Having succeeded in motivating people to educate their MPs about some of the more ill-informed parts of RIP — and, unfortunately, been less successful with others — we lay dormant for a while. You might say we sulked.
Well, not quite. We decided to reuse the web-based Fax-An-MP engine we'd built for the RIP campaign and allow anyone to use it to contact their MP on any issue they saw fit. Hence FaxYourMP.com was born. It's now on its way to sending its 50,000 fax to MPs. We look forward to the day when we can turn it off.
Earlier this summer, a large slice of luck helped us pull off a minor coup, when we relaunched our site a matter of hours before news broke of the Home Office's attempt to create a 'Snoopers Charter'.
Thanks to our supporters, their friends and some good luck, we were very pleased that we helped kick up a media storm that brought the issue to the attention of many sympathetic MPs and, allegedly, one Hugh Blunkett, Esq. The Home Office swiftly dropped its proposals to extend RIP; the day was won and we got to feel really good about having helped make a difference.
So, having sat around feeling rather too smug for six months, we felt it was about time to alert people to the flaws in this ID card consultation. So here we are…
If you'd like to be informed when the site has a new feature (or, when we get up to speed, a regular digest of changes), send a blank mail to stand-news-subscribe@lists.stand.org.uk, and we'll stick you on a mailing list.
And if you'd like to help out, or have any suggestions, you can mail us directly at stand@stand.org.uk. If you're really keen to speak to us, you can call on 07050 605010.
You can find the old STAND homepage here.