Dennis Skinner has said he doesn't use email because he wants to send more letters to ensure postmen still have jobs.
The veteran left-wing Labour MP for Bolsover, who has been in parliament since 1970, also told BuzzFeed News he's baffled by the number of people who run tribute accounts under his name on Twitter and Facebook. He's never used either service and refuses to have a mobile phone on the basis that "there's phones everywhere".
"Twitter? I've never sent an email to anybody," the man nicknamed the Beast of Bolsover said. "I believe in keeping the postman in work. It has resulted in a lot of letters not being sent. When I arrived [in parliament] I learnt how to do all the letters myself as I used to work in the pit and represent people at tribunals."
He added: "With this 'social media', instead of letters you get emails. They're all written in a hurry, with no punctuation, no paragraphs – it's one continual stream, with spelling mistakes. Quite frankly I think it's a world I don't need. But I have to read them all because people say, 'Did you get my letter?' And it's not even a letter! It's a scrawl on a screen!"
Skinner is particularly exasperated with emails from petition websites: "Some people think that because 38 Degrees convinces people to send emails by the dozen every day that somehow they don't have to do anything. They don't write it, they just press a button on a computer screen. I reckon in the course of the past two weeks I've had at least 100 [emails] exactly the same [on hunting]."
Still, Skinner said he's aware of the very popular Twitter tribute accounts run in his name, such as @BolsoverBeast, which has 37,000 followers for its stream of left-wing tweets.
