TMP Online

From Liberal Conspiracy

Campaigning group Power2010 has announced plans to target those MPs who have consistently opposed cleaning up and reforming our political system.

In their bid to rid Parliament of anti-reform MPs, the grassroots campaign is drawing up a list of culprits from all major parties wanted for “crimes against democracy” and from today is asking members of the public to nominate MPs at
www.power2010.org.uk/wanted.

Power2010 will then launch major campaigns in selected constituencies, highlighting sitting MPs’ poor records on democratic reform and civil liberties.

Ex-minister Tony McNulty is first in their sights. The former minister, who resigned in disgrace last year following allegations over his expenses, is a well-known champion of the government’s unpopular ID card scheme and an opponent of a transparent Parliament.

Power2010 volunteers and activists are planning to descend on Harrow East, beginning next week, plastering “Wanted for crimes against democracy” posters across town, whilst thousands of “swing” voters in the constituency will receive targeted campaign literature highlighting his opposition to a cleaned up reformed politics.

In the coming weeks the campaign will be targeting other MPs from all parties.

This is a guest post by James Holland, a climate camp and a local community activist.
Please add your thoughts below and join the debate.

People who want to make the world a better place usually start with the big things – war, poverty, climate change etc and they usually look to make changes on a national and global level, because surely you can have more impact more quickly that way?

But I want to convince you that in fact you change more by working on apparently very small and local issues. ‘Politics’ as it is, is simply too remote and too conservative, you could spend your whole life lobbying governments and international organisations and get absolutely nowhere, but a few days working to help local people stop their school being closed or even just making sure that someone unfairly denied benefits gets what they’re entitled to could have a much greater effect. This is because in addition to directly helping those specific people the more we give people hope that sticking together and solving our own problems actually works, the more people will have the confidence to try it. In short working on small local stuff is a virtuous cycle of empowerment and small victories, whereas the opposite is true of ‘politics’ where even success can mean that people as a whole feel less able to do things for themselves.

And of course it’s not only for strategic reasons that working locally is better – we directly benefit from the improvements we work for and perhaps most importantly we start to feel like part of a community, something I believe we all want to some extent. But surely this approach can’t work for the biggest and most urgent problem we face – climate change? Well yes, and in fact I believe that it might be our only realistic chance. Copenhagen showed us that Governments are unable to make a sufficiently ambitious deal, and I doubt whether they could enact one even if they did. The only way for rich countries to start to reduce emissions on the trajectory required is for individuals and communities to just do it themselves. In fact it looks really simple if you look at it from this point of view – you have probably reduced your own impact drastically in the last few years, partly because other people you knew were doing it and it seemed like the right thing to do, so why can’t everyone else do the same?

This is already beginning to happen in the shape of the Transition Towns’ movement. OK, so these groups are still largely middle class usual suspects who are mostly focussed on ‘the environment’ as a single issue, but if TTs themselves or other related groups start to form that add the goal of tackling immediate, everyday problems that ordinary people face and build a really feeling of the community taking responsibility for itself then social norms have a strange way of gathering weight and then going over a tipping point. I’m not claiming it’s guaranteed to work, relying on inter governmental process for so long has meant that we have very little time but even if we fail then we still have built resilient, self reliant and healthy communities, and surely that’s better than what your left with after another failed international conference or lobbying of governments?