Robert Colvile: How the internet will change the way politics works

Robert Colvile authors his final article exploring the internet's impact on politics.

If we believe our leaders, it is only a matter of time before the internet transforms the way politics works. David Miliband and George Osborne, for example, are both evangelical about its power: the latter has spoken of “recasting the political settlement for the digital age” and called for “open source” government – aka “Public Services 2.0”.

Both sides seem to envisage citizens coming together online to improve the functioning of public services, although they differ on whether such groups would be clients of the state or take on its functions themselves. Yet the current government vision is less about empowering citizens than amassing information on them. In the aftermath of the scandal over the missing child benefit discs, Rachel Sylvester of The Daily Telegraph revealed that Sir David Varney, Gordon Brown’s adviser on “public service transformation”, supports vast databases to tailor public services to individual need – “a joined-up identity management system” that acts as “a single source of truth” about every individual.

This approach is not only opposed to the decentralising spirit that makes the internet so powerful, but also misses much of the point of what this new technology offers. For example, the idea of “Public Services 2.0” – or indeed “open-source politics” – would, if taken literally, mean that policy was not being created in Whitehall, but by a collaborative effort.

This, of course, is as far from the current system as it is possible to get. Despite the mantra of “consultation”, policy is usually formulated deep within the recesses of Whitehall, shown to world in the form of a Green Paper, tinkered with to create a White Paper, then put forward as a law.

An open-source alternative would be different. Measures would be proposed by government, yes – but also by members of the public. These could be scrutinised, line by line, with alternative versions promulgated and debated. Those that withstood the most rigorous scrutiny would then move forward – not on the say-so of ministers or of civil servants, but on that of all those involved in the process.

Robert Colvile: How MPs can use the internet to become more relevant

Robert Colvile authors his fourth article exploring the internet's impact on politics.

As blogs become more powerful and parties adapt to the web, will the voice of the individual MP become drowned out? Perhaps – but is that not the situation already? Many people, to be brutally honest, would not even recognise their own MP, let alone any other figures from the back, or even the front, benches.

But in fact, the internet could offer MPs an unmatched opportunity to create a niche for themselves, and to re-empower local politics. One of the more enlightened Parliamentarians told me how he had amassed an email list of 6,000 voters. This might not sound like much compared to the mega-lists used by the campaigns in America, but in this case it represents one in 10 of his constituents. Unlike with a traditional mailshot, this MP does not have to pay hefty printing costs to reach his constituents – he writes out a message, which can be extensively personalised, and clicks on a button. Nor is he simply bragging about his accomplishments: he is asking his constituents for their views about issues that affect them, drawing them into conversations rather than hectoring them. (Of course, this requires careful judgement, and not just of tone: “In the world of spam, people don’t want unsolicited political emails any more than they want Viagra adverts,” says Steve Webb, Lib Dem MP for Northavon and online evangelist.)

Yet for motivated MPs, email lists are only the start. Webb also reaches his constituents via text message, Facebook and MySpace. Grant Shapps, Conservative MP for Welwyn and Hatfield, has his own YouTube channel, and a discussion forum that attracts 100,000 page views a month. Nadine Dorries, Tory MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, and Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East, write lively blogs. Dawn Butler, Labour MP for Brent South, has an annotated Google Map on her homepage to update constituents on her schedule.

Robert Colvile: How the internet is empowering grassroots movements

Robert Colvile authors his third article exploring the internet's impact on politics.

Yesterday, I argued that political parties can use the internet to become more agile, open, decentralised entities, appealing to people through single issues and lively, intelligent prose. But there are already people doing that rather successfully - the bloggers and campaigners.

The blogosphere is the most obvious, and most successful, manifestation of the political internet thus far - hence, perhaps, the vitriol of some of the attacks made against it (in Italy, it has so unsettled the élites that a law was being proposed to force bloggers to register with the state).

