Zoe Williams hopes for a time when campaign organisations like 38 Degrees will exert greater influence over the House of Lords, and the lords "take public opinion seriously" (The Lords failed to go rogue on the NHS. But they might, 13 October). She also rightly identifies that the Lords – whatever its other failings – does not engage with, or in, "relentless point-scoring and blame attribution".

As a peer who received many 38 Degrees-inspired communications in the runup to the debate over the NHS bill, I can say with some confidence that their lack of influence was strongly linked to the unduly polarising approach they took to this issue. They picked the wrong battle, and the wrong argument.

Their battle was essentially on whether to kill the bill off or not, and the Lords just doesn't do that. We are a revising chamber. And their argument was "if the government's plans go through unchanged, we could lose our health service for ever". This is untrue, and peers knew it. Meanwhile, 38 Degrees' support for the Owen/Hennessy wheeze of shunting the bill into a select committee was misguided, since peers – including 51 of the independent crossbenchers – recognised that this was wrong in principle and flawed in practice.

The Lords has a great many people with something to contribute on this bill. Now that it will be subject to the usual legislative process, they will all have the chance to contribute comprehensively, to table amendments, and to seek genuine, concrete improvements. A select committee is by definition select – small – so many members would have been excluded, and those who were included would have been handpicked by the party whips. In practice, it would also have meant examining the bill far too late for NHS staff who now need it to make progress, notwithstanding their reservations.

Zoe Williams' premise that our verdict was "sod off and live with an unaccountable secretary of state and an external marketplace" is also plain wrong. Ministers had already indicated that they will put it "beyond legal doubt that the secretary of state remains responsible and accountable for the comprehensive health service we all want to see". A select committee would simply have delayed the introduction of amendments to implement that commitment.

The kind of exaggeration 38 Degrees used made people ask whether simply filling up someone's inbox with a lot of half-constructed half-truths was a respectable way to campaign. The organisation had not asked people to engage with any of the detail of this issue, and had given a false impression about the headlines. Some would say this route leads us into a form of one-click rent-a-mob – what is now termed "slacktivism" – enabling ill-informed and disconnected instant electronic communication to take the place of genuine political discussion and interaction. I fear this recent experience will increase the scepticism of decision-makers, when we should be instead seeking more fruitful forms of dialogue.

All this is a pity. Though I disagreed with them on this issue, 38 Degrees has great potential and I am full of admiration for the way they have mobilised interest on a range of important political issues.