Representative Negotiation

Representative Negotiation is a set of worksheets to help you communicate with your MP. It’s also a game. In my head it’s been called The One Where You D&D Your MP, or The Quest To Present Your MP With Your Point Of View. It is a rather silly game, but it may help.

Download three different parts: the introduction and worksheets, the character sheet, and the message sheet. Or read on about why I created it…

I used to work in political engagement. In fact, I was a parliamentary lobbyist for a church, which always gives people a rather misleading impression – I worked for Quakers in Britain, and most of my work was helping local community groups work out how to speak to their elected representatives about their concerns. I covered many social justice, peace, and environmental issues, but my real passion was the “how” rather than the “what”. How does someone with not very much direct political experience go about convincing their MP that issue X or Y is genuinely worth the time and effort?

I ran a lot of workshops on how to talk to your MP/MSP/AM/Cllr, and one of the most popular sessions was where I printed out some names and faces of well known politicians and political influencers and asked participants to act as if they were that person. We’d talk about whether their character was a long term planner or if they tended towards short term reactions. Whether they looked at the big picture or the detail. Whether they would rather inconvenience a large group of people a small amount or utterly disrupt the lives of a tiny group.

Whenever I ran this session, I got great feedback about it. People said they’d thought it would be ridiculous and cheesy, and while to a certain extent it was ridiculous, it was also valuable. Not just fun, but also useful.

What’s in the game?

There’s a character sheet for you. It starts with your name and your key objective – by which I mean the main issue you want to speak to your MP about. Maybe it’s something broad, or maybe it’s a specific issue. Anyway, you put that down.

Then you choose which of four roles you’ll take. These are the Visionary (the person who has the clear passion and sees the big picture), the Storyteller (the one who is good at explaining why it matters), the Logistics expert (might be the treasurer, or the person with all the spreadsheets), and the Facilitator (generally the chair, quite possibly works as a teacher).

While a more complex roleplaying game would have you roll for all your stats, here I’ve simply said that each character gets 4 in one and 2 in each of the others. However, if you wished to make slightly different roles then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t.

You’ll also have a tracker for your energy levels, and the ability to bring one of the following with you: 1) an executive summary with key diagrams, b) personal experience or a compilation of other stories, c) a financial breakdown, d) technical or professional experience.

What does the MP get? Well, their key stats are based on where they fit on various scales. Often we won’t know this for sure until actually meeting them, but some fairly good guesses can be made by watching them on TV or reading about them. The key point here is that our representatives are individuals, and what works for one person won’t work for everyone. I once had a meeting with Jeremy Corbyn in the morning (this was before he was leader of the Labour Party) and Vince Cable in the afternoon. Jeremy was very big picture, while Vince was interested in the details. They agreed on the issue (homelessness) but their approaches were very different, and if I’d used the same speech on both of them then I wouldn’t have got very far.

There are two more parts to this game. One is the Doubt. This is important, as Doubt is what MPs have (obviously) and it’s what you need to defeat. This is essentially the health stats for your opponent, but of course in this game you’d not fighting your MP, simply defeating their Doubt. The second part is the structure for you to play through – first you’ll do one worksheet, then another. Unless you have someone experienced in leading tabletop role playing games, that’s fairly important. So, it’s the Quest To Speak To Your MP!

At the most basic level, this is a tool for you to play around with. If you are a little unsure about how to approach politicians, whether they’re local or national, this should help you get your thoughts in order. And it’s fun.