Access.gov
The article Parliament Unplugged (OnLine, 13 May) was a little unfair, since it told only half the story. The official House of Commons/Lords site is excellent, with full text searchable Hansard, forthcoming business, Research Reports, Select Committees Reports etc just the way a web site should be. It's so good that I expect every day to have it taken away.
Website access to government in general (the official UK government website) is pretty good, although not perfect. However, if we compare it to the official party sites we discover that the Labour Party site is laughably feeble in content, and rather flaky - especially if compared with the Lib Dem site or even (whisper it) the Tory party site. New Labour is still puffing to catch up with those fuddy-duddy civil servants in Parliament and Government that they can sometimes - sotto voce - be heard to deride.
Paul Wingrove
University of Greenwich
Web pages are OK, but not essential. The facility to email MPs is required. This is available on the parliament website. All the email symbols point to the same site with only the last three digits unique to the MP. So the system is up. But the MPs are not running. It would seem that all this was disregarded in the interest of a good unbalanced story.
Keith Scott
It was a pity your cover story did not extend its political horizon beyond Westminster. British MEPs were well ahead of their Commons colleagues in embracing the wired world. I established a website for Alex Falconer MEP about three and a half years ago. The irony is that Alex, labelled a dinosaur for his support of clause IV, was almost the first MEP to have a website.
Until parliamentary protocol and MPs' attitudes change, the very notion of "digital democracy" is specious.
I recently searched for a list of MPs' email addresses. The parliamentary website - which you can search by area, name, consituency - doesn't summarise wired MPs: you can't, for instance, download a single file of email addresses.
I eventually did find a file of some 260 email addresses on a "decriminalise cannabis website". I set out to write to as many MPs as possible to engage in some kind of dialogue about the war with Milosevic.
Fewer than a dozen MPs replied. Of these, a couple wrote at length attaching or pasting in press releases; one wrote at length - on paper.
Alun Severn
Under fire
Although welcoming Fred Pearce's timely introduction to the World Fire Web Project (Fires Next Time, May 13), I cannot let his simplistic asides about the links between tropical vegetation fires and possible global warming pass unremarked.
What people fail to grasp about tropical vegetation fires is that they have been going on for millions of years. They are not new, from the annual savanna burns to the more irregular forest fires. Moreover, between 18,000 to 12,000 years ago, under the drier conditions obtaining at the end of the last Ice Age, there were probably far more fires because most of the current forested areas were then savanna grasslands.
Attempts to shift the moral and scientific blame for gas emissions to the countries of the South are totally unacceptable and blatant examples of neo-colonialist thinking.
Philip Stott,
Professor of Biogeography,
University of London
Bullet point
I am unable to decide whether Steve Wright is misinformed or chooses not to reveal the primary reason so many police and special forces require dum-dum bullets (Lethal Weapons, May 13). Ammunition which dumps the maximum amount of energy on impact is unlikely to exit the body of an attacker and cause secondary injuries to bystanders or hostages. Airline security personnel favour this type of ammunition. Normal high-velocity ammunition can puncture the skin of an aircraft.
Noel K Hannan
Crewe
Addrssing
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