perlmonger: (revolting)
2008-07-06 04:37 pm

Telling the bastards who they work for

I'm assuming (I hope with justification) that any EU citizen reading this has already been in touch with their MEPs about the impending amendments to the Telecoms Package.

FWIW, here's my base email (I amended it slightly depending on to whom it was addressed):
I am writing to you as a constituent asking you to exert whatever influence you have with members of the IMCO and IMTR committees of the European Parliament to vote against amendments 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 that have been introduced into the Telecoms package.

These amendments were introduced under the influence of industry lobbyists whose interests are in the attempted maintenance of obsolete business models that have become unsustainable; they are a stealth attempt to subvert earlier rejection by Parliament of explicit legislation to the same ends. The proposed measures are disproportionate, unworkable in practice, violate privacy and personal data security and would lead to entire families being denied access to the internet through the presumed guilt of one member.

The committees are scheduled to vote on this package tomorrow, 7th July, and I urge you to do what you can to have these amendments rejected and, failing that, to vote against the package yourself should it be presented for a vote by the Parliament as a whole.

I apologise for the lateness of this communication, but I only found out about this today myself: please do what you can to prevent these egregious measures being codified into European law and to ensure that the European Parliament continues to represent the interests of its electors, even where those conflict with the short-term advantage of multinational corporations and their lobbyists.
perlmonger: (1984)
2005-12-13 02:26 pm
Entry tags:

A thin veneer of democratic accountability

On 23rd of November, I used WriteToThem.com to contact my MEPs, expressing my concern about the data retention directive and asking them to take my concerns into account when voting (I was as reasonable and rant-free as I could manage; quite surprised myself, I did).

Anyhow. Today, a little over three weeks later, a fourth response has wended its way into my mailbox:
Neil ParishConservative24 Novemberemailfor
Roger KnapmanUKIP1 Decemberpostagainst
Graham WatsonLibDem2 Decemberpostagainst
Caroline JacksonConservative13 Decemberemailfor
Graham BoothUKIP-- no reply --against
Giles ChichesterConservative-- no reply --against
Glyn FordLabour-- no reply --for

Apropos nothing, really. I'll update this post if any of the other three condescend to acknowledge my communication in the future.

ETA: added how they all voted, data courtesy spyblog