First email bulletin – if you haven’t signed up over there, please do.
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Hi everyone,
First of all, we’d like to say thank you for signing up, and welcome to the Save Parliament campaign!
This is the first email bulletin we’ve sent out. We’ll be sending more as things happen, so you can expect to be contacted on a fairly regular basis in the coming weeks.
The third reading of the Bill (the last vote in the Commons) will be sometime after Easter; it’s not been decided exactly when, but it looks like we’ve only got a few weeks at the most before the Commons vote themselves out of existence.
Representations to the Cabinet Office
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From spyblog
On Tuesday, in the House of Commons, Jim Murphy said that he’d only had 50 representations made to him about the Bill, with no mention of whether they were for or against it.
50 doesn’t seem very many to us, considering the widespread opposition to the Bill. Many more people have written to their MPs about the Bill through the Save Parliament website, and we have had LOTS more than 50 people sign up for the campaign in just three days.
So, we reckon it’s time to show Jim Murphy the true scale of the opposition to his plans. We’d like to ask
you to contact the Cabinet Office and voice your concerns. Keep it polite; abusive emails or letters will only hurt our cause.
Mr. Murphy’s address is:
Jim Murphy MP
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State
Cabinet Office
70 Whitehall
London SW1A 2AS
Spy Blog says that his cabinet office email address should be:
jim.murphy@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk
Alternatively, you could send your emails to his standard MP address, which is:
jimmurphymp@parliament.uk
There are many more contact details on his website
There are also general contact details for the Cabinet Office
Media contacts
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We’re trying to raise the profile of this Bill in the media; if you could help us with this in any way, please let us know. Alternatively, if you know anyone who could help, please send them the website details and ask them to contact us if they are interested.
Raising awareness
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We will only beat this Bill by raising public awareness, so we’d also like to ask you all to keep sending the website to your friends, family, colleagues, in fact anyone and everyone. The more people that know about the Bill, the better chance we have of stopping it.
Latest Links
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The LRRB made the front page of Slashdot this morning
Also, the BBC Radio 4 programme “Law in Action” had a piece on Tuesday afternoon (it starts around 20 minutes in)
Murky has set up a LRRB-related blog aggregator on Squidoo, which will show you the latest news from across the anti-LRRB blogging community
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edited to add – I know many of you have already written to your mps. What’s another letter to another bloke? Five minutes to save democracy – make it into a home education opportunity! Anyone any good at press releases, or have any journalists in the family? Any children in the bbc press pack want to do a report for there?
Technorati Tags:legislative and regulatory reform bill, save parliament
Comments
5 responses to “Save parliament.”
Reply from Oliver Heald:
Many thanks for your e-mail. The Lib Dems and ourselves are taking the same approach to the Bill, working together hand in hand. We oppose the Bill unless major changes are made.
There are two chances in the Commons to get the Bill changed – in Committee (which we have just finished) and later on Report – which will be on the Floor of the House after Easter.. That is why we and the Lib Dems have put down lots of amendments and we have voted for their amendments and vice versa.
What we are trying to do is change the Bill so that it can ONLY be used to scrap outdated and non-controversial regulations and laws and also to make non-controversial law changes proposed by the Law Commission.
After the Report Stage there is a vote on whether the Bill is satisfactory. We will vote NO unless the vital changes have been made.
The Lib Dems and ourselves have voted exactly the same way on this Bill, because we agree that it is no good as it stands.
Oliver Heald MP
Well, that sounds as if at least they have their act together, which was not quite the impression that I got from the response from the esteemed leader.
Have been emailing with the guy running Save parliament today, will get back to you if anything comes of it.
Duh! I blogged about this, left a link, wrote to my MP, and didn’t think to actually join the campaign! Thanks for highlighting it
There might not have been a join option at that point, it was added after the site was launched 🙂
Ah…that explains it! Was just about to echo Clare’s remark, till I read yours, Jax. Will get on to it. Heard back from our MP today (lib dem)…He too is of opinion that amendments will do the trick.