I’ve been supporting the Make Poverty History campaign for a little while now, as can be seen by the ribbon in the top right corner of my site, and I’ve used the campaign site to send automatically-generated emails to various figures of import within the government. I’ve sent messages to both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, but neither of those slack bastards bothered to write back.
However, my local MP was a different matter. Nick Palmer is my local Labour MP (Broxtowe) and he surprisingly mailed me back with a response within a few hours of me sending my mail from the campaign site. It was obviously a cut and paste job, but it certainly appeared that he’d sent it himself, especially when I subsequently received two further emails – one to provide an attachment of a relevant paper he’d written for The Statesman which he’d forgotten to stick on the previous email and a second to apologise for accidentally leaving the name of the previous correspondant on my mail.
Apparently, he’s the Labour Party’s “specialist” on this campaign and he “strongly supports” it. This is good news, and I’ve asked to be kept informed via a mailing list on this whole debate. I’m not usually political, but this campaign has really interested me.
The noises from Gordon Brown were encouraging a few weeks ago, so we’ll see where this goes in the long run. Hopefully there’ll be large strides taken to eradicate poverty world-wide, but knowing how this government works, and to be fair just about every other government in the “developed” nations, there’ll be some compromise somewhere that’ll be no use to anyone.
Still, this is starting to pique my interest in the political spectrum. Perhaps I’ll start asking a few probing questions on local issues to Nick and see what sort of replies I get.
