Recall bill: Your thoughts

Hot off the press: 38 Degrees’s draft recall bill is back from the lawyers. It’s the bill that would make it possible for voters to sack MPs who have behaved badly. That thousands of 38 Degrees members chipped in to make possible.

But before we go any further, we need to decide together if we’re happy with our draft law. We need to make sure that it truly represents thousands of 38 Degrees members.

There are rumours that the government’s planning to start pushing through their bill in the next few weeks. So it’s really important that we get our people-powered bill ready. Click here to fill in a quick poll on our draft law.

The big difference between their draft bill and ours is that theirs puts a committee of MPs in charge – while ours put voters in the driving seat. Our draft bill has a lot of detail. Several MPs and other organisations, like Unlock Democracy and Taxpayers Alliance, have also been involved. This is to make sure that the government can’t ignore it by saying it wouldn’t work in practice.

The more people who fill in the poll, the more likely MPs will listen to us, as we’ll be representing the wishes of the people they need to listen to, their voters.

The sooner we’ve approved our draft bill – the better position we’ll be in to stop the government pushing through their sorry excuse for a recall law. To read an explanation of the law, some Q & A’s, and the draft bill in full please click here.

This is a really ambitious and innovative tactic to try and secure real recall. The big stumbling block which critics against real recall have used was that it won’t work in practice.

So 38 Degrees members have been chipping in to fund our plan. A top lawyer has written the 38 Degrees draft recall bill which members are now considering. Next, a committee of MPs will scrutinise the bill and we’ll hope to get enough supporters of real recall to make the government realise they need to back it!