Here's an interesting new online competition. It comes in the form of the Draft Legislative Programme consultation launched by Harriet Harman - leader of the House of Commons. It runs until August 6th, and it's your opportunity to comment on any or all of the 18 bills proposed for the next parliament. There doesn't seem to be anything in there on energy and food security, climate change, or overseas development (the top three items from the recent G8 Summit ), but what there is covers such large and fundamental topics as:
- interception and aggregation of all your communications data (see previous post)
- equality
- "constitutional renewal"
- NHS reform
- community empowerment, housing and economic regeneration (all one bill...)
- law and order, policing and crime reduction, Geneva conventions
- welfare reform
Strange as it may seem, there was a Welfare Reform Act only last year. I had a look, and it ran to 94 pages, not including the explanatory notes. Which brings me to a further slight snag. On any given bill your considered comments are limited to 500 characters.
I feel I should warn Ms Harman - that may lead to some pretty pithy expressions of opinion.
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500 characters isn't a problem, I find a single 'X' on the right piece of paper normally sends the correct message... shame it only happens every four years or so...
Posted by Toby Stevens on July 20, 2008 at 07:49 PM GMT+00:00 #
Would it really be a good idea to allow random citizens (such as, say, the Cambridge University Professor of Security Engineering) to post long and perhaps sometimes incomprehensible comments? (Only incomprehensible to government ministers of course, his comments generally make pretty good sense to the rest of us.) Five hundred words may be as much as Ms Harman can cope with. She does like to take the pith doesn't she?
Posted by Richard Veryard on July 21, 2008 at 06:18 AM GMT+00:00 #
Richard - yeth. Then again, if, say, as many as 5 million people wrote their measly 500 characters-worth of feedback, would that be any less manageable for Ms Harman than allowing whoever does write in to send as much as they wish?
Am contemplating writing a multi-page response, then chopping it up into 500-character chunks and sending it in a bit at a time...
Toby: true, but they don't get the option of *not* asking for your X periodically. In this case they've actively asked for input, only to limit it to the length of a... soundbite. aaah. Enlightenment dawns...
Posted by Robin Wilton on July 21, 2008 at 02:33 PM GMT+00:00 #