Just propagating links again, I'm afraid: WriteToThem is a new and extended version of FaxYourMP. Type in your UK postcode and send a letter to any of your elected representatives -- councillors, MPs, MEPs, MSPs or assembly members -- instantly and for free.
This can probably also serve as an explanation for the paucity of posts here lately. And as a substitute for actual content, here's a picture I drew a while ago while trying to understand how the UK's electoral geographies are arranged:
The (marginally) interesting thing to note about that picture is that it is both inaccurate and an oversimplification of the true situation....
Comments
Posted by Andrew Duffin, Monday, 14 February 2005 12:35 (link):
Well yes, so it is (inaccurate and an over-simplification, that is). The Scottish Parliament, for instance, seems to have dropped out of view completely (I wish!). However, the most important mistake is that you've shown the UK as the top level of the tree, whereas of course our real government is located in Brussels.
otoh, I didn't know that stuff about Orkney and Shetland having special arrangements...
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Monday, 14 February 2005 12:48 (link):
Ah, when I drew that diagram I still thought that the best way of thinking of the UK's electoral geography was as a hierarchy. That turns out to be a very bad idea.
The Orkney/Shetland thing is odd -- all of the Scottish Parliamentary constituencies are coterminous with Westminster constituencies, other than Orkney and Shetland, which form one Westminster constituency but two Scottish Parliamentary constituencies.
The picture above is only supposed to show geography, so Brussels isn't at the root of the tree -- different European countries have different arrangements for European elections (just as for national elections), so it wouldn't make sense for an additional level to appear....
Posted by Roy Badami, Tuesday, 15 February 2005 00:45 (link):
Ah, when I drew that diagram I still thought that the best way of thinking of the UK's electoral geography was as a hierarchy. That turns out to be a very bad idea.
Indeed. Particularly because of the way that boundary reviews are (currently) carried out, which results in the revised district ward boundaries, country electoral division boundaries and constituency boundaries coming into effect at different times.
Currently in Cambridge we have City (ie district) councillors elected under the new ward boundaries, but county councillors and our MP elected under the old divisional boundaries.
On 5th May we will elect county councillors under the new county electoral divisions (which just came into force this year, and align their boundaries with the new wards introduced last year) but even if a there's a simultaneous general election, that will still be under the old constituency boundaries (which are aligned with the old ward and division boundaries).
I imagine that building and figuring out how to maintain this site has been an, erm, interesting challenge :-)
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Tuesday, 15 February 2005 10:48 (link):
Oh yes.
One side effect is that I can now bore for Britain on the details of electoral geography and our (insane, imo) arrangement of local government. I'm not actually sure there'll ever be an opportunity to put this, err, skill to good use, but that's the great thing about skills -- you never know....
Posted by Roy Badami, Tuesday, 15 February 2005 00:48 (link):
I notice that you encourage feedback if there are errors in the list of district and country councillors you show me, but that the MP and list of MEPs are infallible :-)
I'm not sure I believe that...
Posted by Francis Irving, Tuesday, 15 February 2005 10:45 (link):
Not so much infallible, as nearly two orders of magnitude fewer of them...
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Tuesday, 15 February 2005 10:46 (link):
They're not infallible -- it's a question of (a) scale and (b) implementation. There are somewhere over 20,000 councillors, so -- assuming the error rates are the same for all representative types (they're not) then it's worth implementing it for councillors first. In fact we get the councillor data from a company who (in certain cases) have to poll individual local councils for any changes; we want to speed up that process as much as possible.
Most changes to MP/MEP/etc. data are changing how they want to be contacted or the fax number or email address they want us to send to; obviously in those cases we can't just accept `corrections' from random members of the public....
And for historical reasons our process for importing councillors into the database is different to the process for importing other representatives, so adding the automated corrections interface to that was useful. If you're lucky Francis may be along in a moment to explain in more detail.
Posted by Steve, Tuesday, 15 February 2005 17:20 (link):
Another interesting thing to note when looking at such an absurdly complex system is that politicians will always find a reason why we need to pay for more politicians - rather like the legal establishment deciding when litigation is appropriate (but hey, that's another rant entirely).
The only real suggestion I can make is to periodically shoot them all and start again, hoping each time that the stuff which floats up to the top will not be scum.
Posted by Iain J Coleman, Thursday, 17 February 2005 00:37 (link):
The whole point of democracy is that you can get rid of politicians without having to shoot them. Not only does this save money on bullets, it also greatly reduces the incentive for incumbent politicians to have people who disagree with them pre-emptively murdered. Sounds like a win-win arrangement to me.
Posted by Steve, Thursday, 24 February 2005 20:32 (link):
It would be nice if what you said was literally true - however as we can see, we did not lose some politicians when we got some more by joining Europe, nor when the Scottish and Welsh parliaments were built.
You can indeed get rid of individuals, but only by replacing them. They always think of a reason for more bodies. Perhaps if we promised to only vote for a party that reduced the overall number of representatives in each house?
Posted by Iain J Coleman, Friday, 25 February 2005 02:04 (link):
What, you would rather be ruled by people who you can't fire?
Posted by Iain J Coleman, Tuesday, 22 February 2005 09:58 (link):
I got my first message from WriteToThem today. Now I have to see what I can do about your response time statistics...
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