Encouraging ignorance of politics

Sometimes one has to think people deserve what they get when they vote, just as they do when they buy a product for some irrelevant reason without reading the label or figuring out how they will use it.

Hackney blogger Blood and Property, proudly proclaims 'I've lived in Hackney for 10 years, not voting, not knowing who my MP or councillors are and not paying attention to Hackney current affairs. Am I missing anything?' Their latest post allows us to answer the question definitively: yes.

It is also a classic example of how TheyWorkForYou.com doesn't work for us, failing in a way its creators almost certainly didn't predict. The elegant interface assists human stupidity. Most people just don't have sufficient grasp of politics to be let near the site. It has produced a widespread blight on political commentary. Forums and comment columns everywhere are full of the sort of numbskulled quotation of division extracts that Blood and Property provides here:

Info from theyworkforyou.com shows that in August of the same year [2005] Meg Hillier "voted very strongly for introducing ID cards. votes, speeches" it also says she " Voted very strongly against investigation into the Iraq war. votes, speeches"

Well, dur. Those were heavily whipped votes. No Labour MP except for the Socialist Campaign Group would show any different. Blood and Property has focussed on this empty, highly selected pseudo-information, and neither noticed that Hillier is a junior minister (so that under no circumstances could she vote against the government), nor that, a much stronger case for the contradiction s/he set out to point out, that Hillier is actually the minister responsible for the ID scheme.

Even if you look at the votes of the Socialist Campaign Group on any issue other than right-on lefty totems, then they are solidly conformist too. Do we see principled abstentions on government amendments to incomprehensibly obscure tax or companies legislation or sentencing rules accessible only to specialists? No. They vote as the whips tell 'em. An MP's voting record tells you almost nothing about their personal beliefs. Only votes against the whip and free votes are significant, and there are almost none of them. Sites such as TheyWorkForYou.com, far from demystifying politics, make this sort of misunderstanding because they create highly selective pictures of MP's activity. Their top users and creators are essentially drawn from a liberalish tradition of interest in politics, so the questions that are highlighted are the very same right-on lefty totems.

TheyWorkForYou and its relations are useful tools, if you already understand something more than superficially about politics. But they aren't helping the general public get more insight. Contrariwise.