Jason Kitcat

One of the most stimulating things I do is advise the Green Party, especially in Brighton & Hove, on their use of the Internet. It's stimulating because unexpected things happen.

Keith Taylor is the Green Party's convenor for the group of 6 councillors they have on Brighton & Hove City council. He is also the male principal speaker for the Green Party of England & Wales. Most importantly he's the party's candidate for Brighton Pavilion, the Westminster constituency with the greatest chance of delivering the UK's first Green MP.

Keith is in his 50s, an excellent politician with a finger on the local pulse and used to be in the beer business. Keith also is currently carrying a Blackberry, two mobile phones and I just got him blogging. One of those mobile phones is so he can post pictures to his blog. His Blackberry lets him email posts to the blog and he's just loving it. His posts are combining personal, political and insider insights in just the right mix.

You can read his first week of posts at keithforwestminster.com (and yes I hinted at this development with my earlier moblog photo of Keith by his PC)

With any luck this will be the first of many Green politicians I persuade to blog.

PublicTechnology.net is reporting that the Conservative Party has launched a new web-based campaigning system called 'Conservatives Direct'. This is part of the party's relaunch including a radically re-designed site. Personally I find their new logo rather eerily disembodied but the new site seems to 'do' much more than the previous one.

A tiny amount of guesswork unearthed this link to a Conservatives Direct login page. The branding really does smack of being only a short way from catalogue shopping. Their strapline of “Winning the Field Campaign” is rather militaristic. But that's just fluff… what's behind the login? The Tory press release sheds little light on the matter, but is buzz-word compliant. The Telegraph tells us that campaign information, polling data and canvassing tips will be part of the offering. Nothing earth-shattering there then. But what is interesting is that Conservatives Direct will allow people to join the party at a national level without any local party affiliation. This is very interesting… many argue that all politics is local and certainly most MPs win or lose their seats on the local issues. But this is even more interesting because in many ways the Conservative Party doesn't really exist. Well it didn't, I don't know exactly how they are set up today but I know that for a long time it was merely an association of the local parties who pooled money together to pay for the centralised activities. Is Conservatives Direct the sign of a deeper structural change to where financial power lies in the party?

Party chairman Dr Liam Fox suggested to BBC News Online that “People are used to online shopping, online banking, why not online politics? … They do not want to sit through committees or be involved in fundraising. We want to be as open as possible and able to attract people from a wide spectrum.” This kind of attitude ties in very much with the debates I reported on at the Labour Fringe meetings.

It looks like the Tories are trying to follow in Dean's steps. But I think they may end up with a hollowed-out party if they go online at the expense of their local grassroots which form the core of all parties.

Kudos must be given to the Tories for having the sharpest looking site of the big three.

For more on Internet use in local parties see “Click Here for Participation” [PDF].

Later than late here's my roundup of the fringe events that I attended at this year's Labour Party conference.

Voting Reform in a Third Term

First in my diary was a packed event titled “Voting reform in a third term” organised by Make Votes Count (a coalition of Electoral Reform Society, Charter 88 and others). Anne Campbell MP, Chair of the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform kicked off her main point being that PR is actually politically imaginable these days. 'Super Thursday' this year saw numerous different voting systems in action for European, London and council elections. 10 years ago such a thing would have been unthinkable she argued, showing how much progress had been made in that time. So proportional representation for Westminster is politically possible though she somewhat undermined this point when she explained how hard it had been to keep the commitment to PR in the 2001 Labour manifesto.

This was a love-in, nobody needed to be told why PR was a good thing. They just wanted to hear that PR was coming and soon. Peter Hain MP (Leader of the House of Commons, Lord Privy Seal and Secretary of State for Wales if you wanted to know) tried to persuade Single Transferrable Vote wonks that the Alternative Vote was the only politically viable option for electoral reform. It may be true that AV is acceptable to anti-STV and pro-STV people alike and so presents itself as a viable compromise. But AV is not proportional and can have even more distorted outcomes than First-Past-the-Post.

No MPs are going to be turkeys voting for Christmas argued Hain. But all MPs recognised the challenge of declining turnout and so felt something had to be done. Hence his view that AV could be the answer. He finished with a persuasive challenge to Labour that instead of reaching for PR when it was weak it should make a permanent positive constitutional change to the country when in power. We shall see. Hain did mention one statistic that caught my attention… apparently turnout for electing New Deal boards is double that for local elections. Does anybody know any more about this?

I asked Hain if due to the complexity of proportional voting system he felt that we needed e-voting. His response? 'I'm very concerned about the complexity of voting systems and it's something we need to look at.' Hmmm.

The meeting ended with Robin Cook MP giving a barn-storming speech with many excellent points. Essentially he asked how can any government elected by a minority have any legitimacy or mandate for radical change? (Well it didn't seem to bother him when he was in the government). He argued that democracy was the only alternative to the market. It provided an opportunity for people to be judged equally with one vote each instead of being assessed only in terms of their buying power. Such a view depended on each vote mattering… hence the need for PR. The kidney punch was this though… 'If elected by PR then Parliament wouldn't have voted for war.' Quite probably true and so we heard a new slogan – 'Vote PR for Peace'. Not bad, eh?

