Most of us felt this was reasonable, but wished we didn’t have to reply to each person individually as the numbers built up terrifyingly quickly until very little additional work was possible.
Since then, the curse of the automated e-mail has become ever more pervasive and destructive of time management. On any given day, there will be between three and five campaigning bodies, trade unions or special interest groups encouraging their members and supporters to e-mail their MP – and woe betide the miserable Member who fails to reply by return.
This worrying trend has reached its apotheosis – without the divinity – in an organisation called 38 Degrees. On first sight, this seems a noble set up in which civic-minded citizens unite around an issue and seek to persuade, by sheer weight of numbers, an MP to vote for or against the selected cause. They cite the recent call for the BSkyB bid to be referred and the abandoned sale of ancient woodlands as examples of their goodness of heart and campaigning success.
However, all is not as well as might seem and I suggest that democracy and citizen engagement with Parliament are actually diminished rather than enhanced by 38 Degrees.
The identikit emails are usually caught by the spam filters at Westminster and most MPs only drain the sump once a day, so there tends to be a built-in time delay in responding – which seems to annoy those who expect instant replies.
Once you have received the message, you have to resist the temptation to create an identikit response – especially if you have a long history of voting in support of particular propositions and are unlikely to be spurred to greater passion by 100 emails. I have seen offices in which an intern opens the identical emails and constructs a standard response which is then sent back to the constituents – all with the MP having neither sight nor sound of the message. The 38 Degree people then claim a huge success and the MP claims a massive level of contact with the electorate.
You might ask yourself if this actually matters and make a case for any contact between electors and elected being a step forward. I suggest that the blizzard of identical emails is not only counterproductive in that many an honest MP who opens each and every one of his or her emails gets profoundly fed-up of writing back to people who have elected to tick a box and dispatch a pre-digested message.
The other problem is that a standard email does not discriminate between MPs. In the matter of the Murdochian massacres, the key motion in the emergency debate was tabled by the Labour Party, so it seems a waste of time to write to Labour MPs asking that they vote for their own motion.
By simply ticking a box and sending an indiscriminate message, the chances of minds being changed is slight indeed and the strong probability of an ever increasing irritation being experienced by the MP tends to make the process futile and self-defeating. I consider it a bitter irony that every single message I have received in favour of the retention of post offices has been sent by email and never miss the opportunity to remind people that actions have consequences.
I write back to people who have contacted me for the first time to thank them, assure them of my attention in the future and explain where we can meet in person and briefly breathe the same air and look each other in the eye – instead of conducting a distant relationship in which cliché speaks unto cliché and nothing really changes.
I attribute no dark motives to 38 Degrees and actually agree with all their campaigns to date, but the danger of plebiscite rule is that subtleties are lost and a situation could arise as it did in the case of the Gurkha settlement rights, when it was utterly impossible for any MP of conscience to even consider voting against the extension of British residential rights to Gurkhas and their families, yet many could foresee the consequences that are now so horribly evident in depopulated valleys of Nepal and the new slums of Aldershot.
By what transparent and democratic process does 38 Degrees choose its causes? I don’t know. I welcome further civil participation, but dearly wish we could achieve it without the juvenile mechanism of the ghost-written tick-box generic email.
