Thanks to Jack Perschke, who is standing against Margaret Beckett in Derby, for this one!

Have a look at Google Moderator.  It does all sorts of things – it’s a communal suggestion box, it allows people to submit questions and rank the answer, it uses the wisdom of crowds, it gives everyone a voice.

I think it might be my favourite web invention ever (even better than politicalbetting.com which I would have said is really quite difficult).

This is why the internet is important in politics. It’s not because it’s The Internet, all self-important and different. It’s because it’s democratising, it’s transparent, it allows people with an interest to really dig deep but it also gives those with only a passing interest as much access as they want. And most importantly, in this case, it’s another way for politicians to be directly in contact with their constituents and it removes the pre-moderation that is part of a public meeting.

I’m quite tempted to make this a compulsory tool for all MPs.

There’s a fascinating piece in Joe Trippi’s must-read ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’, where he talks about the power of the internet in forcing the resignation of Trent Lott as Senate Majority Leader.  Lott made some comments at Strom Thurmond’s 100^th birthday party effectively saying he wished that Thurmond had won the 1948 election (when he stood on an outright racist/ segregationist ticket).  The remarks received little coverage from the mainstream press (apart from ABC) who preferred to focus on Thurmond’s years in the Senate.  However, the remarks were picked up on by the blogosphere, which launched a campaign against Lott’s offensive remarks – eventually, and quite rightly, leading to his resignation.  The blogosphere was dictating the agenda for the mainstream media, who eventually had little option but to follow the internet’s lead.

I was reminded of this when watching Marr’s question to Brown about prescription drugs and, particularly, his preface that “everybody in Westminster is talking about it.”  What this means of course is that it has been the talk of certain elements of the blogosphere for months.  Once again the internet and the blogosphere are setting the agenda.  It is forcing the mainstream media to tread where previously they would have feared to tread.  Does anybody doubt that, if this was the rumour a few years ago, the rumour would have remained the preserve of the press bar at Westminster and it certainly wouldn’t have been discussed on a high profile BBC programme in an interview with the Prime Minister.

For the record, I’m not at all comfortable with where this style of questioning is leading British politics.  I don’t like the idea that gossip and innuendo about the Prime Minister can make it to breakfast TV.   But the point is that the proliferation of the blogosphere has made such a development inevitable.  What was the preserve of the in the know few is now, thanks to blogs and an open source world, openly discussed.  The mainstream media is now almost obliged to follow the lead of the blogosphere.

I don’t want to spend all my time talking about Gordon Brown but I think his announcement this weekend of a binding Fiscal Responsibility Act is very instructive about the problems he is facing.

His first problem is that no-one thinks he gets anything right.  I’ve written before about how he cannot admit that he made mistakes on some things because that will just up the ante on others (even things he got right. Can’t think of many at the moment, but there are some).

His second problem is that few people actually trust him with their money any more. He was in charge in the run-up to the recession – indeed, his profligacy and failure to prepare during the boom exacerbated our problems.

His third is that every time he tries to move onto a Conservative policy he implements it badly – makes it more complicated, removes the accountability, fails to ensure it will achieve what it’s supposed to. So for example we’ve had Border Police, which turned out to be giving new shirts to existing staff. And they’ve been trying to privatise part of the Post Office but have been scared off.

His real problem (for today anyway) is that he’s too late. If only he had said a year ago, we’re going to borrow (and print) a shedload of money but because we know that that’s far from ideal, we’re going to enshrine in law a requirement for balanced budgets and deficit reduction, and show we’ve got a plan for coming out of the recession.

Instead it’s a panicky response – too little, too late. Does anyone seriously believe, after the shenanigans over the golden rule, what ‘the economic cycle’ actually is, and the non-independence of government statistics, that a law brought in by Brown to reduce debt by specified levels would actually achieve that in reality? They won’t even put PFI on the books.

