Marcus Wood is the prospective parliamentary candidate for Torbay (the seat he fought in 2005) and writes a regular blog at www.marcuswood.blogspot.com.
As the expenses crisis moves into its next phase and the political Tumbrels roll almost daily across Parliament Square, we are focusing almost entirely on what - or rather, who - is going, and a lot less on what it means is coming to our Parliament.
Information Technology in our politics has so far been seen only as a threat (missing CDs, identity theft, cyber attack) but it is also massive opportunity. It could be argued the expenses scandal only came about because new technology makes keeping this information feasible: millions of receipts that would normally have filled a cellar of filing cabinets were passed on a single CD to a newspaper, and then on to the electorate.
This is a profound change and, added to the Internet, it becomes a revolutionary one.
Since coming into existence our 'public' Parliament has been anything but. The laws passed, the questions asked and what MPs said and did were written down and filed in public records which only a handful of people would ever see. MPs have worked on the basis that what they did was scrutinised by a handful of lobby journalists and then interpreted and passed on often third-hand to disinterested electors hundreds of miles away.
Success in the political era that is just ending was predicated on effectively managing this process - a technique we now call spin. The masters of this technique are New Labour.
Subscribe to this blog's feed