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 Featherstone (LibDem)
Bob Russell (LibDem)
Chris Mullin (Lab)
Douglas Carswell (Con)
Tom Harris (Lab)
Jo Swinson (LibDem)
David Howarth (LibDem)
We are not suggesting that this is a definitive list of the best MPs in Britain but they are all MPs with qualities that our users think are worth recognition:
Gisela Stuart: ‘…..for standing up for what she believes in…’
Bob Russell: ‘…..a fanatic about his town of Colchester, has one of the best attendance voting records in the country….’
Douglas Carswell: ‘…..one of the few MPs to consistently call for reform of parliament and criticise the concept of safe seats….’
What we are doing now, is asking people to post questions on our website which should be aimed at allowing us to define what qualities make a good MP, for example, jamesfmevans is asking:
‘Should I vote for you as a representative of your party, or as someone who will do your best to make your party do what you want whether or not that is official party policy?’
Users of Yoosk can vote for the questions they like and the top five will be answered by all candidates, their answers recorded on video and posted on Yoosk for our users to rate and decide who is their ‘Best MP’ – a kind of ‘Online Question Time’.
If you would like to post your own question, please visit our site here, and click the ‘ask’ button in the panel at the bottom of the page (you will be asked to register with Yoosk which is easy, but will require an email address, username and password). Alternatively, you can add your question as a comment here or Twit it to #bestMP and we will pick it up and post it on our website for you. Submission and voting on questions closes on the 13th December and we hope to get answers on the site as soon as possible after that.
The more people who are involved in this dialogue, the better of course so, if you have a few moments please head over to our site and take a look at what we are doing and feel free to join in.
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5 Comments
Yeah, Jo and Lynne def get my vote. To be honest don’t know much about the others….though I may do? Watch PMQ’s quite a bit and there are quite a few Labour bankbenchers that are really passionate and remind you why people wanted to become MP’s at the first place (well idealistically!).
I would have liked Sarah Teather to be in there though I understand Lynne due to Baby P and Jo’s always on the box. I’m no Tory but I liked Douglas Carswell’s bravery over the speakership. David Howarth is top notch – shame we’re losing him 🙁
What’s the odds that the “libertarian” bloggertariat are going to astroturf this one in favour of Carswell, then? He’s the only Tory on the list and ticks all the boxes for that particular demographic.
All good choices from our ranks, Lynne F. and David H. especially (what a massive loss to Parliament David will be when he steps down!) and pleased to see Chris Mullin nominated on the Labour side (though I’d have liked to have seen them put forward Lynne Jones or Austin Mitchell).
From this list, Howarth all the way. Still gutted he’s going.
Many Thanks for your comments. I’d just like to point out that nominees were put forward by our users, not their parties. We are still gathering questions over on http://www.yoosk.com – the top 5 questions will be put to nominees next week – and we hope that people will vote for their choice of Best MP after viewing the answers.
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[…] going to be asked to answer a set of questions taken from suggestions made by the public. As our post from Yoosk’s Keith Halstead explained: If you would like to post your own question, please visit our site here, and click the […]
[…] going to be asked to answer a set of questions taken from suggestions made by the public. As our post from Yoosk’s Keith Halstead explained: If you would like to post your own question, please visit our site here, and click the […]
[…] 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 […]