Cold Calling (North East Hertfordshire Liberal Democrats)

North East Hertfordshire Liberal Democrats <bob.young@ntlworld.com>

Cold Calling

September 27, 2008 6:00 AM
By Andrew Duff MEP in East Anglian Daily Times
Originally published by Andrew Duff MEP

When Nick Clegg calls me, we get on fine. But my party leader's attempt to make 250,000 cold phone calls, via a recorded message, has fallen foul of the information police. As I was not one of the lucky recipients of Nick's automatised call I cannot vouch for the experience. It will certainly have annoyed quite a lot of people - although party headquarters reports a large number of positive responses too.

In any case, that type of exercise, clearly borrowed from the US presidential election campaign, is not to be allowed over here. So how should politicians communicate with their electorate?

The problem is particularly acute for Members of the European Parliament who, to be effective law makers, have to spend much of their time living in Brussels and whose constituencies are in any case very large. The seven MEPs for our constituency of the East of England, for example, cover six counties and 56 House of Commons seats. On top of that, the European Union is fairly complicated, badly explained and poorly understood. General political ignorance of how the EU works and what it does was very much on display in Ireland during its recent referendum campaign on the Lisbon Treaty.

The latest Eurobarometer survey shows that only 4 per cent of the EU citizens know that the next European Parliamentary elections are to take place in June next year, and only 46 per cent claim that they will be interested in the election campaign. (You are most likely to be interested, by the way, if you are a well-educated male aged between 40 and 54.) Across the Union, European issues seem to be becoming at least as critical as national issues - although as many as a third of British voters do not know what will be the main factor in their decision on how to vote.

To drum up interest in the run up to next year's campaign, the European Parliament has recently launched its own web-based television channel. EuroparlTV has four channels in 20 languages: Your Parliament, aimed at specialists, Your Voice, for the general public, Young Europe, for youth, and Parliament Live, providing continuous coverage of actual events. EuroparlTV will stimulate informed political debate.

Take a look at www.europarltv.europa.eu. Two things will become immediately clear: first, all politicians are not the same and, second, your vote will make a difference.

Andrew Duff is the Liberal Democrat MEP for the East of England. www.andrewduff.eu