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Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

And, obviously the parliamentary rule should change here, but it's also perfectly within the power of a political party to set down a norm they expect their MPs to follow. The norm Starmer sets is "they're fine". www.mysociety.org/2025/07/02/w...

When a new Register of Members’ Financial Interests comes out, we make that available in more formats in TheyWorkForYou, and we look at the new entries to see if there are any interesting patterns. It was noteworthy looking at the release a few weeks ago to see five MPs registering free football tickets, including Keir Starmer.

This was a big conversation last year, and there was never actually a promise to stop doing this — just a much more limited change that they would stop accepting clothes as a donation (which as the Guardian points out, was only ever a small proportion of gifts received). There is an emerging pattern with ministers (examples for David Lammy and Jonathan Reynolds) accepting the hospitality ticket, but donating to the associated club charity an equivalent amount.

The Starmer example is tricky, because the argument made for him is security issues around not being in a private box (in this case donated by the club). But it’s also true that when MPs are considering if they want a free day out, they can look to the top and see tacit approval in what ministers accept. Unless there’s a rule change, or leadership from the top to set a norm, this unpopular practice is just going to continue. There are entirely predictable “here are the freebies MPs got over the last five years” news stories that can be avoided at the next election —but it needs leadership now.

November 14, 2025 at 12:13 PM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

Following up last RT, it is stunning how much Parliament's rules are out of step with not just the private sector, but the civil service and local councils research.mysociety.org/html/beyond-...

While the Code of Conduct for MPs only talks about disclosing gifts, guidance for civil servants is much more rooted in offences under the Bribery Act. The Civil Service Code more directly says that civil servants should not "accept gifts or hospitality or receive other benefits from anyone which might reasonably be seen to compromise your personal judgement or integrity".

2009 Cabinet Office Guidance breaks this down further with points around purpose, proportionality and conflicts of interest. Individual departments give more precise guidance, for example the Single Source Regulations Office (loosely influential because they publish their guidance online) talks about gifts being of a nominal/notional value, for an appropriate reason, not at an inappropriate time, and being one-off or irregular. In that case they also talk about a nominal amount of £50 for a single gift — and no more than £200 from the same source. There is no lower threshold for registering gifts. All gifts made, even if declined, need to be stored in the SSRO's registry. The ICO's policy allows that sub-£5 gifts do not need to be recorded. In some areas, councillors have far stricter rules on disclosures and non-acceptance than MPs, with Merton Council requiring gifts of £25 or greater to be registered.

The basic ideas that "smaller gifts need to be recorded" and "there are some gifts you should not accept" are not radical ideas: they are standard practice through the public and private sectors. Code of Conduct should be revised to lower the declaration limit and introduce, for the first time, principles that guide whether they should accept certain types of gift at all.

November 14, 2025 at 12:10 PM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

"We're creating a problem we're also the solution to" is again, much less convincing than they want it to be.

November 14, 2025 at 10:32 AM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

Passive voice here, but the barriers aren't just dropping by themselves, they're dropping because of software you're creating and selling!

The barriers to performing sophisticated cyberattacks have dropped substantially—and we predict that they’ll continue to do so. With the correct setup, threat actors can now use agentic AI systems for extended periods to do the work of entire teams of experienced hackers: analyzing target systems, producing exploit code, and scanning vast datasets of stolen information more efficiently than any human operator. Less experienced and resourced groups can now potentially perform large-scale attacks of this nature.

November 14, 2025 at 10:27 AM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

None of this is nearly as mitigating as the writer wants it to be www.anthropic.com/news/disrupt...

At this point they had to convince Claude—which is extensively trained to avoid harmful behaviors—to engage in the attack. They did so by jailbreaking it, effectively tricking it to bypass its guardrails. They broke down their attacks into small, seemingly innocent tasks that Claude would execute without being provided the full context of their malicious purpose. They also told Claude that it was an employee of a legitimate cybersecurity firm, and was being used in defensive testing.

