Although these ideas would be good to implement (especially a
distinguishment between written questions, written answers and speeches
in alerts) I don't think they'll help your situation much.
As I understand it, now that your MP is a minister of state, he will act
as a firm supporter of his party and will never be allowed to deviate
from party lines. In that way, I doubt he will ever speak as your
constituency MP rather than as a minister (although I might be
mistaken), and I don't know how easy it would be to distinguish between
these two styles of speech. It may be more interesting for you to follow
a neighboring constituency's MP of the same party, who often will raise
issues that affect the wider area.
However, as I said, if I have misunderstood the way parliament works and
if you can implement these ideas they would be very useful!
Rustam
On 16/06/2010 11:52, Mark Goodge wrote:
Following the election and change of government, my local MP has been
appointed a Minister of State for Defence. One side-effect of this is
that my TWFY email alert for him now contains primarily links to his
written answers relating to defence procurement. There are two
problems with this:
1. I though I was signing up to get an alert when my MP *speaks* in
parliament (and, indeed, that's what it says on the "My current email
alerts" page - it says the criteria are "spoken by Peter Luff").
Written responses shouldn't be included in that, surely?
2. I'm not all that interested in defence matters - what I want to
know about is how well my MP is performing as a constituency MP, and
what he says in debates rather than merely giving statements on behalf
of his department.
It would be nice, therefore, to have a bit more customisation over
what alerts I get. In particular, I'd like to be able to exclude
written answers completely from the regular alert so that I really
only do get alerted to spoken contributions. Secondly (although less
importantly), I'd like the alerts to distinguish between when my MP is
speaking on his own behalf and when he's speaking from the dispatch
box (ie, when he's speaking on behalf of the government).
Are either of those likely to be implementable in the not-too-distant
future?
Mark
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