POLITICS: Leave them alone
Don’t email your MP this Christmas
Sometimes you hear something that confirms everything you’ve always thought was true, and a result, it bores you. There being only so many times you want to hear the patently self-evident. Take the story about MPs and email for instance. A company has set up a site that brings together details of every MP, how to get in touch with them online, and even provides a simple form so that you can best bring your concerns to their attention. And what has been the general reaction of parliamentarians to this electronic boon? Despair. Compounded by the fact that they’re helpless to prevent the inevitable flood of ‘unwanted’ email. So there you are, a simple enough morality tale, yes? Well no as it happens, for anything that increases the amount of communication between MPs and voters is a thoroughly bad thing, invariably to be deprecated.
The reason for this lies not so much with MPs, but with the nature of people who want to get in touch with them. Have you ever wanted to? Being harsh, there are only two basic categories into which you fall if your answer to the previous question was ‘yes’. Either a.) you have a relative (or relatives) in prison, or, b.) you are a fruitcake. The former category is generally very sad work for MPs and their offices. Usually female ‘dependents’ are left to cope with the consequences of seeing their man imprisoned. For whatever reason they want to visit him, and, it has to be admitted, the prison service is quite fantastically inefficient. At their wit’s end, such unfortunates turn to MPs for help. The latter category keep themselves cheerfully occupied by dispatching (and they honestly do use green ink more often than not) voluminous corresondence about ‘femiNAZIs’ or the plastic windowframes her next doors has had put in, or, pretty much anything, as long as it meets one test. Which is, that it should be in no way amenable to the influence of an MP to do anything about.
Sensible MPs know the limits to what they can do for constituents. Exceptionally good ones know that there are limits to what they should attempt to do for them. This is why the MPs that we should esteem are the ones that don’t even have email. Those that don’t list in directories their direct line, but give only the House of Commons’ switchboard number certainly get a star. To go further, a good MP is one who shares a Commons’ secretary with four others and gives the rest of his ‘research’ allowance to his wife, nominally employed in some capacity or other. (By this standard there an awful lot of very good Scottish Labour MPs.)
A bad MP contrariwise is, for want of a better term, a Liberal Democrat. In other words — and in truth they’re to be found in all parties — the sort who: employs (at your expense remember) not merely a secretary at Westminster, but also a researcher, and maybe has the use of a clueless intern paid for by some American foundation, and on top of that, a ‘constituency assistant’ too. What you might ask is this huge staff going to do, apart of course from answer all those emails? And draft letters for their member to sign replying to the fellow who keeps writing in about ‘the things the Europeans keep putting in the water now, keeps us docile you know, it’s all part of a plan to make Surrey a French nuclear test site’.
Very simply, they’re going to demand answers for the letters they’ve been sent and write letters to the people who’ve written them letters and on and on it goes, and it has very little to do with your elected representative standing up in the chamber of the House of Commons and making a speech. You know, debating stuff, voting on things, holding the government to account. No, far better that he or she should spend all their time doing things that either a county councillor should be doing, or that shouldn’t be done at all by a politician.
There are two broad categories of things-MPs-shouldn’t-get-involved-with. The first is the little stuff. Some of you will throw yours hands up in horror at this point, and hiss, ‘well if your [fill in complaint as appropriate] had been messed up, it wouldn’t seem little to you’. Indeed not, and such is the importance of, for example, housing benefit that every local authority has a vast appeals procedure, and employs a great many specialists to implement it. If, after that, things are still ‘messed up’, or just not working out the way you might want them to, well then there’s the courts. For ultimately that’s where you’ll end up if you keep complaining — MPs, despite what many of their petitioners appear to believe, can’t wave magic wands. The other ‘don’t-touch’ category relates to who else is trying to get in touch with MPs, whether by email or any other means. For most of an MP’s postbag doesn’t come from actual flesh and blood voters. Instead it comes from people claiming to speak on their behalf, or in their best interests. The very job in fact that MPs are there to perform. These rodents are lobbyists, with by far the worst coming from self-righteous, let’s legislate rather than persuade outfits like the RSPCA.
Or to use the name the ‘Today’ programme does when it invites them on each morning to whinge at ministers, this is the mail, the garbage in 90% plus of cases, MPs get every day from, pressure groups. ‘Do this, don’t do that, stop them from doing that, this is what your constituents think about this, that or the other, we know better than you’. That’s the pressure group pledge: a whinge a day keeps the taxman away, taxing, in order to fund all those idiotic government schemes. Which are then badly provided, and the poor old voter to get any sort of redress has to complain to someone. At this stage the circular nature of the problem becomes very obvious.
MPs need time and mental space to do their real job, the one which only they can do (whatever the pretensions of pressure groups) — that is, deliberate as to what’s in the best interests of the people who sent them to Parliament. To do that, the less they hear the better. Never mind not answering emails, take away their telephones, and make them all work in corridors, not £200 million palaces.
John Rugby, December 12, 2002 11:07 PM