Much of the power of the bloggers and activists lies in their ability to hold the powerful to account, to pick up stories that the mainstream media have allowed to fall beneath the cracks. In 2002, Senate majority leader Trent Lott spoke at a 100th birthday party for Senator Strom Thurmond.  "I want to say this about my state [of Mississippi]," said Lott. "When Strom Thurmond ran for president [in 1948], we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years."

Given that the central plank of Thurmond's campaign had been to strengthen segregation, these remarks were hugely controversial. Yet the mainstream media largely ignored them - it was left to the bloggers to pick the story up, and circulate it, to increasing outrage, until Lott was forced to recant. Similarly, Michael Howard's plans to restrict democracy within the Conservative Party were scuppered not by the Tory press, but by a revolt led by the grassroots readers of ConservativeHome.

Robert Colvile: Britain's political parties have yet to grasp the internet's potential

Robert Colvile authors his second article exploring the internet's impact on politics.

A few months ago, I was one of the few outsiders taking an interest in the Lib Dem leadership contest - not because I backed Chris Huhne over Nick Clegg, but because I wanted to see how important the internet had become to political campaigning in this country.

The short answer? It hadn't. Neither candidate blogged, and their websites were uninvolving affairs: Huhne’s had the candidate draped strangely across the masthead, while Clegg was captured seemingly mid-yawn.

But worse than the websites themselves was the lack of imagination. Months into the contest, only The Spectator had bothered to buy up such search-engine keywords as “Nick Clegg”, “Chris Huhne”, “Lib Dems” and “Lib Dem leadership”. Clegg’s site even announced that it was “A site supporting Nick Clegg’s campaign to become leader of the Liberal Democrats”. Perhaps they were hoping to imply that a constellation of other sites were backing the Clegg campaign - but the result was that a casual surfer on Google would have found that claimed to be Clegg’s official homepage.

The Lib Dems aren't the only ones who have neglected their websites, as I pointed out yesterday. In fact, a basic lack of agility permeates all the parties’ online offerings. Why have the Tories not claimed online ownership of the phrase “clunking fist”? Why does Labour’s YouTube channel predominantly feature rather dull ministers making rather dull points and answering rather dull questions? WebCameron was an honourable exception, but even then traffic has trickled away.

Robert Colvile: Searching for a new internet-based politics

Robert Colvile begins a series of articles exploring the internet's impact on politics.  By looking at what people look for via search engines we can learn a lot about what interests people about politics.  Robert is a features editor and leader writer at the Daily Telegraph. He was also part-time director of the think-tank Direct Democracy.

What will politics look like when the digital generation comes of age - when politicians emerge who can use the web to get their message across as instinctively as a Tony Blair uses television?

That was the mission statement behind 'Politics, Policy and the Internet', a paper published this week by the Centre for Policy Studies (and available online).

I summarised the argument in The Daily Telegraph, but it's such a vast subject that ConservativeHome has agreed to host a few articles looking at how this affects specific groups: MPs, political parties, campaign groups/ordinary citizens, and finally policy-makers.

However, there are also important points to make about the political internet as it currently stands. For starters, few people realise how many people are simply excluded from conversations on sites like ConservativeHome - according to the Office for National Statistics, only 15 million UK households, or 61% of the population, have internet access. And although 67% of Britons use the internet in one way or another, the poor and elderly are far less likely to be online: 51% of those earning up to £10,400 have never used the internet, compared to 6% of those on £36,400 or more; similarly, 71% of those aged 65 and over have never been online.

Yet this is changing rapidly - a year ago, for example, that 71% was 82%. Similarly, 97% of those now at university are regular internet users - a habit they will no doubt keep up once they graduate.

Robert Colvile: The LibDems wouldn't localise power to the individual

Robert is Director of Direct Democracy.  For the next part of this series, Dr Lee Rotherham will look at the obstacle of the EU.

This isn't something you'll read often on this site, but here we go: the Lib Dems were right, and we were wrong.

