Let’s get engaged, Gordon
6:14 pm - November 10th 2007
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I’ve been giving some thought to positive engagement with political processes – I like the idea of producing a kind of rough and ready primer for the man or woman in the street who wants to get their voice heard.
The Queen’s Speech seems the ideal place to start. So, head to the Number 10 website. Click on the special section all about the Queen’s Speech and select the list of bills, draft bills and statements to see what issues were covered in the speech.
Let’s take a look the Citizenship and Immigration Draft Bill. They’re hot, emotive issues right now. There’s not a lot of detail in the PDF document (what is it about this government and PDFs?) but there is a link at the bottom to Lord Goldsmith’s citizenship review.
Except the link doesn’t work. You can’t click through to the review’s webpage from the PDF document. You can either type the web address manually into your web browser or try another angle.
Let’s try the Number 10 website’s search engine. It’s a pretty poor search engine and it’s all over the shop. Entering ‘lord goldsmith citizenship review’ into the search gives some pretty confused results. A lucky guess in clicking on the ‘related sites‘ tab gives us a link to the Ministry of Justice website and mentions Lord Goldsmith’s citizenship review.
Finally, we find it. The review began on October 5 this year and reports to the Prime Minister in March 2008. View from the public are solicited but no deadline for them is given.
Each month the review plans to publish a pamphlet on ‘focussing on different aspects of the subject’. The first and only one so far is ‘The Future of Citizenship Ceremonies‘ (yup, a PDF – it certainly stops those pesky bloggers who might want to cut ‘n’ paste some of your text and, you know, discuss the issue, link back and give you inbound traffic). You can print it off and read if you have the resources. If you don’t and want a hard copy you have to email the review team to find out how to get one.
One of the barriers to this information is, obviously, having Internet access. Those without it (currently 36.2 per cent of the population) are probably unaware aware of Lord Goldsmith’s review, his pamphlets or how to obtain them.
Then there’s the tedious and frustrating path to the information. It didn’t take me too long because I’m a desperately sad individual who trawls these sites for fun and has got a feel for for how amateurishly they can be put together. A less geeky or technically savvy citizen stands a very good chance of giving up in frustration.
The feedback mechanisms involved feel uncertain; more often than not it means firing an email off to an anonymous government inbox. The whole set up militates against engagement and informed opinion. Is it any wonder that so many issues are fed by ignorance and tabloid newspapers’ vested interests?
The state of affairs outlined above follows for many of the bills, draft bills and statements on the Queen’s Speech list. Some have links that are working, some have links that are not, some have no links at all and require the interested and those wishing to engage to embark on another hunt to find out more.
The casual browser who may or may not have something worthwhile to contribute is likely to give up at the first hurdle. A more serious and potentially important contributor might get no further either. As I’ve said before, a cynic might think that this is the intention on the part of the government.
I’m willing to accept however that it’s merely incompetence. Which is shameful when you see how many people in Britain successfully run easily accessible and searchable websites of their own for very little money in their spare time. Has any of the government’s people actually tried to chase down some information from their own websites? Or given any thought that herds of their PDF documents don’t exist in the real world for people to read and engage with?
I’d suggest that a government truly concerned about engagement, canvassing and informing opinion and debunking myths should investigate mature cross-media push technologies (sending information out) rather than pull ones (expecting people to go hunting for the information). Within reason, obviously, and away from the soundbites of glossy leaflets, party political broadcasts, tainted gimmicks like citizen juries and other propaganda.
Give the job to an independent, apolitical organisation to avoid accusations of bias and political interference. Deliver just the facts without any background noise. And it might be a good idea to stop patronising people – treat them like adults, value their contribution and say so: positive feedback can work wonders. Make it an engaging, fulfilling and transparent process and they’ll come back for more.
I’d bet there’s hardly an adult in the country without an opinion on immigration and citizenship. I’ll also bet that the vast majority of people are ignorant of the fact that there is a forum to express those views with the (possibly slim, admittedly) potential of reaching the Prime Minister’s ear.
From a government and Prime Minister that pay lip service to a more positive political engagement and to people’s ‘responsibilities’ to the society in which they live that’s something of an inexcusable disgrace.
