Consultation is Not Participation

December 6th, 2007

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Posted by ChrisG at 4:50 pm

Let’s go back to the subject of government-by-consultation: a friend pointed me to this today. News of how Greenpeace’s challenge to the Government’s first consultation ‘exercise’ on nuclear power earlier this year has morphed into a different challenge:

Greenpeace’s new complaint concerns the techniques used by polling company Opinion Leader Research.
The environmental pressure group claims that survey questions were “not of appropriate quality” and that “positive messages” for nuclear power were “presented as statements of fact”.
The group goes on to claim that respondents “were not able to answer the questions in a way that reflected the view they wanted to express” and that “respondents were led towards a particular answer”.

‘Opinion Leading Research’, more like.

The attacks on the Government’s ’strategy for engagement’ are increasingly focusing on the main problem: the fraudulent basis of the ‘consultation culture’, namely the systematic framing of such exercises in ways which intrinsically rule out genuine engagement.