November 14, 2025 at 10:24 AM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

One of the reasons freebies matter is that, if behaving ethically, politicians should recuse themselves from issues they should actually take an interest in

November 13, 2025 at 8:45 AM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

Yes, given that SIs can't be amended, requiring one-org-per-order would be appropriate.

further suggestion is to introduce votes on the proscription of individual organisations (including any aliases). The
current process, following parliamentary convention for statutory instruments, allows the government to present a list
of organisations for Parliament to approve, but does not allow amendments to remove individual organisations from
that list.74 To allow Parliament to vote on individual organisations, the Terrorism Act 2000 would need to be amended
to require a separate statutory instrument for each organisation being proscribed.
82 Recommendation 82: If a proscription is based on intelligence material, the Intelligence and
Security Committee should be invited to consider any proposed proscription order, and where
possible, report to Parliament ahead of any debate and decision on an order.
83 Recommendation 83: The Terrorism Act 2000 should be amended so that only one organisation
(including any aliases) can be added to the list of proscribed organisations in e

November 11, 2025 at 11:25 AM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

Oh no

November 8, 2025 at 12:29 PM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

So this is pretty bad I think. What seems like a considered attempt to not make a public donation by splitting it across multiple "sources" just below the threshold.

I think debateable what "source" means here but the correct thing for Nandy would have been to declare them regardless.

November 7, 2025 at 1:05 PM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

November 4, 2025 at 6:07 PM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

A few for mercury prize (there's a few more for other things in there, just logging some multiples for notes) www.theyworkforyou.com/interests/ca...

November 4, 2025 at 5:39 PM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

In Freebies, Ascot. Note the sub £300 entries where those MPs have previously recorded a gift from Ascot (the rule is cumulative).

November 4, 2025 at 5:35 PM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

In tracking gifts from non-free countries, the Saudi Arabia APPG went on a trip. Will check in to see what the APPG itself declares in the next release www.theyworkforyou.com/interests/ca...

November 4, 2025 at 5:31 PM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

Continued labour deputy leader donations (over £1,500).

November 4, 2025 at 5:25 PM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

This is a bit related to a shift from EDMs to open letters, where backbenchers are lobbying the government in public (with more caveats than EDMs allow) www.mysociety.org/2025/10/21/s...

Similarly, open letters are free from the format restrictions and word count of EDMs (a single sentence of less than 250 words). This can be important as many letters represent a group of government MPs trying to change the government position. Being able to write more is important in referencing previous government actions, anchoring the change in agreed principles and so on, while still being a critical signal.

This fits with a general change in usage of EDMs. While the number of actual EDMs proposed per year have remained roughly the same, overall signatures have dropped by almost half since 2015 (33k to 15k), and far fewer petitions get a large number of signatures. The average number of signatures per EDM has dropped from 27 to 12. Some of this activity has moved to the new social open letter format.

November 4, 2025 at 7:43 AM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

And a slightly harder question which it got wrong, but I do sort of blame the Parliament site for. Tessa Munt abstained (voted for and against), but Parliament presents that as voting in two different lists because it doesn't acknowledge abstaining as a thing.

How did my MP Tessa Munt vote on proscribing palestine action as a terrorist group According to the parliamentary record, Tessa Munt (Liberal Democrat MP for Wells & Mendip Hills) voted against the motion to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.
votes.parliament.uk
+2
leftfootforward.org
+2

If you like, I can check for any statements she made about the vote.

November 3, 2025 at 3:49 PM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

Doing some checking into click-throughs from ChatGPT summaries, and was curious what a very TheyWorkForYou questions throws up. It clearly likes a diversity of different links (not necessarily sources on the same thing) - going to votes.parliament, Parellel Parliament, and TheyWorkForYou.

how has my MP bobby dean voted on smoking bans: Your MP, Bobby Dean (Liberal Democrat, representing Carshalton & Wallington) has voted against the major recent legislation aimed at increasing smoking bans/tobacco regulation.

