Power 2010

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Power 2010 was a campaign to reform the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Its goal was to identify five key reforms that the public wanted and to get every candidate in the 2010 General Election to back them.

The idea came from the Power Commission, which looked at why people in the UK were not engaging with politics. From 2005 to 2006, the commission highlighted the “Myth of Apathy” and poor political engagement, but it didn’t lead to much change. Helena Kennedy, who chaired the Power Commission, also chairs Power 2010. The campaign is funded by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust and has support from activists like Billy Bragg and Mark Thomas.

Power 2010 ran in four phases. Phase 1 invited ideas from the public (now closed). Starting on 15 September 2009, the project received thousands of ideas from people across the UK; by 30 November 2009 more than 4,000 had been submitted. Southampton University academics organized the ideas and used them in a deliberative poll to create a shorter list of proposals.

On 9–10 January 2010, a 130-person Deliberative Poll in London, coordinated with experts from Stanford University, refined the ideas into 29 proposals that most participants supported. The public vote on these 29 ideas ran from 18 January to 22 February 2010, and about 100,000 votes were cast.

The five most popular ideas formed the POWER2010 Pledge. From 22 February onward, Power 2010 began a grassroots effort to collect signatures and show broad support for the pledge. By March 2010, there was no published total of signatures.

The five pledges are:
- Introduce a proportional voting system
- Scrap ID cards and roll back the database state
- Replace the House of Lords with an elected chamber
- Allow only English MPs to vote on English laws
- Draw up a written constitution

The plan was for as many people as possible to sign the Pledge and then persuade candidates in their area to publicly commit to reform, using letters, calls, hustings, and MPs’ surgeries. In March 2010, Power 2010 ran a full-page advertisement in The Guardian targeting six MPs it said were countering parliamentary reform. Some MPs questioned the motives of Power 2010 and suggested it was a front for the Liberal Democrats. The identities of those MPs were not listed here.