Do we need another political debating website?
New online political debating website launched is normally about as newsworthy as new Twitter app launched: they come along with great regularity, only the very few get much of an audience share and yet the media still love giving such reports plenty of attention.
So should the plans that Bebo co-founder Michael Birch is following this well-worn political debating path with jolitics.com get more than passing attention?
He believes so, as the Daily Telegraph reported:
Politics online simply has not been done well yet. There are lots of political discussion forums, but they never lead to any full conclusions or consensuses. It’s just a lot of people spouting their opinions with no constructive debate. Jolitics is about empowering those who are following an issue really well to help form opinion and fuel debate. And if they don’t do a good job, people can take their nominations away from them and they lose influence. It’s a real incentive to look after people’s interests.
The reference to “nominations” gets to the heart of what he hopes makes Jolitics different and so effective – people can nominate someone else to cast their vote on their behalf in a political debate on the site. Perhaps you don’t know what your views are on reform of student financing, but you do trust the views of someone else – you can then give your vote to them.
The upside of this is that it may provide a system whereby some people’s views have more sway – because they have persuaded others to trust them. It would be rather like the stories that your friends have most often ‘liked’ on Facebook rising to the top of your newsfeed – that collective judgement of others helps filter the good content from the mass.
But the big downside is the underlying idea that rather than think for yourself, you cede your judgement to others. That is often a sensible practical response as there is not enough time in the day to always try to trace back arguments to source evidence that you cross-check. However, the idea that we should judge politics more by the messenger and less by the message is hardly reaching for a debating ideal.
You only have to look at examples such as those Labour members who did not object to fixed-term Parliaments when they were in the Labour manifesto but started disliking them in principle when proposed by a Conservative/Lib Dem government to see the risks of going by the messenger rather than the message. And if you are going to judge by the messenger, a lot of liberals would find themselves in an uncomfortably position on the abolition of the death penalty and legalisation of homosexuality – for those were both causes that Enoch Powell backed.
So although I wish the attempt to improve political debate well, this does not so far look to be a desirable way of going about it.
I’m not sure objections to the coalition’s fixed-term Parliaments plans was just about the messenger, Mark. It was also about the content of the proposals.
Many – I suspect most – people who’d thought about it at all had understood that fixed-term Parliaments meant simply taking away from the PM the right to call an early election. The argument rarely went beyond that. I can’t remember anyone ever having argued for fixed-term Parliaments before the general election of 2010 on the basis that a successful opposition no-confidence motion should not even open up the possibility of an election.
I think what made a lot of people change their minds was the realisation that that proposition was being put forward, and that the initial 55% threshold was finely calibrated to favour the coalition parties’ partisan advantage (preventing an opposition no-confidence motion from triggering an election; allowing the Conservatives alone to veto any early election; yet allowing the coalition to call an early election whenever it suited them, contrary to the underlying principle most people thought fixed terms were about).
I think the precise nature at least of the coalition’s initial proposals discredited the whole idea of fixed terms.
Carl: certainly there were people who objected to the details, rather than the principle (including yourself if I remember right?), but there were also many who, particularly on Twitter, took to objecting to the principle at all. The debate over the details was a good one – especially as it resulted in a better threshold being proposed than originally.
I object to the principle, too, in fact. I think in reality it depends exactly what principle you’re talking about.
The principle that the PM should not have a unilateral right to seek a dissolution? I don’t see that it’s a real problem, but I have no objection to taking away the unilateral right. Nor would I have a big issue with extending that so that the government could not unilaterally seek or obtain an early election even on a majority vote. I’m not in favour of those changes – I don’t think we need them or that they have any real benefits. But I don’t think they’d be really harmful either. When people thought this was the principle Labour and the LibDems meant by “fixed terms”, they tended to favour it.
The principle that a majority in Parliament that wants an early election should not be able to force one, even following a successful opposition no-confidence motion? That I do think would be very harmful to our democracy. It’s what the coalition seemed to want initially (the Scottish-style safety valve seemed only to be brought out in response to objections; I can’t remember hearing any minister refer to it till Nick Clegg conceded it in the Commons) and it’s what stirred my strong opposition – and I think when people realised this was the principle the coalition meant by “fixed terms”, a lot of people woke up and changed their minds.