Here are the key details:

On the Tobacco and Vapes Bill second reading (26 Nov 2024), Dean voted No (against the Bill) while the House overall voted Yes.
votes.parliament.uk
+2
TheyWorkForYou
+2

On a later stage (26 Mar 2025) of the same Bill, Dean again voted No, against the majority of his party and the House.
Parallel Parliament
+2
TheyWorkForYou
+2

The summarised record states: “Voted against smoking bans — 1 vote against, in 2025. Comparable Liberal Democrat MPs generally voted for.”
TheyWorkForYou

If you like, I can check all votes of his on smoking‐related legislation (including amendments) and send you a detailed list.

November 3, 2025 at 3:45 PM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

To build on this, chatbots are a logical continuation of algorithmic social media because once users have a relationship with the algorithm rather than each other, the steps lead you towards removing the unreliable people from the picture alexparsons.co.uk/blog/posts/2...

The transition between the two is gradual. The algorithmic timeline encourages actual people to behave in engagement-maximising ways. This goes from people understanding what gets numbers, and going and making it, through content farms that start to rely on automated approaches, and then increasingly AI to generate content. At the transition point, you have platforms running their “here is what people want to see” algorithms, and then “users” of the platforms running “make what people want to see” algorithms to provide that content and extract some money from the process. You can see if you’re the platform with some appeal in cutting out the middle man, replacing the nominally human content wranglers with actual machines and not really noticing you lost something of value about five steps before. A system that started out selling human connection has been step-by-step replaced by machine processes offering a simulation of that.

October 29, 2025 at 7:54 AM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

We've also made it easier to review saved alerts in the browser and see recent updates - helping you manage more alerts www.mysociety.org/2025/10/23/i...

Screenshot of alerts interface, showing several queries with their this week counts

October 24, 2025 at 9:57 AM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

Jumping off this, here's something on why Parliament should control more of its time www.mysociety.org/2023/07/18/g...

$Opening up the schedule Russell and Glover argue it is “difficult for MPs to get key topics of concern debated in the Commons, and in particular to make binding decisions on them, in the face of government resistance – even where a majority of [MPs] would support this”, and suggest changes to fix this problem. They highlight previous recommendations and examples from other Parliaments, international and in the UK, in favour of giving Parliament as a whole more power over the agenda. For instance, they argue in favour of more dedicated time for non-government business (highlighting that the Welsh Parliament has an explicit 3:2 rule for government versus other business). They also highlight a previous recommendation from the 2009 Wright Committee that that the schedule should be possible for Parliament to amend, which had been “standard practice in many parliaments around the world and has operated in the Scottish Parliament without problems for the last decade”. In the fracking vote, Labour’s approach was attacked by the government as being against how the system works – but the wider context shows that the UK Parliament works badly when compared to other parliaments, and the current system does not work with the best interests of citizens in mind. The Citizens Assembly on Democracy in the UK was very supportive of giving Parliament more control over its time. With overwhelming support for the idea that MPs should be able to ensure important public issues outside the government agenda are discussed (recommendation 1.7), that bills do not need to originate in the government and time should be available to properly examine potential bills with cross party support (recommendation 1.8), and that while the government needed to have the time to deliver what they were elected to do – more fixed time was needed in the schedule for non-government business (recommendation 1.9). Arguments about how parliamentary scheduling should happen are sometimes dismissed as procedural …$

October 23, 2025 at 9:48 AM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

As well as the content update, progress on richer information on adding vote annotations and whipping information to the voting summary page. This is our only example of that for the moment, where we've added a few links to public statements to test the process. www.mysociety.org/2025/10/22/v...

Screenshot showing a link to public statements about the policy area, and that it contained a free vote.

October 22, 2025 at 9:47 AM

Alex Parsons

@alexparsons.bsky.social

There's been a real change in the use of EDMs over the last few years - with a much lower average number of signature. At least some of this has moved to open letters shared on social media www.mysociety.org/2025/10/21/s...