So, Gordon Brown has finally fired the starting gun for the general election. With local polls also held on May 6, election fever (or fatigue) threatens to engulf the nation. If I had a pound for every time I’d heard the claim that 2010 heralds the first new media election, I reckon I’d have – well, several quid by now. By dint of having a two-bit blog myself, I recently appeared alongside BBC political editor Nick Robinson on a panel chaired by the Today programme’s Evan Davis at London’s City University debating the case for and against this proposition.
“Tweets don’t win elections, people talking to each other about their preferences do”, declared one panellist who had worked for Barack Obama’s campaign. His comment reminded me of comedy Welsh pop collective Goldie Looking Chain and their song mocking the moral panic induced by hip-hop – “Guns don’t kill people, rappers do”. Nonetheless, Twitter is a sign that we live in accelerated times.
Harold Wilson said that a week is a long time in politics. In our climate of ever-shortening attention spans, we crave summaries of facts in our news coverage, rather than longer narratives. This results in running headlines festooning current affairs programming, ticker-tape style. Every second brings more narcissistic status updates via Facebook and multitudes of easily digestible 140 character tweets. A week is an eternity now.
The whole “technology and democracy” question is often wheeled out alongside the “youth apathy” one, yet it’s not just the young who are disaffected. After the MPs’ expenses scandal, many are hugely turned off by politics. They think all the parties were “at it”, rendering them all as bad as each other. Consensus could damage turnout.
Ideological convergence has long taken root in our politics. “New” Labour absorbed aspects of Thatcherism. Now there’s David Cameron’s copy of what was already an amalgam. Nick Clegg is a copy of a copy (Cameron) of a copy (Tony Blair). All this is hardly designed to fire up public passion.
The internet offers possibilities of filters through news agendas presented from on high, allowing voters to make their own decisions. For instance, the Westminster webchats hosted by Mumsnet generated interest by cutting though the spin of the political classes – an insular species whose members tend to communicate with one another in a language only they understand.
But there remains little incentive to vote if you can’t see it making a difference. In my experience, knocking on doors as a local election candidate for May 6 and as a former Westminster and European parliamentary hopeful, people care more about issues than political parties. There is plenty of evidence that people now are less joiners than they used to be – witness the contraction of trade union membership.
Web campaigning is better suited to single issues than all-encompassing party programmes, as some recent mobilisations demonstrate. Cadbury brought back its Wispa chocolate bar after a Facebook petition.
It just as well that a petition on the Downing Street website to install Jeremy Clarkson as Prime Minister came to nothing.
However, it is easy to overstate the importance of new technology. Yes, it can undermine old technology. David Cameron’s “We can’t go on like this” poster will be longer remembered for its subverted version. “With suspicious minds” was added, along with an Elvis Presley-style quiff to the Tory leader. But surely an old fashioned pen would’ve done the job just as well as Photoshop. Further, when it was claimed that more people voted in Channel 4’s Big Brother evictions than a general election, this was not a true comparison. With a telephone ballot, you can vote repeatedly, which is not possible in British electoral politics.
At that City University discussion, the audience was asked whether the forthcoming television debates between Brown, Cameron and Clegg or the internet would play a greater role in deciding the fate of the nation. The TV debates “won” by a show of hands. Yet it’s not a case of “either or”. Any slip-ups will be repeated ad infinitum on YouTube. Old and new media have an incestuous relationship and tend to work in conjunction.
The rate of technological change has been very rapid over the past five years alone. As far as elections are concerned, though, the pace of procedural innovation has been rather more glacial. With the slight variation of the postal vote, it still comes down to crosses in boxes every four or five years.
Modern candidates may well have a Facebook account, twitter and blog – such things were barely on the radar for the 2005 election – but they would still be better off with an army of envelope stuffers, leafleters and doorstep persuaders. The online campaign may offer some interesting diversions, but it is offline where the election will be won or lost.
