To say that prospective parliamentary candidates are traditionally not very candid is a huge understatement. For decades, they have relied on the “if you stick a big party rosette on a donkey it’ll get elected” rule of the old politics. Too often, a bit of biographical blurb listing how many school governorships the candidate has amassed, is the best you get.
But, post expenses scandal, and now with more revelations about overseas jaunts and cash for influence, public acceptance of the traditional political game is wearing thin (another understatement).
This won’t be new to OurKingdom regulars, but what is new about this election is that it has been billed as the “e-election” where the internet takes charge.
Of course, readers will have different takes on the e-election claim. But, combined with the implosion of the Westminster (mainly) boys club, there does seem to be an opportunity to use the internet to get parliamentary hopefuls to be more open about policy and, as a result, achieve greater accountability.
Though there are some good examples of this emerging, the Democracy Club being one, and fantastic campaign “pledging” pressure going on, which is different altogether, there seems to be room for much more of this kind of thing.
Hence a new non-party web initiative – DEMREF 2010: Candidates for the General Election tell us where they stand on democratic reform.
The idea of DEMREF 2010 is to create a web-based platform where voters can scrutinise and compare the views of their candidates in order to help make an informed choice on polling day. It is a very simple constituency-by-constituency listing with each candidate as a separate pdf document that can be easily downloaded.
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