There’s a good post up here on Conservative Home about what advice MPs should take seriously. I had one here a while ago about personality types – it would be good to do anything that could be done to weight these models – help the poor buggers to work out how they should be behaving at the moment.

Old Anarchist joke: Guy Fawkes - the last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions.

Two weeks ago, Internet campaigners made a decisive intervention on what was, as far as the media were concerned, a big story.

Perhaps the most prominent single political blogger in the UK – Guido Fawkes – was followed by perhaps the leading alliance of hacktivists MySociety in demanding that MPs desist from exempting themselves from the full disclosure rules in the Freedom of Information Act.

One rule for them?

As far as I can see, this is an oddly directed campaign. There is one strong argument in it’s favour:

• If Parliament imposes Freedom of Information rules on other areas of government and failed to make the case for Parliamentary Privileges at the time of the original drafting, it looks foolish to try and wriggle out of the obligations respectively – and it damages Parliament’s reputation to do so.

The other arguments are, I think, a good deal weaker.

An effective way to ‘clean up Parliament?’

Will it stem corruption? I don’t think so. Most of the recent scandals have been to do with the choice of staff who have been employed and what they do. Disclosing receipts won’t deal with that.

And what about dealing with the perception that MPs are on the take? I’d suggest that there are a number of problems with this.

Firstly, as a perception, it’s not that fair in the first place. When the media have managed to create an impression that something is large when it is – in reality – small, one has to wonder how far the provision of evidence is going to make any difference.

By international standards, the UK is a fairly robust democracy with a low level of corruption.

The real shortcomings to our democracy – the centralisation, the lack of bicameralism, the Presidential trumping of Parliament, an unsatisfactory voting system and so on, never seem to attract the kind of attention that capricious personality-centred campaigns like this do.

Even with orchestrated campaigns by newpapers and pressure groups, the public don’t beleive that the UK is really a corrupt place. The idea that such campaigners will give it a rest once this disclosure is in place is very optimistic, as far as I can see. The Guido Fawkes blog makes no secret of the contempt that it holds elected politicians in. Perhaps now that one set of ransoms have been paid, the next hostages will be kidnapped?

This measure will do nothing to restore confidence in democracy. It will just give anti-parliamentary campaigners more petty ammunition to misrepresent what MPs expenses are for. Prepare now for a string of minor scandals about who bought which pot-plant for their London residency.

Does the ‘transparency’ campaign exacerbate the problem it purports to solve?

This, I would suggest is a significant problem. The leitmotif of modern politics – individual corruption of politicians – is drowning out many bigger issues, and providing the cynical campaigners of The Taxpayers Alliance with more ammunition is likely to only exacerbate the problem while keeping the spotlight off many of the real issues that could concern us.

So, in summary, a strong-ish argument – that MPs should have drafted a bill more carefully a few years ago, a couple of weak arguments and a fairly serious unintended consequence.

What about the other guys?

Now I’d like to introduce an argument against doing this.

Parliament competes with other institutions to influence legislation. OK – it does the drafting – but it does so against a backdrop of coercion from the political centre, the permanent bureaucracy, the media, pressure groups, and political parties. It was ever thus. Surely pro-democracy campaigners should be campaigning against those coercive forces?

But when you impose degrees of transparency upon one side of that never-ending struggle – without doing the same to the other participants – you essentially weaken the only grouping that has a legitimate claim to represent the interest of the nation as a whole. We can do mashups of MP’s disclosures because they are obliged to disclose things. Lobbying companies are under no such obligation.

So what about demanding more transparency from MPs rivals? This site aims to expose the mendacity of The Taxpayers Alliance. And the NUJ have started to campaign on the subject of newspapers not doing their jobs properly.

These attempts to crowdsource data to hold participants in civil society to account are clearly going to be a more prominent feature of political life. There are lots of small, fairly uncoordinated campaigns designed to demand transparency from the rivals of Parliament.

Perhaps the next time web activists are looking for someone to target – someone that we can demand full disclosure from, they may choose a tougher – and more deserving target? But here is the big question: How much of a following wind would such a campaign get from slightly demagogic mid-market tabloids?

As there are a couple of good posts in the mainstream political blogosphere touching upon the qualities that are needed to promote an effective representative democracy, today is a good day to start a blog on the subject. This post will focus on the most topical:

Both Puffbox and Spartakan are chewing over the fact that Labour MP Paul Flynn has had his parliamentary allowance docked for misuse of the weblog that he has established under that same allowance.

This scheme was set up in March 2007 with the express purpose of promoting a public understanding of Parliament. To my mind, it raises a number of questions that I will seek to answer here over the coming weeks and months. They are as follows:

1. Do we over-fetishise political neutrality? Are the rules that preclude politicians from doing politics on the rates entirely sensible in this day-and-age? And do rules that are designed to stop this from happening actually pander to a highly anti-democratic and centralising agenda?
2. Is this the old ‘Eunuch in a harem’ problem? Is there not something slightly distorted about going to people who are morbidly, obsessively and fanatically political people and saying “here is a budget that you can use to communicate with millions of people with an efficiency that you wouldn’t previously have dreamed of – as long as you don’t use it for political purposes?
3. If you give an elected representative tools to communicate politically, are you necessarily giving them a political advantage? The public are increasingly turned off by political huckstering, yet politicians seem oddly keen to do it. Giving them the space to do it really effectively a bit like giving them a shorter rope and a longer drop?

I will return to these questions shortly – particularly the first one.