Author Archives: Keith Halstead

Britain’s best MP competition: the results

By Keith Halstead | Thu 7th January 2010 - 4:20 pm

Our ‘Britain’s Best MP’ competition has come to a close with Douglas Carswell, Conservative MP for Harwich, a clear winner. The final results are:

Douglas Carswell 47%
Gisela Stuart 16%
Tom Harris 12%
Lynne Featherstone 9%
Bob Russell 6%
Jo Swinson 6%
David Howarth 2%
Chris Mullin 2%

I appreciate that the results do not make happy reading for visitors to this site and the results of online polls cannot be taken too seriously, but please don’t dismiss this competition just yet.

Whilst acknowledging that our hope of getting people to listen to the MPs answers and then vote for their ‘best MP’ based on what they heard probably …

Posted in The Independent View | Tagged bob russell, david howarth, douglas carswell, Gisela Stuart, Jo Swinson, lynne featherstone, tom harris and yoosk | 10 Comments

Voting started in Britain’s best MP campaign

By Keith Halstead | Wed 23rd December 2009 - 1:20 pm

You may remember that back at the beginning of December we launched our ‘Best MP’ campaign to highlight the fact that not all MPs should be tarred with the same brush as the ‘expenses cheats.’

We asked users of our website – Yoosk – 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 website now and cast your vote in our Poll, which will be ‘live’ until the 31st December.

Here is a sample of how we edited the answers together to make them easier to compare. This question came from ‘artichelper’ and received most votes from our users:

‘What do you believe is the best change in policy that you, yourself played a significant role in making that change happen?’ And you can view a compilation of the answers below.

Posted in The Independent View | Tagged bob russell, david howarth, featured, Jo Swinson, lynne featherstone, tom harris and yoosk | 1 Comment

What makes a ‘good’ MP?

By Keith Halstead | Wed 9th December 2009 - 1:40 pm

Well, there has been plenty in the news recently about what makes a ‘bad’ MP so we at Yoosk thought that it might be a good idea to focus for a while on the qualities of a ‘good’ MP. End the year on a positive note.

And that is why we started our ‘Britain’s Best MP’ campaign two weeks ago. We want to find out who the good MPs are and what differentiates them from the rest. We asked our users at Yoosk to nominate their candidates and these are the people they put forward:

Gisela Stuart (Lab)
Lynne …