Freesteel Blog

I cannot afford to pay for PublicWhip and TheStraightChoice out of my own time and money

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010 at 9:00 pm Written by: Julian

So here we are at the end of the election having not raised one bean for running TheStraightChoice.org. Nor is there a single penny available for a new improved version of PublicWhip.org.uk, or the radical YourNextCandidate.com internal party monitoring project.

Due to the serious lack of substantive democratic interest in this country, the only potential funders of projects such as these is the The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust who have blown all their money on their Power2010 campaign with nothing to spare to afford one single link to TheStraightChoice.org at any time during their campaign. I can’t even put into words how pissed off with that project in terms of its self-serving waste of opportunities and anti-grassroots astroturf instincts.

According to the Grants Awarded page, the breakdown of money that didn’t go to TheStraightChoice.org is as follows:

Amount	Receiver	Year	Description.
£410,000	POWER Inquiry	2004	Over two years. Jointly funded by JRRT and our sister Trust, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, to mark our centenary year, the POWER Inquiry aimed to understand why the decline in popular participation and involvement in formal politics has occurred and to provide concrete and innovative proposals to reverse the trend.
£105,000	POWER Inquiry	2005	Additional funding granted during 2005/6 to this project jointly funded by JRRT and our sister Trust, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. The report was released in February 2006
£553,000	POWER Inquiry	2006	Granted for Phase 2 of this project jointly funded by JRRT and Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.
£17,500	POWER Inquiry	2006	Additional funding granted to enable Power to organise the consultation in the UK as part of the European Citizens’ Consultation project. Jointly funded by JRRT and our sister Trust, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.
£24,500	mySociety	2006	Over six months towards the construction of the Freedom of Information Filer and Archive web-based project.
£24,600	Unlock Democracy	2008	To develop VoteMatch for the European Elections.
£101,466	Unlock Democracy	2008	Over 2 years to build on the ‘Purity of Elections’ research and support a campaign for change in advance of the next General Election.
£5,000	Unlock Democracy	2008	To pilot VoteMatch London, an online voters’ educational tool.
£671,000	POWER2010	2009	Towards Phase 2 of POWER2010
£3,000	Unlock Democracy	2009	Towards the productionof a broadsheet for Local Works’ campaign for transparency of governance in the spending of public money.
£20,000	Unlock Democracy	2009	Over 6 months to develop VoteMatch for the 2010 General Election.

This table includes the £24.500 given to mySociety to establish the website WhatDoTheyKnow.com to show what money well spent looks like. The website gets stronger and more important with every passing year.

On the other hand, the £1million thrown at the 2005 Power Inquiry sank without trace, and the £150k given to Unlock Democracy has produced steadily worse versions of their VoteMatch StemWijzer system which is now all but unusable.

But it’s okay. According to them, an incredible 1.3million people visited their site, and 1 million brave individuals actually completed all 30 questions on their painful user interface, filled in two pages of irritating selection criteria, to be rewarded with a crappy bar-chart.

The JRRT trustees probably swallow these numbers wholesale and form the false conclusion that this same site is better than all the others — for example the superb (and unfunded) VoteForPolicies.org.uk who reported a quarter of a million completions on 2.25million page views.

Post Election

We are entering a very interesting time for Parliament watching with a new coalition, yet Professor Philip Cowley is no longer able to run his revolts.co.uk MP vote watching website, owing to lack of funding from the ESRC. Read his comments about how he eked out the money to the end of this Parliament.

With my power to get through extra-ordinarily crap websites, I have obtained some relevant links to pages of grants from the Economic and Social Research Council:

£110,940.04	Robotic or Rebellious? Backbench behaviour in the 2001 Parliament	Professor Philip Cowley	Start Date: 01/09/2003 End Date: 31/08/2006
£71,750.70	ESRC Placement Fellowship	Professor Philip Cowley	Start Date: 01/08/2008 End Date: 31/07/2009
£1,030,401.41	British Election Studies 2005-2006	Professor David Sanders	Start Date: 01/04/2004 End Date: 31/03/2007
£1,505,964.12	The 2009/10 British Election Study	Professor Paul Whiteley	Start Date: 01/09/2008 End Date: 31/08/2012
£431,886.15	The Internet, Electoral Politics and Citizen Participation in Global Perspective	Professor Rachel Gibson	Start Date: 01/02/2010 End Date: 31/01/2013
£80,422.55	Constituency Campaigning in the 2008/9/10 General Election	Professor Justin Fisher	Start Date: 01/02/2010 End Date: 31/01/2011

So Cowley got £180k over 7 years, during which time he has written a couple of books, numerous articles, and provided good authoritative analysis of MP’s voting patterns (if not always the best explanation for the underlying reasons). He is good value, and no further money is forthcoming.

On the other hand, this £2million pumped into “British Election Studies”… what the hell is that! This is the first time I’ve heard of it! That’s real money! It’s certainly kept a low profile. I wonder if they’ve heard of us. After all, the Constituency Campaigning project says:

The study will provide an empirically based account of the style and intensity of constituency campaigning in the election; investigate the role of the parties’ central organisations in planning and managing constituency campaigns; analyse the extent to which constituency campaigns involve traditional party members as well as party supporters; and investigate the electoral effects (both short and long-term) of constituency campaigning in a new electoral context.

… so you would think that they might take some input from TheStraightChoice.org, wouldn’t you? But then I’m not an academic or another grant receiving entity whose instincts lie with ensuring that no other competitive force exists in the marketplace when it comes making a bid for a second round of funding. It’s not in their interest to “help out” perceived competitors in any way whatsoever — even when such behavior violates the core principles of the grant giving body.

It’s not standard practice to insert into the remit that grantees should collaborate with others in the field where possible, or provide a point of feedback for reporting performance by outside observers. The only legitimate feedback returns through the organization that got the money.

Which is a conflict of interest that nobody in the system gives a flying fig about.

I’d like to see evidence of solicitations for some proper independent reviews of the different efforts. Only then will it be possible to punch through this wall of corruption that causes the money to be spent with total ineffectiveness.

Update

Forgot to add in photo from the Take Back Parliament For Real This Time Liverpool from Saturday.

In the wake of the Tory/LibDem coalition we have decided to protest to demand “fair votes and a fair choice”, and to say AV is simply not enough

This is a protest walk through Liverpool City Center to make our voices heard!

TIME: The protest will begin at 2pm and end whatever time we end up back at St. Georges.

ROUTE:
Meeting Place, Steps of St. Georges Hall,
Then onto, Renshaw Street, Bold Street, Church Street, around Liverpool One, Liverpool One Gardens, The Strand, Lord Street, Mathew Street, Stanley Street, Victoria Street,
End point: St. Georges Hall.

It would be really great if you could all wear something Purple, be as creative and crazy as you like!
Time: Saturday, May 22, 2010 GMT+01:00
Host: Charlotte Murray
Location:
St. Georges Hall (Liverpool., Merseyside)
Liverpool., Merseyside L1 1JJ

The organizer didn’t show up. About 10 people did get there and eventually found one another by chance. We sat around in the sun and chatted for a bit. Then a bemused policeman wandered over and asked if we were the demonstration he was supposed to be watching.

He then asked some very hard questions, like: “What’s this protest supposed to be all about?”

I didn’t know. The whole Power2010 thing has felt so utterly vacuous and without any depth of purpose, it would have been nice to hear the organizer explain it. So I talked about my own general stuff, which is a lot easier because it has a direction. Although it is not something you march through the centre of Liverpool about. I would have marches, but they would be to the office of the local party branch meeting on the night they were selecting the next candidate for a safe seat behind close doors. That sort of place.