Tuesday 22 December 2009

Voting begins in our 'Britain's Best MP' Campaign

by Keith

At the beginning of December, we started our 'Britain's Best MP' Campaign. The thinking behind it was to highlight that, despite all the negative press surrounding politics, there are MPs out there who genuinely do a good job for the UK.

We asked users of our website to send in their nominations for Best MP and to send us the questions they would like to put to the nominees. All eight nominated MPs agreed to answer and you can compare what they said on our home page now and cast your vote in our Poll, which will be ‘live’ until the 31st December.

These are the MPs you nominated.

Douglas Carswell (Con Harwich), Lynne Featherstone (Lib Dem Hornsey and Wood Green), Tom Harris (Lab Glasgow South), David Howarth (Lib Dem Cambridge) Chris Mullin (Lab Sunderland South) Bob Russell (Lib Dem Colchester), Gisela Stuart (Lab Birmingham Edgbaston), and Jo Swinson (Lib Dem East Dunbartonshire).

And below is one of the questions which threw up some interesting answers:

'How do you think Uk democracy could be improved?'



Tom Harris has a pessimistic view that just changing the electoral system won’t engage more people in  democracy because, as he says, the ‘democratic process isn’t of interest to most people.’ Is this the case though, or is it just that nobody has yet found a way to present the democratic process in an appealing way?

This is what we are trying to do – make politics a bit more fun and engage more people. We let our users choose the questions which will be asked, have introduced voting, we try and keep answers short and publish them in an easy to view format and then we allow feedback on the answers.

We are not the only ones either, with ideas to liven up the political arena, with Simon Cowell possibly getting involved next year. Until he does though, and telephone voting becomes the norm in political debates, please nip over to our website and take part in our old-fashioned online poll and cast your vote for ‘Best MP.’