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.
An interesting question from our perspective was this one from ‘wastenotwant’:
‘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 the 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.’
Note from the Voice: Liberal Democrat MPs Lynne Featherstone, David Howarth, Bob Russell and Jo Swinson are in the running for the acolade of Britain’s best MP. One of the questions they’ve all answered is from The Voice’s own Mark Pack.
One Comment
1/ Change the voting system to STV so that you do not anymore have to vote tactically, you can vote for your first choice preference knowing that if s/he does not get elected, your second choice will still count.
2/ Decentralise power to local government to enable people to take part in the decisions that affect them.
3/ State funding of political parties to remove the corruption from large corporations and wealthy individuals.
And Ok this will make some difference.
Historically politicians have made decisions such as the introduction of the NHS which transformed people’s lives. Today the important issues are how to mitigate global warming, how to stop terrorism, how to pay off a large part of the national debt. Difficult decisions that will not make you popular.