He works for me?

[tinyjo]

Having been irritated again by someone going on about our wonderful
representitive democracy on the radio again this morning I thought I'd
go and have a look at my MP again on the jolly fab They Work For You site and see
how much my MP does represent me. This is from his voting record...

How Andrew Smith voted on key issues since 2001 (From Public Whip) :

Moderately for introducing a smoking ban.

Fair enough - I think you could describe me as the same. I have
reservations but am broadly in favour.

Very strongly for the reduction of parliamentary scrutiny.

I suspect that if anything we could be doing with a bit more
parlimentary scrutiny so no, not really.

Very strongly for introducing ID cards.

Nope, don't think so.

Very strongly for introducing foundation hospitals.

I think the best you could say is that I'm ambivalent on that one.

Quite strongly for introducing student top-up fees.

Nope. I think that both the effects on cutting down university entrance
and the effect of having the 20somethings all in debt up to their
eyeballs already will be damaging.

Quite strongly for Labour's anti-terrorism laws.

90 days? I think not.

Quite strongly for the Iraq war.

Nope, although now that we are where we are, I do feel that we must take
responsibility for the mess we've created and not withdraw precipitatly.

Very strongly for the fox hunting ban.

I think I ended up on the side of this philosophically but it wasn't a
straightforward call and I wouldn't describe myself as strongly for.

Very strongly for equal gay rights.

Best thing I've seen so far. Absolutely agree.

Never rebels against their party in this parliament - 405th most
rebellious of 635 MPs.

Lame. Very very lame.

Well, I have to say, if he was working for me, I'd fire him. And I
can't see in what sense he can claim to represent me or my views. I
can't help but feel that PR could be less worse than this - I just don't
feel like I have a voice at all. I don't have money and I'm not in a
union so where can I go to get my voice heard?
__

Comments

[knirirr.livejournal.com]

I think that a discussion based around that last question would be very interesting thing to have over a few drinks. It's a shame that the pub meetings aren't going on at the moment.

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, now that we're all out of the city centre it's a bit more tricky, sadly.

As to the question, it's something I'm honestly baffled by at this point. I'm not a natural activist myself so I would prefer to be advocated for by someone I trust - unfortunatly, I don't see any candidates.

[tea-and-cuddles.livejournal.com]

The broadly anarchist activists up in Scotland last summer have an interesting system, where they use delegates instead of representatives to implement decisions for large numbers of people.

Basically, nobody who wants to be involved should be left out of decision making. Everyone should have the opportunity to express their views on issues they care about, and influence the decision making process.

Up to a certain number of people, the mechanism used is consensus. That doesn't mean arguing forever until everyone agrees, nor does it mean suppressing anyone. It means that in a circle of people, gathered for the purpose, everyone has the opportunity to be heard (there are conventions to help this), and everyone can veto a decision or lodge their complaint. With power comes responsibility, and it's understood that there will always be disagreements, but after sufficient debate, people will decide if their objections to some decision are strong enough to veto the decision, or if they are willing to let it pass, with a record their objection and the reasons why. There is more to doing it well than I've said here, and the conventions for harmonious meetings where all are heard are quite developed and sophisticated.

When there are too many people for a single circle, the camp divides into neighbourhoods which have such circles, and then those neighbourhoods send one or two delegates to represent the views of the neighbourhood to a more central meeting of neighbourhoods.

And so on, forming something which resembles a hierarchy, although it's a bit looser than that.

People who go to "higher-up" meetings don't go to express their own views, they are there to express the views which were agreed beforehand in neighbourhood meetings, and to return with whatever came out of the central meetings. A delegate can be sacked at any time, if they're not doing their job which is to express whatever the neighboorhood has decided by local consensus. A delegate is there to carry information, not to implement their personal agenda.

The key point is that this is different from representative democracy. In the UK (and many places), we're expected to pick someone to place our trust in their beliefs, and then they act on their personal convictions, or brown-nosing in the case of Andrew Smith clones. We have very little power to influence executive decisions, and we're restricted to pick from the few people with political networking ambitions and skills, who are usually wankers and invariably don't represent most people's views.

Even if we could vote MPs out of office on a regular basis, that wouldn't create much of a mechanism for coalescing many people's views into a thoughtful consensus, because we're still choosing between MPs' views, as a whole package, not expressing our own.

In delegate democracy, we don't need to trust a single person's own beliefs to represent thousands of people. Representing a group is a job in conveying the group's expressed views (themselves ideally formed through consensus), and a delegate is not supposed to voice their personal views when in this role. (They have the opportunity to voice their personal views in the local meetings like everyone else).

For all its imperfections, the consensus and delegate mechanism does mean that everyone who has something they want expressed, and for their view to be considered, does have a mechanism for doing that. To balance against paralysis of permanent indecision, there are ways for people's views to be taken into account without blocking, and there are conventions, always evolving, for doing that effectively.

I think those anarchists have some damn fine ideas.

[tybaltstone.livejournal.com]

I've never seen the site before - excellent, thanks! I'm stuck with Nicholas Soames! Gah!

[tybaltstone.livejournal.com]

I realise my comment above makes it sound as though I've just discovered Soames is my MP... I'm all too aware he is, but didn't know his voting record very well until now. It's very absorbing.

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's interesting to see exactly what they get up to, isn't it?

[applez.livejournal.com]

Nice site ... I should try to find a US one...