Smeargate - the last word on it from me!

The consensus on the ongoing Smeargate debacle is that politics has lost out, its reputation further tarnished by this fresh evidence that politics is a dirty game. One voice that stands against this is Conservative MP Douglas Carswell who writes on his blog quite rightly that "Politics in Britain is fundamentally broken. The Internet is merely helping to expose the bogusness of what we currently have to put up with" - in other words this is really little that is new. However he makes the further assertion that: "The web will break the predominance of corporate party machines, the corporate media and corporatism - each of which helps currently sustain the SW1 class. Politics will have to become "open source" and more democratic"

I found this a really interesting argument, and one that would be a very positive development, but I worry if this really will be the case. My problem is that I doubt that currently the right people are influential in the blogosphere to hold SW1 to account. My take, disagree if you like and I am sure some will, is that Smeargate is a symptom of something that is endemic in modern politics, that campaigns are as likely to be fought on negative grounds and what often predominates is the personal attack. And perhaps Smeargate provides evidence that rather than being a feature of party machines it is actually spilling over into the blogosphere. Smeargate is the latest instalment of a battle between two egos. This was not a revelation exposed by a blogger wishing to scrutinise the actions of those in politics. It appears to be more the case that the underlying desire was that of Paul Staines to did dirt about Derek Draper, to undermine Labour's rather brash and artificial attempt to have a grassroots online presence and to score party political points.

The blogosphere seems to currently reflect the pattern of the mainstream media. What predominates is bias, with even the BBC being accused of favouring parties and ideologies (usually those in government). Bloggers have no regulation and so, rightly, we can say what we like, that is the idea after all. But if it is biased opinion following party political lines, whether this can encourage democracy in anyway is a very big question. What seems very rare is good, objective political blogging that is not out to score points or cheerlead for one party or another (not a call to read my blog by the way but an observation of what is available). The problem is that much also purports to be independent, both from parties and politically. Thus I share the despondency and am much more pessimistic than Douglas Carswell I'm afraid. Evidence suggests that petty squabbling and point scoring does not encourage engagement in politics, if this is to spill over into the blogosphere then it will keep it as a forum for the few and not the many. Just my humble opinion!

No Surprises there then

It seems that the latest bout in the fight between Derek Draper and Paul Staines is not just a spat about whether sites were or were not offline but is a little deeper. Surprise, surprise Labour are doing badly in the polls so their tactic is to smear the opposition. This is always done, The Conservative Demon Eyes Poster, Michael Howard as Fagin, the Obama bin Laden stuff. But it has been turned into a big story on the BBC, today's Telegraph, various blogs with various comments about desperation, being appalled, it being ludicrous the shock and amazement goes on. The problem is though there is no surprises here. It would be obvious it was happening, it is a pretty obvious tactic and consistent with the tone of Labour's campaigns recently. It is also consistent with a rather ham-fisted attempt to create a Labour supporting journalistic blog in the same vein as Iain Dale's Diary and Order Order, mistakenly they think that they can use this not just to spread the Labour message but also scurrilous gossip about opponents. The bit that is surprising is that once again Labour got caught in this way and made to appear so underhand and devious to the man in the street, and this can only be due to the lack of an effective or stable communications team. Brown hailed himself as the non-spun PM after Blair stepped down, this is of course rubbish but, as this great piece by Fraser Nelson suggests, what he has is a largely reactive communications operation which has little long term strategy and (it seems) little job satisfaction or loyalty. While the next election will not be won by communication strategy alone, as the polls wax and wane you can't help wondering if Brown had a more efficient team and strategy would he be losing out as badly in the court of public opinion?

Solution or Smokescreen?

Attended an interesting event on Tuesday organised by the Hansard Society, the purpose of which was to discuss the online campaign and models of its application to politics in terms of it offering a solution to questions of engagement, interest and involvement or was a smokescreen that, in my interpretation, makes parties and MPs appear to want to engage more but without actually doing so. The presenters were LibDem Head of Innovations and Editor of LibDem Voice Mark Pack, Conservative Home Editor Jonathan Isaby and Labourlist creator Derek Draper. It was not hugely insightful, but there were some gems that grabbed my interest and so I thought I would share them. This is what I took away from the event and not designed to be a definitive account in anyway - so no "cybershit" ( a term introduced to proceedings by Draper) if you disagree.

