campaign. We were soon joined by some very clever and influential people and the grass-roots campaign, which gathered much attention, succeeded in lobbying MPs enough to get the bill watered down to a point we were reasonably satisfied with.

I saw exactly the same situation with the Digital Economy Bill recently. Poorly drafted and rushed through. What annoyed me most about both these pieces of legislation was how it moved through the Commons. After a few MPs debate in the house, all of a sudden floods of them pour in to vote. Having not taken part in the debate they are instructed which way to vote by the party whips. This is how a majority Government can push through legislation, by flooding the Commons with MPs who presumably don’t really know the details of what they’re voting on.

“Strong government”

Which brings me nicely onto what David Cameron has been saying about electoral reform. He says that getting rid of First Past the Post (the system that could gives this abomination of a result) would be a “big, big mistake”. He also says it “delivers strong government” and what he means by that is a majority government that can, once it is in power, do pretty much do whatever the hell they like. Providing they don’t land themselves with too many ‘rebel’ MPs – the whips just load the commons with enough MPs voting the ‘right’ way.

FPTP “delivers strong gov’t” says Cameron. No, it’s a winner-takes-all system which means the party that wins gets to control everything, despite the majority of the electorate (at least in the case of the 2005 election) having not voted for them. The result of the election may well be decided by around 100 seats – those ‘key marginals that we here so much about – that’s 16.7% of the electorate deciding the outcome when 100% should be assured that their vote will count.

Cameron also says FPTP delivers “clear results”. Except that I’m fully expecting a hung Parliament which will go some way to showing that simply isn’t the case. If anything, FPTP is a great system for showing politicians (as I believe it will tomorrow) when none of them have a clear mandate and need to work together to find the answer.

This suggestion that the Lib Dems are simply being idealistic because they have no chance of getting in power is ludicrous. Time and time again we are given promises by election campaigns promising electoral reform and referenda on contentious issues like Europe yet we are repeatedly disappointed. The Conservatives are presenting us with this idealistic interpretation of society while Labour struggle to regain our vote after attempting to deliver on a vision of a Government that provides for society but in the end has only embedded bureaucracy into almost every aspect of our lives.

What the Liberal Democrats are offering is a more sober, pro-active Government. Not the reactive left versus right playground politics that we so often get. They don’t offer majority government (and damn good thing, in my opinion) but to shake up the commons and force MPs to reach consensus. What that means is the three main parties will need to work together to find solutions, and the outcome of that should be that they are mature enough to reach a solution that they are all comfortable with but probably one that none of them had previously considered – the one that delivers the best for the country, not what they think is the best.

Oh and yeah, we may get a collapse of Government and another general election within a year but so long as we get electoral reform, I say bring it on!

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Like many voters, I think, I’m fed up of the playground politics that we often see. By that I mean politicians just attacking each other. Providing nothing meaningful in terms of solutions to the problems faced by the country or individuals, or focusing on policy. I believe the primary reason why Nick Clegg performed so well in the first leader’s debate is because he focused far more on re-iterating Liberal policy while Cameron and Brown attacked each other.

The polls were clear; as voters we are tired of playground politics. We don’t want you to be saying “don’t vote for the opposition, they’ll do A, B and C” – we want to hear “vote for us because we’ll do X, Y and Z.” In fact, I kind of don’t mind if candidates attack each other so long as they attack policy and then follow it up by telling us what their own policy is on the same issue.

It’s not hard, we just want to know what candidates stand for and what we can expect from them if they become our MP.

So with those basic principles in mind I decided to do a (very unscientific) sentiment analysis of Fabricant’s tweets since he ceased being an MP and became a candidate.

Of 47 tweets since 12th April I found that while 13 (28%) were positive a slightly higher number, 15 (32%) were negative. The rest (19 – 40%) were neutral.

I’ve copied them all into a spreadsheet which you can all see and scrutinise to your hearts content, and I encourage you to do so.

There was no rigid rule set about what is and isn’t positive or negative and in some cases I’ve even asked for clarification from you as to whether I got it right as well as explaining in some cases why I chose the sentiment I did. I’d appreciate your thoughts and feedback in the comments below.

What it showed me personally was that, overall, Mike’s tweets ain’t that bad. Some of the negative tweets could have easily become positives if followed up with “…but Conservatives would do X” to show the difference in the main parties and hence the choice we have.

I should also point out that as an MP, Fabricant had some very good moments. Especially (and dear to my heart) the tweeting he did during the passing of the Digital Economy Bill.

So, what do you think?

Update: Michael said to me on Twitter, “Oh get real! Detailed policy in 140 chars? Go to www.conservatives.com for detailed policy.” so it makes sense I give an example of what I would like (not detailed policy!) This tweet attacking Nick Clegg could have been followed up with something like, “Conservative gov’t would introduce Privilege Act to stop that happening. See manifesto p66 http://bit.ly/aR9PfA [pdf]” – that’s 117 characters that says “vote for me and I’ll do something about such abuses.”

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I do agree with the majority but I wanted to share the comments I added when I signed up to the Pledge.

I support the POWER Pledge because it represents a true grassroots desire from the people of Britain to change politics in this country. It gives Government the opportunity to welcome the desire of the people to be actively engaged in British politics at a time when voter apathy is such a huge concern.

I don’t agree that an elected second chamber will necessarily make a difference to the effectiveness of Parliament but welcome negotiation in Parliament on a possible solution, resulting in a referendum.

I am also unconvinced also that restricting votes on ‘English’ laws to ‘English MPs’ is a right course of action. Rather, the country as a whole should be guided by correct principles as part of a written constitution that ensures at a local level that the majority rules.

See the POWER 2010 Pledge for yourself.

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The plugin adds a new widget which your blog readers can use to get in touch with their politicians from councillors to MEPs. There’s a demo video and instructions on how to set up over on the Talk About Local blog.

You can download the plugin now and subscribe for future updates.

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For this first version the plugin creates a single widget which shows the latest activity for your MP. I hope to add more in the future and if you have any suggestions, please add them to the comments below.

I made a demo video and wrote instructions on how to set the plugin up which have been posted over on the Talk About Local blog, as well as instructions on installing the plugin.

All that’s left to do now is download the plugin (ZIP).

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