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Guest blog: Winning the argument - new media and the election

Monday, 25 January 2010 18:04

by Alex Smith -  editor of Labourlist

It’s often said that the imminent general election will be the first “internet election” in Britain.  It’s a term banded about by many, but frankly understood by few. Because British political parties are relative beginners when it comes to using online tools for political communication – at least compared with the United States, where Democrats were harnessing the power of the web long before Barack Obama organised online so effectively for his historic victory in November 2008 – no one really knows what the term “internet election” really means.

Certainly, the web is playing an increasingly significant role in our politics. At Labour HQ, a dedicated and expanding team of tech-savvy staff have been deployed, and has quickly got to work developing new ways for Labour supporters and sympathisers to connect. MembersNet provides a space for activists to organise; single issue campaigns have been launched to oppose, for example, the Tory-proposed repeal of the fox hunting ban and to capture a deep email database; and, most effectively, the virtual phone bank – an online access point for members to find voter ID information and canvass from their own homes in their own time – has been an instant success, with 1,083 members making 16,000 calls to voters in its first 90 days. In February, that phone bank will go mobile, with the launch of Labour’s new iPhone app.

Labour has come a long way over the last 18 months in terms of its online effectiveness. And it needed to. For many years, the consensus amongst pundits was that the right was streets ahead online – and it’s certainly true that, until recently, Tory online initiatives such as WebCameron and live web streams of Cameron Direct, as well as more independent sites such as ConservativeHome, Iain Dale’s Diary and the notorious Guido Fawkes, were the dominant brands in the blogosphere.

But, thankfully, that trend has reversed. The project I run, LabourList.org, has become the fourth most influential political blog in the country within a year of its launch, attracting well over 300,000 readers. Left Foot Forward is scrutinising Tory policy and shining a light on right-wing media inaccuracies. New sites on the left are popping up all over the place, and that can only be a good thing for the left’s reach and pluralism.

The We Love the NHS campaign on Twitter and the We Still Believe video on the night of the catastrophic European elections last June showed that Labour people could be spontaneous, quick-witted and relevant online in defence of our values – and that campaigns could be run and bought into across multiple, integrated social media platforms where people are increasingly living their lives. More recently, a Labour video celebrating the history of our movement aired nationally on prime time television after a blogger agitated for it to be shown to a mass audience. That blogger, Ellie Gellard, recently featured in the Observer’s 2010 HotList.

So what effect will all this have on the election?

My guess is that its eventual electoral impact will be very marginal indeed. Traditional campaigning – door knocking, leafleting, mainstream media planning and even the old soap box – will still remain the key to winning votes.

But that’s not to say that it won’t play a role, because it absolutely will – indeed, it already has.
 
Firstly, mainstream media journalists are increasingly looking to blogs to inform their own journalism. In the autumn, Andrew Marr asked the Prime Minister about his alleged use of anti-depressants after it was trailed in the blogosphere.  More infamously, one of the PM’s closest advisors, Damian McBride, was forced to leave Number 10 after Guido Fawkes discovered his intention to smear Tory opponents.  It was a Lib Dem blogger, Mark Thompson, who initially discovered a correlation between the level of abuse of MPs’ expenses and the relative safety of their seats – which helped shape the news agenda and may even have been significant in the current momentum towards electoral reform. And LabourList’s publication of MPs’ emails attacking Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon after they called for a ballot on Gordon Brown’s leadership helped kill of their chances of success within a few brief hours.
 
The web’s great value, then, journalistically, is that in disseminating information quickly an widely, it concentrates and intensifies news. That will be important in the heat of an election campaign.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the internet is the great enabler. As the most powerful connector ever created, the web can powerfully augment – but will never replace – traditional campaigning methods. Twitter, Facebook and email will all be used to bring people together so they can arrange offline campaign activity. Nowhere is this more evident than with the grassroots initiative #MobMonday, which is using Twitter to mobilise Labour supporters to make phone calls to voters for two hours each week. The web will assist candidates in their fundraising, too: in just a few short hours and with a few brief emails that harnessed new tools created by the Party, Labour’s PPC for Manchester Withington, Lucy Powell, raised over £1,000 that will pay for many thousands of leaflets.

The internet will not on its own change the result of the 2010 general election. In these times of financial and democratic deficit, success will come as it always did from boot leather, leadership and meaningful reform. But what the web has already shown is its ability to expand the terms debate and place it in people’s hands. The time to get involved is now.

Alex Smith is editor of LabourList.org and a council candidate for Labour in Islington.

Alex is speaking at Progressive London's conference "A Progressive Agenda to Stop the Right in 2010" on Saturday, 30, January . Click here to register.