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Politics and the internet

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Apr 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition

The lessons of the latest viral sensation

IF GORDON BROWN was embarrassed by his recent rhetorical skewering at the hands of Daniel Hannan, a Conservative member of the European Parliament (MEP), Britain’s established media can sympathise. Journalists were tipped off about the speech before its delivery on March 24th but chose not to cover it. Broadcasters did not deem it worth showing for several days. Yet indifference from those accustomed to managing the flow of information from politicians to voters failed to stop the speech, delivered after the prime minister’s own address to the Strasbourg parliament, from attracting more than a million internet viewings within a week.

For the British left, it was painful confirmation of its tardiness in mastering new media. The most popular political blogs are Tory-leaning, and the Conservatives’ overhauled website is more impressive than the Labour Party’s lacklustre effort. Some suggest that right-wing views are inherently more suited to delivery in punchy form; the most successful tabloid newspapers are, after all, conservative. But that fails to explain the American left’s internet successes, including MoveOn, an online advocacy group set up during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and Barack Obama’s election campaigns against Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Others blame a lack of internet savvy in a New Labour apparatus that was built in the 1990s to deal with the traditional media. That may account for the state of the party’s official website, but not for the left’s deficit in the blogosphere.

The most plausible explanation, confess some Tories, may be that the internet is a largely oppositional medium. Incumbent parties can count on media coverage; oppositions must be resourceful to get noticed. There may also be less tolerance of dissent in a governing party, making for duller debate online. Commentators on LabourList, the left’s answer to ConservativeHome, a popular website among Tories, have been criticised for straying too rarely from the Labour line for fear of being blacklisted by the party. Some activists say Labour must undergo its own glasnost to become truly vibrant online. That may come if it loses power at the next election. A subsequent leadership contest would also help; ConservativeHome really took off during the Tories’ prolonged and vituperative leadership race of 2005.

Still, Mr Hannan’s triumph was a mixed blessing for the Conservatives themselves. Despite his mere 37 years, Mr Hannan is a more old-fashioned conservative than those who lead his party. Not only was his speech dominated by support for laissez-faire economics and hostility to the EU—two positions the Tories have spent recent years striving to moderate and play down respectively—but it was also delivered in the pugnacious style that failed to impress voters when William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, tried it in his previous life as Tory leader. The popularity of the video, to which there was not even a link on the party’s official website, was an ill omen for senior Tories. They will have a much tougher time controlling the party’s messages to voters in the run-up to the next election than Labour did before 1997.

Recent months have seen the online pioneers of the Obama campaign visit Britain to dispense their wisdom to fawning neophytes of both parties. But it is the internet’s potential as a governing tool that grips many in Westminster. The Tories, and many within Labour, aspire to a “post-bureaucratic” way of running public services, with information about things such as hospital performance and crime patterns widely dispersed, personal budgets for health and social care managed online like bank accounts and innovative policies open-sourced rather than solicited only from civil servants. Much of this sounds fanciful, but so does a humble MEP’s rise to stardom on the back of a three-minute speech to a half-empty chamber.