Matthew's Journal

I don't think it makes much difference at all. None the less, it makes more difference that doing nothing at all; and it is one of the few avenues open to us to make our opinions known.

I'm not sure what Jim Cunningham's for, exactly. Abi and I went to see him about the national identity register a couple of years ago, and he just wasn't interested. We were in there for about ten minutes, and he spent the first three saying we should have let him know in advance what we wanted to talk about (we did), the next few minutes dismissing our concerns as Tory scaremongering (in a way that implied that we must ourselves therefore be Tories trying to cause trouble) and then the last couple of minutes saying that he wasn't really interested because it was a manifesto commitment and therefore he had a sacred duty to vote for it (although for some reason this principle didn't extend to the previous manifesto commitment to not introduce top-up fees). We left with the distinct impression that we'd been wasting his valuable time.

A few months back, the prospective Tory candidate came knocking on doors, so I brought up the matter of the NIR, and he totally got the point of it all. So I'm currently inclined to vote for him next time round.