Back in the 1980s, the Conservatives had a problem – how to deliver services at a local level when councils were run by people like Ken Livingstone or Derek Hatton. Their solution was to emasculate local government, believing that Whitehall could do things better. That prescription was, most people now recognise, flawed.

Localists such as our group, Direct Democracy, want to set this right. There are Lib Dems who think the same way – the 'Orange Book' group, for instance. And Conservative Home's new poll shows that while Tory supporters do not want to see David Cameron and Menzies Campbell sitting together at the Cabinet table, there are areas – such as decentralisation – they could join forces on. So, would such co-operation work?

As the example above shows, the Lib Dems have long been keen on local power – the  'manifesto' by blogger Stephen Tall makes extensive mention of it. But there is a critical difference between their localism and ours. Theirs is based on trusting and empowering town halls. Ours is based on trusting and empowering the individual. For example, the Lib Dems dislike selecting candidates through open primaries, an idea of ours that Tory associations have embraced.

Robert Colvile: The Sustainable Communities Bill wins a parliamentary champion

Robert Colvile is the director of Direct Democracy.

As the loans-for-peerages affair is teaching us, when it comes to politics the people with the money have the power. For the past decade, Gordon Brown has had remarkable control over the domestic agenda simply because he controls who gets how much cash. Similarly, to achieve its countless objectives and targets, the Government has become expert at linking the cash it doles out to the programmes it wants to see implemented. But now all that could change.

Displaying astute political judgment (or an exemplary, career-boosting anticipation of his leader’s wishes), Nick Hurd MP has topped the ballot for Private Members’ Bills - the one chance ordinary MPs, let alone the public, get to affect the legislative agenda - and has promptly put forward the Sustainable Communities Bill, published by David Cameron in association with the pressure group Local Works earlier this month. Despite its neutral-sounding title, the Bill actually does something very important: tilts the balance of power (and funding) away from central and towards local government.

Under the Bill, the Secretary of State has to tell councils how much is being spent in their area, and on what. But, if they decide they don’t like this, councils can then come up with their own spending plans on a range of issues - services, jobs, fighting poverty, energy efficiency, carbon emissions, transport, local democracy and so much more. At a stroke, central government goes from dictating to communities to assisting them in carrying out their own priorities.

There will be objections to this plan, on the grounds that however useless the Government is, some councils are even worse (we cannot all, more's the pity, be lucky enough to live in Wandsworth). David Cameron himself has acknowledged that a postcode lottery is inevitable. “At different times, different areas will have different services and different standards of service,” he writes. “Some areas will sometimes do better than others. Some areas will make mistakes where others will succeed.” But, he continues: “It is by permitting local communities to develop their own priorities and their own innovations that we will produce a far higher general standard.”

This is very true - and it is also true that the reason councils are inefficient, and profligate, is largely that they are not accountable: not responsible for the money they receive, or the money they spend. They are, as Mr Cameron says, “the local outposts of central government” rather than “the collective instrument of local people”.

If councils have attracted poor quality personnel, it is because they have no power - just as national politicians have had their powers siphoned away by Brussels, the judiciary and the quangocracy, so have councils been stripped of true responsibility. If a community could control, really control, its own transport policy (for example), many more people would get involved in trying to fix it - and who can doubt that local people know their own problems and solutions better than bureaucrats sitting in Whitehall?

Our group, Direct Democracy, was established last year with the aim of wresting back powers from the centre. We launched with a manifesto for the Conservative Party that would see the party take localism into its heart. Since then, “localism” has become a buzzword used by the unlikeliest of figures - such as Gordon Brown, the most centralising Chancellor in history.

But the Sustainable Communities Bill is a sign, we fervently hope, that the Cameron Conservatives do not just talk local, but think local as well - that they are prepared, as so few Governments or prospective Governments have been, to sacrifice their own powers for the good of all. If the last decade of Labour Government has taught us anything, it is that the directives that flow from Whitehall are not the solution to this country’s problems, but the cause. This Bill is the start of the long process of correcting that.