This entry was posted on
Thursday, April 1st, 2010 at
12:01 pm and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement, Tories! Tories! Tories!.
No, we don’t plan to take 4 weeks away from work/families to hound Nadine Dorries, park a van outside her house and basically stalk her on the campaign trail. That would be just a little bit OTT.
The joke is this is all too close to the fantasy that Nadine Dorries and others hold to.
The punchline is that while all the van/stalking crap is fake… The People’s Pamphlet is real.
The relevant wiki is brought to us by the capable and clever Dave Cross (cheers, Dave):
Fellow Traveller’s Wiki: Home of the People’s Pamphlet
Anyone claiming this to be a personal attack of bile and vitriol is going to look a little bit foolish (not to mention dishonest), as it’s designed from the ground up to be as relevant and issue-driven as possible. The whole exercise revolves around deciding on the best issues to put forward, and the fairest (yet most effective) way to present them.
Transparency? The whole thing will be built/negotiated in public, which normally would give the subject plenty of time to prepare for any of the questions raised… but the difference with Dorries over many other MPs is that there are now far too many pertinent questions that she has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid, and by now she cannot afford to answer any of them with any honesty.
So, unlike the baseless, childish and pathetic #kerryout attacks (1, 2), this will be an issue-driven campaign that will be more transparent than anything that’s come before it.
We will be strongly encouraging people to contribute under their own name, and if you’re attached to any party-political campaign/team, you won’t be able to take part.
Also, the project has its own safety-valve; without sufficient support and consensus, nothing gets printed/delivered.
Each contributor will be asked to make a minor initial donation at the point of registration (to keep the site ticking over and keep timewasters away) but we intend to organise the primary/major donations via the wiki, too; with contributors pledging what they can (if they are in agreement with the direction of the letter/pamphlet) toward a goal of (yet to be fully determined/finalised) printing/delivery costs.
If you don’t like where the letter/pamphlet is going, you pull out. Simples. If you agree with where it’s going, we expect to meet you at the lock-off point; where you put your money where your mouth is and sign your name to the letter/pamphlet.
Further, like any wiki, this has the potential for expansion, and while there are very few MPs who are quite so mendacious and reckless with the truth as Nadine Dorries, we are open to the idea of expanding the project to cover other candidates, for as long as we can do so credibly, sensibly and safely.
And no, this time we’re not kidding.
