Putting my money where my mouth is: Voting on the Digital Economy Bill

[palfrey]

So, most of you have probably heard about the Digital Economy Bill, and how it's massively fucked up. Various of you have been campaigning, going to demos, writing to MPs, the whole nine yards. I've decided something I'm going to do about this: I will base my voting for the next election entirely on the Digital Economy bill, and how potential MPs/

Comments

[dennyd]

Found this site today, I bet they'd welcome someone signing up and contributing an issue (i.e. the digi-con-bill) for discussion and voting: http://www.poplar-limehouse.com/

[friend_of_tofu]

This seems like a perfectly decent idea, and one you should probably publicise more widely.

I'm probably going to do something I sad I'd never do and vote tactically. I want a hung parliament, which is terribly hard to achieve, and I probably live in a fairly safe seat, so if it turns out not to have any tactical implications, your criteria seem like a good choice for me - I need to find out what the positions of all our candidates are on the subject, although in reality it's likely as always to be a toss-up between Green and lib Dem, with a slight tendency to edge towards Green through long-standing affiliation, but I'm not a party loyalist. I care about policies first.

[oedipamaas49]

Nice plan; just be sure to let all the candidates know about it. "Please don't make me vote for Galloway" is a good tagline.

Actually, I've been wondering if one way to cajole MPs into paying attention would be to assemble into a caucus, and agree to vote according to a collective decision. Once you can credibly say to an MP "vote this way and lose 5000 votes", you surely get a _bit_ of influence over them.

[palfrey]

Actually, I've been wondering if one way to cajole MPs into paying attention would be to assemble into a caucus, and agree to vote according to a collective decision

How do you plan to find 5000 people you agree with on everything? I think even the people I agree with in general I disagree with on a bunch of stuff.

[oedipamaas49]

You don't need to agree on everything -- just find a set of issues on which you agree, and which are important enough to you all that you'll sacrifice the opportunity to vote based on other issues. If total agreement were a requirement for political action, nobody would ever form a political party. And this would be something like a political party, just one acting at a different point in the political system, rather than going for the very difficult goal of winning a FPTP election.

[palfrey]

Fair enough. So, basically an extension of this, but for a set of issues/bills rather than just one, and then sending a collective "we're voting on these issues" missive.

The problem there is the set of issues. If they all have a common theme (online rights for example), then it's workable. However, I'd be concerned by people dragging in issues that they assume that "of course everyone who agrees to X agrees with Y!". My personal reference case for this is someone trying to drag opposition to the Iraq war into a student fees protest, to which I got rather annoyed because the two issues are entirely orthogonal.

[purplecthulhu]

My understanding was that Galloway was only going to sit as MP for Bethnal Green for one parliament ie. that he would not stand for Respect at this election. Has that changed?

As you'll know from the email I copied from him to my LJ, he is against the DEBill.

[palfrey]

Not sure of the history behind him saying he was only going to sit for one parliament, although Wikipedia indicates that his claim for why he's going against this now is his 18 day suspension from parliament, which sounds a bit crappy.

[sashajwolf]

On 1), your Lib Dem candidate is Jonathan Fryer, whom I know fairly well. He's retweeted ORG and Lynne Featherstone on the #debill and was a keynote speaker on media freedom at the Governing Council of the European Liberal Democrats recently, when he spoke about the importance of online "citizen journalism" and social networking, so I think he's going to be broadly sympathetic. I'll see if I can get a more direct statement from him for you. It may take a little while, though - he's in Eritrea for one of his day jobs at the moment, I believe (he's a journalist and a SOAS lecturer.)

On 2), I see you already have our Chief Whip's position, but I appreciate you'll want to see what actually happens in wash-up.

[sashajwolf]

Jonathan tweeted the following about an hour ago:

@MattKillock Yes, I will oppose the #DEBill being pushed through without debate and full scrutiny