Wired Politicians

April 30, 2008 Graeme Codrington Generations, Global View, Technology No Comments

A week or so ago, Dean noted that the Tories in the UK were trying to target (or needed to try and target) a younger generation of voters. In the same week, I read an article in The Economist about how British politics was using (or not using) digital communication technologies and Web-based tools. Read it online here, or a summary below.

The internet and politics

Semi-connected

Apr 17th 2008
From The Economist print edition

British politics is missing out on the potential of new media

EVEN the least fogeyish of politicians have been flummoxed by the internet. Tony Blair, champion of all things modern, paid no end of lip service to the potential of new media as prime minister but was comically technophobic himself. Still, the internet plays a role in huge areas of British public life: party politics, punditry and government itself. But web aficionados lament a yawning gap with America, and with the most go-ahead corners of Europe.

The official websites of the main political parties—Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats—get less web traffic than the most popular political blogs, and much less than even the far-right British National Party. No surprise, say cyber enthusiasts; they do a passable job as repositories of information but offer little scope for users to get involved beyond signing up for e-mail distribution lists.

The Tories want to transform their online presence, and Gordon Brown, the prime minister, has recruited new staff to overhaul Labour’s. Both parties have wised up, it seems, to foreign examples of what new media can do for fund-raising and campaigning. Ron Paul, a former candidate for this year’s Republican presidential nomination in America, raised a record of nearly $6m online in one day in December—recalling Howard Dean’s spectacular efforts in the 2004 Democratic race. NSTV, the video website run by Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, proved hugely popular during his campaign for the Elysée Palace last year. By contrast, Webcameron, a video blog starring the Tory leader, David Cameron, has run out of steam since it was launched in 2006.

More vitality can be found in the British blogosphere, which has changed how many people tap in to punditry. But shortcomings remain. Whereas there is broad parity between right and left in the American blogosphere, in Britain the left has yet really to get going. There is no agreement on the best way of measuring web traffic but few dispute that right-wing websites such as Conservative Home, Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale’s Diary are more popular than left-wing rivals such as Liberal Conspiracy, Labour Home and Bloggers4Labour (see table). Some say this is because the party in opposition can usually count on more motivated activists than the party in power. Others contend that right-wing politics are more suited to the punchy, pithy medium of blogging.

And true “civilian journalism” has been slower to emerge in Britain than in America: Britain’s main political blogs are mostly written by insiders, such as former party staffers and established journalists. Blogs also seem to scrutinise politicians and the mainstream media less fiercely in Britain than in America, where senior politicians and big newspapers sense the blogosphere’s watchful eye on their every remark and news report. Guido Fawkes, roughly speaking the British equivalent of America’s Drudge Report, boasts of breaking stories and is certainly resented by some mainstream journalists. But few major scalps have been claimed.

One area where Britain is showing tentative signs of stealing a march is in the use of the internet by government to involve citizens and improve policy-making. Since 2006 the Downing Street website has allowed the public to create and sign online petitions. In amongst the calls for the drummer from The Stranglers to be honoured, Jeremy Clarkson (a mouthy motoring journalist) to become prime minister and Arsenal football club to be “closed down” have been some serious and hugely popular petitions. One in 2006 calling for the government’s road-pricing policy to be scrapped ended up attracting 1.8m signatures.

Mr Brown is not much more web-savvy than his predecessor but some of Westminster’s rising stars are evangelical about the internet’s potential for government. In a speech to the Google Zeitgeist conference in London last year, David Miliband, the blogging foreign secretary, looked forward to the internet allowing people control over public services, not merely access to them. Policy wonks talk excitedly of “Public Services 2.0”.

George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, is another who is thought to “get it”. He wants much more information put online, including American-style crime maps and every item of government spending over £25,000 ($49,000). More radically, he is flirting with “open-sourcing” policy: some companies now go online to solicit solutions to stubborn problems, so why not the public sector?

Of course, there are caveats to all this fervour. One reason why American political parties have snazzy websites is that they can afford to; there is far less money sloshing around in British politics, and few regret that. America’s vibrant blogosphere has emerged partly in response to relatively staid mainstream media, whereas Britons seeking partisanship and wit can get it from a host of newspapers. Some also say that the publicly funded BBC’s well-nourished website crowds out other potential players. And online consultation still leaves the structural political problem of how to respond. A million people moderately interested in a particular issue may have less influence on the government than a smaller but more passionate bunch willing to lobby in the old way.

Yet web gurus insist that British politics could be doing much more with the internet, and the idea of open-sourcing policy particularly intrigues them. Government efforts to solicit the public’s ideas are often clunkingly non-specific: asking people what they think should be done about, say, crime is unlikely to result in much new thinking. Narrowing the question to particular problems, often in particular locations, is cannier. “You may only get one truly workable idea out of a thousand,” says Tom Steinberg, a former government-policy adviser who set up the e-petitions website and now runs mySociety, a charity operating websites designed to foster civic engagement. “But that one idea makes it worthwhile.”