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Justin McKeating is an occasional contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. He is a Brighton-based writer and blogger who can also be found at Chicken Yoghurt and Nuclear Reaction.
· Other posts by Justin McKeating
Story Filed Under: Campaigns ,E-democracy ,Our democracy ,Westminster
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Reader comments
In the past I’ve occasionally responded to government ‘consultations’ on this or that. Despite taking considerable time to write thoroughly thought out responses that were reasonably short and to the point, I never heard anything back from them – not even an automated email to say they’d received what I sent them. After the infamous ID card consultation where all the dissenting voices were counted as one to make the figures stack up in favour of the governments plan, I no longer feel it’s worth while responding to them.
If we have an issue we want to press then let’s use this site to put pressure on the government to pass a bill on it or postpone bills.
We’ve seen the effect that the right -wing media has had on pushing the inheritance tax issue. Why can’t we do that with liberal issues? Suggest an issue and we can press the government on it by putting our arguement to people. If we put the arguement to Businesses, working classes, middle classes, scientists or experts, you name it. We can argue how it will be beneficial to them and create some momentum on some liberal issues.
NOW NAME THE ISSUE!!!!
If it’s going to happen it has, as you say, to be done in a way which means it doesn’t just become government propaganda. The government has quite enough resources with which to push their own message. Look, for instance, at the Passport Service website: big advert at the top which is selling identity cards.
I don’t know whether it’s plausible to have an ‘independent’ body doing the selling – how would you make sure it was independent?
As a fully paid-up cynic, I have no problem in believing that the government doesn’t really want to give people the means to ‘engage’ in the political process in any meaningful way. There’s just no incentive for them to do it.
It’s not like this is particularly difficult – MySociety have done excellent work in opening up government with a tiny fraction of the budget that the government itself must be spending on maintaining its plethora of websites. The story of DirectionlessGov provides an amusing lesson here. If a handful of reasonably smart techies can create better tools for accessing government information than the government itself can, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to conclude that the government simply isn’t trying.
Well, imagine you’re a government minister – or a Council leader, or the Chairman of a Health Trust – what do you want?
Remember, that in order to have got to your present eminence you have long ago realised that any idea of “public service” is for the birds.
Also, you have ambitions to go higher.
Your interest is therefore to use public consultation in such a way that it will demonstrate not only that people are gagging for whatever it is you wanted to do in the first place, and to use the public money at your disposal to do just that. You therefore need, and instruct your staff to provide, consultation systems that not only achieve this but hopefully also demonstrate that you are better at delivering this outcome than your peer group.
It’s not really about the internet – MPs have long had strategies for discounting their constituents’ views as revealed in letters received, and we would all think less of any MP who changed their mind on an issue of principle on the back of the contents of their mailbag.
The only time government says it has not taken a view on an issue is when it believes that the downside of every course of action is greater than the upside – “green taxes” come to mind. And of course consultation on any proposal is likely to attract a disproportionate response from those who are against it, whether on self-interested or high-minded grounds.
Consultation sounds good till you think it through. Budget-setting by referendum in California wasn’t exactly a roaring success and 20-odd years ago Southwark Council undertook a genuine consultation exercise in order to re-write its Borough Plan it was quashed by the Government Inspector who damned it as “inward-looking and backward-looking” – i.e. the working people of Southwark wanted to preserve the existing economic and social relationships in their area in aspic. Why wouldn’t they?
Of course government consultation is a sham. Show me a government anywhere, from any historical period, where this wasn’t true. It’s part of the nature of government. Articles like this do the site no favours, I’m afraid – it’s easy to be “oppositionist” but that’s not, I take it, why you guys went to the trouble and expense of creating the site. I’m not an anarchist, I believe government is a necessary evil so long as humanity consists, in Kant’s justly famous words, of “twisted timber”. To govern is to engage in a dirty business unfit for tender consciences.
“I believe government is a necessary evil so long as humanity consists, in Kant’s justly famous words, of “twisted timber”.
This is to suggest that governments themselves consist of something
other than twisted timber. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Innocent Abroad raises a good point that it’s alot easier to throw rocks at government but it’s alot harder to rebuild it from the inside.
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