Require all MPs to publish details of any meeting with any individual or group who is not a constituent.
All Government departments and government-funded organisations, such as arms-length bodies will be required to submit all publications, including press releases, to the national archives. This will be extended to political parties, ensuring a record of manifestos and election promises remains indefinitely for the public to browse.
Devolve all legislative powers currently enjoyed by the Scottish Parliament to equivalent devolved Parliaments in England, Wales and (eventually) Northern Ireland. The UK Parliament to retain control over macro-economic, foreign, and defence policy.
@PaulJRobinson - about 10 years ago
Agreed.
Might be more useful to refer to regulatory bodies, inspectorates, and other non-governmental and quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations rather than the more ambiguous 'arms-length bodies'.
with kind regards, Paul Robinson
about.me/pauljrobinson
On 1 February 2014 20:45, philipjohn [email protected] wrote:
You can merge this Pull Request by running
git pull https://github.com/philipjohn/manifesto political-archives
Or view, comment on, or merge it at:
https://github.com/openpolitics/manifesto/pull/91 Commit Summary - Add publications to the national archives
File Changes - M democracy.mdhttps://github.com/openpolitics/manifesto/pull/91/files#diff-0(2)
Patch Links: - https://github.com/openpolitics/manifesto/pull/91.patch - https://github.com/openpolitics/manifesto/pull/91.diff
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/openpolitics/manifesto/pull/91 .
@frankieroberto - about 10 years ago
I'm not sure that the 'requirement to submit' is helpful.
How about, instead, the National Archives (and perhaps other institutions like the British Library?) could be given the explicit rights and responsibilities (and funding) to be able to collect documents from organisations of public interest and make them available for the public?
The organisations should have to make them available in a form that the NA can use, so I think a requirement to submit is OK. I'd also make this explicitly cover all election materials (leaflets, posters, etc etc, like democracy club did)
@frankieroberto - about 10 years ago
👎 disagree with the requirement to submit still – would create a huge burden. This is too broad to be workable IMO.
@PaulJRobinson - about 10 years ago
There is a National Archive (used to be called the Public Record Office when I went there - highly recommend you visit if you want to get your hands on primary source material) http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/. Are we certain this isn't already their policy? I would be surprised if a National Archive existed and they didn't have this as their stated purpose. Otherwise what sort of documents are they archiving?
OK; @JeniT is pretty sure that the NA already collects all government and agency publications, including press releases, so that part may be unnecessary. They only collect governmental information though, so do not collect the party political materials.
I'd say that perhaps this should change to suggest that the NA be given the job of doing that as well, thus avoiding the 'conservative party deletes all press releases from the web' problem we had last year. In terms of requiring it, we could perhaps broaden slightly to say that electoral materials and party press releases should be stored in the national archives, and leave aside the question of exactly where the burden lies.
@PaulJRobinson - about 10 years ago
👍 I think the British Library have also set themselves the somewhat daunting task of archiving every webpage on a UK domain http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/digi/webarch/ so these things should also be captured by them, but yes the National Archives would be a better place for these documents to be stored.
with kind regards, Paul Robinson
about.me/pauljrobinson
On 10 February 2014 15:50, James Smith [email protected] wrote:
OK; @JeniT https://github.com/JeniT is pretty sure that the NA already collects all government and agency publications, including press releases, so that part may be unnecessary. They only collect governmental information though, so do not collect the party political materials.
I'd say that perhaps this should change to suggest that the NA be given the job of doing that as well, thus avoiding the 'conservative party deletes all press releases from the web' problem we had last year. In terms of requiring it, we could perhaps broaden slightly to say that electoral materials and party press releases should be stored in the national archives, and leave aside the question of exactly where the burden lies.
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/openpolitics/manifesto/pull/91#issuecomment-34646695 .
@philipjohn, reckon we could reword this slightly? The NA already archives stuff from govt and agencies, so that's not necessary. All we need to say is that the NA should also archive materials produced by political parties and independent candidates in elections. Web materials could be scraped automatically (like the Internet Archive), and there could be a requirement to submit any election-related paper materials to the electoral commission (who could then pass it to the NA). That seems to do the job without being too burdensome, to me, considering the benefit and transparency it could bring to election promises.
@frankieroberto - about 10 years ago
I'm still against any requirement for political parties to submit stuff – this would be making political activism harder, not easier. Better in my view to simply give archiving organisations a mandate to collect this stuff (if they don't already). There could also be a 'quick win' in making it easy for archiving organisations to be automatically given a copy of material by the Royal Mail as part of the publicly-funded election mailouts.
I think making political participation slightly harder is a necessary consequence of making it transparent in this case, but I see your point.
The mailout idea is a good one - are all election deliveries done that way? I didn't realise. That could work. Otherwise, if the NA had a mandate to collect, how would they do it without the participation of those people producing the materials?
@frankieroberto - about 10 years ago
@Floppy as I understand it, most elections give candidates a free* mailout via the Royal Mail. However parties are free to deliver additional leaflets themselves. The recent PCC elections abandoned this in favour of a website though, to save money. - although given candidates have to pay a deposit, only refundable upon getting a certain percentage of the vote, not completely free.
@philipjohn - about 10 years ago
Yeah, I found out about the free distribution part of elections recently, so it could be that Royal Mail are simply required to add the NA to their delivery list :)
Require all MPs to publish details of any meeting with any individual or group who is not a constituent.
To improve the ability of citizens to hold politicians to account for the promises they make, the National Archives' remit for creating an archive of Government publications will be extended to political campaign material produced by political parties. This will primarily be done by collecting copies of all material distributed by Royal Mail as part of election campaigns. Political party manifestos will also be archived by the National Archives.
Devolve all legislative powers currently enjoyed by the Scottish Parliament to equivalent devolved Parliaments in England, Wales and (eventually) Northern Ireland. The UK Parliament to retain control over macro-economic, foreign, and defence policy.
@philipjohn - about 10 years ago
Okay chaps, wording changed on this one - let me know your thoughts!
@philipjohn - almost 10 years ago
@frankieroberto Looks like your previous vote is blocking this change at the moment, but based on the previous wording. Fancy having a look at the update, see if you like it better?
The OpenPolitics Manifesto
@philipjohn - about 10 years ago