From Telegrams to Twitter: Writing to Politicians in the United Kingdom, 1890-Present

This project addresses the phenomenon of members of the British public writing to politicians. The investigation will begin with Gladstone (the first Prime Minister for whom a collection of such letters survives) and will conclude with very recent developments. In recent years, in contrast to traditional policy history, historians have increasingly investigated political, parliamentary and electoral culture. However, correspondence as a means of 'doing politics' has been overlooked. Although there have been a few specific case studies of individual politicians' postbags, these have concentrated on analysing the opinions expressed. Our research, by contrast, will explore the broader significance of what are termed 'letters to power' over a period of more than a century. Through examining this correspondence-which incorporated telegrams, greetings cards, and faxes as well as letters-the project will explore how members of the public understood and reacted to the changing nature of the British state, political communications, and leadership. We will analyse twenty-four correspondence collections belonging to British political leaders that have been identified in a prior scoping project to contain letters from the general public. We will involve current/recent MPs and their staff, and other relevant stakeholders, in order to obtain a contemporary perspective on how correspondence is received and regarded by elected representatives, particularly in the context of the rise of social media.

In recent years, due in part to the use of email, there have been dramatic increases in the volume of correspondence that politicians have received. This upward trend is no novelty. In the context of successive franchise extensions (so that all adults over 21 had the vote by 1928), and the expansion of the State, MPs began to receive increasing numbers of letters seeking help with issues such as war pensions and benefit claims. However, there was a lack of adequate parliamentary office space and administrative support, and some members declined to take on the role of 'glorified social worker'. As time went on, shifting understandings of what it meant to be 'a good constituency MP' made such refusenik attitudes more and more unsustainable. Of course, there are legitimate questions to be asked about how representative 'letters to power' are as expressions of public opinion. MPs tended to reject orchestrated letter-writing campaigns as inauthentic, although paradoxically issues on which there was strong public feeling were more likely to stimulate organised collective efforts. Moving the focus from the representativeness of particular views to the broader question of what voters were trying to achieve by writing to politicians will not only give insights into the techniques of political action but also the wider meaning of this particular type of political participation.

In addition to exploring the historical significance of 'letters to power', the project has three further purposes. The first is to increase scholars' awareness of the numerous collections of such letters, which are distributed in multiple archives across the UK, and to highlight the uses to which they may be put. The second is to explore the legal and ethical implications of undertaking and publishing scholarship based on them. Given that members of the public wrote to politicians in the reasonable expectation that their views would be treated confidentially, and very possibly not understanding that their letters might be archived, what are the limits on their acceptable use? The third is to create Impact by sharing the research findings with MPs and the staff of the House of Commons Library (the Project Partner organization) to promote best practice in the management and archiving of correspondence and a more effective responses to correspondence through a better understanding of why, when, and how members of the public write to politicians.