Posts Tagged ‘Jo Swinson’
Jo Swinson: “I want to put Parliament on YouTube”
Jo Swinson, Britain’s youngest MP, e-mails me back instantly when I contact her to arrange an interview. Either, I think, she must be incredibly efficient or she has too much time on her hands.
But by the time I meet her at the end of the week, the 29-year-old has already appeared on Question Time, led a debate in Parliament on tax credits, and seen the results of her hard work pay-off to force the Government to reverse its position on the publication of MP’s expenses. And this, it seems, is just a normal week’s work for Liberal Democrat Swinson, who is MP for East Dunbartonshire – the constituency where she grew up. In fact, I later find out, the Mail on Sunday reported in January that she was the ‘most active’ Scottish MP in Westminster during 2008, having spoken 58 times in debates and having submitted 220 written questions.
In her cramped office in the eaves of 1 Parliament Street, Swinson signs a stack of letters to new voters in her constituency as she talks about her achievements as the youngest MP in Westminster – a role colloquially known as the ‘Baby of the House.’
“You need to be determined to get into politics. It’s hard to get elected and it’s hard to stay elected,” she says. Indeed, although Swinson was only 25 when she was elected in 2005, she had already stood unsuccessfully twice – in Hull East in the 2001 General Election, where she gained a 6% swing from John Prescott, then-deputy leader of the Labour Party, and in Strathkelvin and Bearsden in the 2003 Scottish Parliamentery election, where she came third. Since being elected in 2005 she has acted as the Liberal Democrat’s Shadow Scotland Secretary and Shadow Spokeswoman for Women and Equality and, at the start of this year, she was appointed to the role of Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs.
But Swinson’s first forays into politics were as a student at the London School of Economics, as president of her halls of residence committee and a member of the Liberal Democrat Youth and Students organisation (now Liberal Youth), where she played an instrumental role in campaigning to scrap tuition fees.
U-Turn on MP expenses as “first real victory for online political campaign”
It is certainly a sign of the times when even BBC Radio Four presenters are talking about FaceBook and Twitter on the Today programme.
Yesterday, however, on the 5th Birthday of the now-iconic site, which was set up by Mark Zuckerberg from his dorm room at Harvard, the programme discussed how social networking sites have so rapidly become a part of our everyday lives.
But in addition to the social aspect of these sites, they are also becoming increasingly important as a tool for political campaigning and protest.
Jo Swinson, Britain's youngest MP
Much has been made of the use that Barack Obama made of social networking sites during the election campaign. Some British politicians, however, are not far behind; Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson is a regular Tweeter, and she partially attributes the Government’s recent U-Turn on the publication of detailed breakdowns of MPs expenses, for which she tabled a Parliamentary motion, to the use of social networking sites. Over 7,000 people joined the FaceBook group and thousands who heard about this story through FaceBook and Twitter sent e-mails to MPs, forcing the Government to abolish its plan to exempt MPs’ expenses from the Freedom of Information Act.
Conservative blogger Iain Dale called it “the first real victory for an online political campaign in this country”, whilst the founder of campaign group mySociety, Tom Steinberg, said: “This is a huge victory not just for transparency; it’s a bellwether for a change in the way politics works. There’s no such thing as a good day to bury bad news any more, the internet has seen to that.”
Most dramatic is the speed at which the campaign gathered momentum. According to Peter Facey, director of Unlock Democracy, the campaign that was mounted in just a few hours would have taken weeks 10 years ago. There’s a great article on what happened by Mike Lowe here.
And internet-savvy Swinson is not stopping there. When I interviewed her yesterday she also said that she would like to make clips of Parliament available on YouTube – with the dual purpose of getting more young people interested in politics and of making the political system more transparent and accessible. She may have a battle on her hands for this one though – even though some European Parliamentary debates are on YouTube, she suspects she will first need to explain to many of her older colleagues in Westminster what the site actually is… See below for YouTube video of Finnish MEP Alexander Stubbs arguing in the European Parliament for “equal treatment for Vodka”.