Firstly the answer to the overall question is it is neither! The Internet provides an additional method for communicating to certain audiences, and perhaps an optimum route to some audiences, but is not a solution to the wider problems identified with political engagement. However this may change, so hence it is not simply a too for perception management. Both Draper and Isaby hinted at a restructuring of the membership model that may be weaker but learned from foot in the door persuasion techniques - asking for small actions from joining a Facebook fan group up to working as an activist but with various level of exit points. However for Pack and Draper it appeared that the most powerful objective for using online communication tools was to feed the news agenda and that from this function there could be a reshaping of politics, possibly as the public begin to engage with strong and engaging party and MP presences across different parts of the WWW. Draper, however, went further to suggest that in a close contest a few hundred votes in a dozen seats could be decisive, hence it could be argued that an engaging presence, a persuasive message, third-party (voter) promotion, endorsement and amplification and highly targeted strategies of mobilisation then there could be an argument that it was 'the web wot won it'! Thus we may see a marginal seat strategy that employs the Internet far more ruthlessly at a local level than simply one national strategy as has been seen previously.

Much of this sounded a little Obama-esque, and a question posed by a representative of Hustings (on whose website all the presentations can be watched) asked if this 'may look like your dad dancing at a wedding'. Obama as an example was played down, and parties seem to recognise that it was the right candidate with the right message that was influential not his skills to adapt to Web 2.0. However it is clear that lessons have been learned and there will be techniques that worked for Obama that will be adapted to a UK context. YouTube may surpass television as a way of getting videos viewed for example (mine based on a comment of Ivor Gaber's in the queue to get in. But the local aspect is seen as important. Obama allowed social networking within his website via the http://www.mybarackobama.com/ area, this put supporters in touch with one another. Isaby suggested a similar technique that may be appropriate for the UK. Candidates should use Facebook, but not just as self-promotion tools but to identify active groups within an area and identify with their campaigns - perhaps this will surpass the old technique of reading the local newspaper or be a useful supplement.

Another interesting gem is the notion of the online active public being an elite. But Mark Pack made the interesting point that this is actually fairly open compared to many other ways in which the public can participate in politics. Draper agreed, reinforcing this by noting how few people attend any political event, yet still more may do so online. A fact sadly, I heard that one candidate selection meeting was attended by five people!

So overall food for thought, lots of titbits despite the sense that no-one wanted to reveal too many aces despite the fact that they are all probably the same cards. Two final things on this, innovation is driven by election failure, so whatever happens in online campaigning it will be determined by the goal of electioneering! Secondly, and more trivially, what ever some people have claimed Derek Draper publicly admits he does not have a monopoly of wisdom!

Twitter - Influence

Here is an interesting little tool, it is called twInfluence, and it measures the influence of any individual Twitter user. It works on number of followers and their followers and so the basically the degrees of separation between you and a larger network. Obama has a huge network, and it is argued an even larger 'horizon of communication' because his followers can re-tweet his messages. In the words of twInfluence, this is how it works: "Imagine Twitterer1, who has 10,000 followers - most of which are bots and inactives with no followers of their own. Now imagine Twitterer2, who only has 10 followers - but each of them has 5,000 followers. Who has the most real "influence?" Twitterer2, of course". So, based on the site's calculations, who is influential in British politics?

Well Downing Street have too many followers for a simple calculation to be made so hard to say with that one but we assume it is up there but not in the top 50 globally. Labour fare worse on the whole, Labourlist for example is 25,919th with only 317 followers; Labour Party have slightly more followers with 562 but are only 24,091st. The Conservative Party fare much better with 5,840 followers and so are 4,008th, Cameron though has only 551 followers but they are better networked than Labour as he ranks 15,486th. Party wise the Liberal Democrats come out in the middle, 10,624th with 1,078 followers. Interestingly the strategists and commentators do well, LibDem Mark Pack is 9,387th; Conservatives Craig Elder is 6,832nd and Iain Dale is 8,942nd. But here is the surprising one given interest in politics, Labour's Derek Draper has 50,431 followers and is 477th globally. Why, well it is suggested he has ruthlessly built a network, befriending (following) those with a large network and so gaining reciprocal relationships. And that is the way to make Twitter work, if you want to influence then you need people to get your Tweets, if no-one is listening then you are simply not influential. Derek has advantages of being more than just the Labour online guru, so potentially multiple audiences to draw to his tweets, also he had received a lot of media coverage, but so has David Cameron. Does this mean anything? Who knows, but it is interesting and lets face it everyone wants to know if there is any indication of their influence even if it means little. If you are interested, I have no idea why you would be, I am 11,177th, so I beat David Cameron. Labourlist, and Labour itself but who is counting?