Spent day doing paperwork basically: the morning at Parliament and the afternoon at my constituency office.

Earlier this week I became one of the early guinea pigs for www.hearfromyourmp.com – a new experiment in bringing MPs and their constituents together. I’ve been a bit of a sceptic about online interactivity when it comes to politics (examples of such interactivity are often so poor – same old people mouthing the same old slogans) – but am interested to see if this site can make a go of the idea.

It seems to be done by pretty much the same people as did www.theyworkforyou.com. This site has rapidly become a key part of the political furniture – it’s where so many people now turn to find out how MPs are performing. There’s always a risk when you put together stats that too much attention ends up getting paid to what can be counted just because it can be counted – you can count the number of speeches an MP makes but can’t really count their quality! But the site’s done pretty well at picking out sensible numbers and making otherwise obscure information about MPs easy to find. In the end letting people like you keep tabs on people like me is probably good for democracy!

All of which is a way to say – the team doing www.hearfromyourmp.com are pretty impressive. So – fingers crossed – this new scheme will be another useful building block in making democracy a bit healthier in this country. It could certainly do with some help!