What we actually need is a properly independent statistics office and a properly independent regulator which says ’stop spending’ or ‘that’s not true’ or ’stop trying to fiddle the figures’. That’s the only way anyone will trust it. Whether or not a Chancellor takes their advice is a different matter – I fully accept that sometimes there will be political imperatives and very occasionally you could argue that these outweigh the economic ones.

I think that would be rare indeed, especially if the regulator had already made its independent assessment known, and especially if any figures were published in a format that meant normal people could look through them and investigate what they meant.

And that is the whole point of the Office of Budget Responsibility, the pledge to publish all government spending over £25,000 and the pledge to publish government documents in accessible formats.

It’s not going to be perfect, and it will probably have some hiccups. But that’s what is needed to recover trust in how our money is being used.

I went to the Lib Dem conference in 2004. It was in Bournemouth and it was my first ever political conference. I hasten to add that I was sent there officially by the Tory party – but I came back having filleted a few ideas from the mish mash that they had proposed.

Sadly by that point the Tories’ overall direction was pretty much set in stone. This time though it could all be so different.

Let’s go back to the rationale for Eric’s love-bombing. If someone cares about civil liberties, social mobility and opportunity, aspiration, the environment… they could vote Lib Dem and risk having a Labour government (especially if Nick Clegg, Vince Cable and Ming Campbell get their way). Or they could vote Conservative this time and make sure that there’s a loud and decisive voice saying to the Tory party ‘THIS is what we want’ and we expect you to deliver.

So that’s one side of the equation. What about the other side? Should the Conservatives be looking at some of the Lib Dems’ policy ideas?  I think so. Not all, not many, but some could have some roots in sensible ideas.

In an ideal world, we might want to look at their proposals to take all income under £10,000 out of the tax system. Apparently that would cost £22 billion, so won’t be happening tomorrow.

But – maybe, like Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare proposals, the upfront cost actually saves the Exchequer money in the long run. For example, people earning under £10,000 a year will get at least some of the 50-odd types of benefit currently on offer. As we all know only too well from the spectacularly untrustworthy EU accounts, every time you administer money, you lose some of it.  So maybe leaving it where it began – in people’s pockets – means it will achieve more than it could by going to the government and then back again.

I don’t know. I don’t know the figures. But in principle, I think this is an idea we could look at, especially if introduced with the IDS proposals. It’s simplification, it’s giving people more responsibility, it’s removing complicated backwards and forwards – it’s very new Tory.

I’m reading Zac Goldsmith’s book, The Constant Economy, at the moment. In it, he proposes “a political programme: a tool for voters, and a challenge to the political classes; a gauntlet thrown down at their feet”. As I haven’t finished it yet, I won’t say much about it. But one idea that recurs frequently is direct democracy (as also espoused by Dan Hannan, Douglas Carswell, Greg Clark, Nick Herbert, Jeremy Hunt, John Penrose, Theresa Villiers… the list goes on).

I am a huge fan of their ideas. I think that even where some of them are impractical at the moment, steps can be taken. I want to see a reversal of the role between state and citizen so the citizen holds the reins, and the state is there to enable our lives rather than run them.

Lots of the ideas suggested in the 2005 book and the 2008 one (The Plan) have or will become official party policy.  Which is great news.

One word of warning… Every time anyone mentions California (where I have sadly never been), it is held up as a paragon of voter initiatives and local control. They even have a recall mechanism which I think is absolutely essential (with appropriate safeguards – but who wants to wait 4 years to chuck out a corrupt politician?) and have argued for before.   But it appears that they forgot something in California. Apparently every single budget set-aside which is specifically voted on is then set in stone forever. So if, say, there was something in 1989 which particularly exercised voters, they got a vote up, won it, won some budget to do whatever it was they wanted, achieved it… the money still,  twenty years on, has to be spent on that project even though it was a success and isn’t needed any more.

So what’s needed as well is either sunset clauses, or an automatic cut-off at which point another vote needs to be won.  I know that is a lot of voting (so let’s see if we can make that more efficient as well) but it really will be essential to be able to say, yes – we did that. Now it’s time to move on.