Cook continued exploring, using Sweden as an example, how PR allows parties to be more radical because there is less of a battle for the centre: Those few swing voters that can make or break the tiny number of at-risk seats often lead to elctoral battles of 'frenzied moderation' .

Cook told us that he became convinced of the need for PR when he watched Maggie Thatcher being asked by Dimbleby if perhaps the Tories needed some time out of government to refresh their policies. Absolutely no way she had replied, if the opposition get in they'll install PR and the Tories would never get back into power. And there you have it, the progressive reason to push for PR!

As the meeting ended I privately asked Cook if he still supported e-voting having been the one to instigate it when Leader of the House. Yes he replied, though the pilots had been disappointing and postal ballots had shown much better results. I didn't have any time to push him further but it was interesting that he sees e-voting in terms of turnout and not from the security or accuracy angles that so many of us do.

At the event I received a flyer for Billy Bragg's proposal for House of Lords reform. Quite an interesting compromise he's putting forward… read all about it on his site.

The Future of E-Democracy in the UK

The next day the lovely people at VoxPolitics and Sussex Community Internet Project lured us to their event with free drinks and nibbles. Brian White MP, a former systems analyst who is a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Internet and E-Democracy groups, started us off. He leapt straight into a discussion on e-voting via Big Brother which led to many eye-rolls from hardened e-democracy wonks in the audience (I'm guilty as were the rest of the panel!). His verdict on e-voting: People who have used e-voting tend to be positive, even if they were negative before, so we need to get more people used to it. Uh-oh.

The rest of White's talk focussed on how e-democracy can enhance accountability through interactive consultations, blogging and good use of email. Refreshingly he quite happily admitted that a targeted email campaign on a certain issue could quite well change his mind.

Next up was MySociety's Tom Steinberg who quoted someone-or-other saying 'Dean ran smack bang into broadcast TV.' In other words e-democracy can only get us so far. It's good at co-ordinating a geographically dispersed group to fight the status-quo but other media are needed to go up to other levels he argued. So short term Internet spending won't deliver much to political parties. I mainly agree with Tom but the fund-raising potential alone of the Internet may be enough to get parties to take the Internet more seriously.

E-Government Bulletin's editor Dan Jellinek finished off the panel's presentations. A few days later Dan was announced as one of the E-Politics top 10 people or organisations having the greatest impact on the way the Internet is changing politics. Anyway his presentation was mainly aimed at getting the discussion rolling but he had several good points I noted down for posterity. Firstly, with elections it's easy to claim that pretty much anything has made a small difference as there's no way of proving or disproving such claims. Secondly the key to online consultations is usability. Labour's Big Conversation could be a good example of e-participation he argued but we have no idea if anything is actually coming out of it. We need to see some results being shared from such projects.

The most interesting thing to emerge from the discussions was that tech-friendly MP White actually prints all the emails he receives! Why? So he can file them along with postcards, letters etc that he gets from the same constituents. White only just won his seat in 1997 and nobody expected him to hold it in 2001 but he did, thanks (so they claim) to his hard work at the constituency level. Perhaps this printing emails thing has something to it!

After the Party: Can Labour restore public trust in politics?

The final fringe I managed to attend (I missed one on ID Cards I'd had hoped to make) was from those clever people at Demos. While notionally on trust in politics the event soon drifted into how can parties increase their membership and much more.

David Lammy MP, a minister in the Department for Constitutional Affairs, made many interesting points. He felt that the introduction of citizenship classes should be seen as only the beginning of a programme to increase political education. But his key point came down to the differences between party politics, personalities and issue-groups like Greenpeace. Of those three parties were the losers because they occupied, in his view, a nuanced landscape of priorities and compromises. With declining amounts of free time he felt that it wasn't surprising that parties were losing membership. He felt that the US model of affiliation to party might be a useful direction.

Hilary Wainwright, editor of Red Pepper, argued that single issue organisations often actually had much broader agendas than any one issue. She felt that people were less willing to compromise and with the closure of debate, notably by Labour, this led people to activist groups or to just feeling that there's no point. She felt the first of many reforms to revive diversity in politics would be electoral reform.

At this point the whole session became very interactive but Douglas Alexander MP made some valuable contributions. He argued that parties are still based on hierarchical industrial-age models when modern-day society rejects hierarchies and deference. It was easy to be a Labour member 10 years ago when Thatcher was in power because everyone was just against her! Today it's difficult for a member to see how passing a resolution in their local party meeting 'authentically expresses their values', ie makes a difference when compared to the immediacy of protesting on the beach. Alexander argued that local politics forces you to bump into people you disagree with (and even don't like) again and again. He felt that single-issue groups can be very comfortable places to be as everyone agrees with each other (not in my experience!).

Tessa Jowell MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport, slipped into the session from the Hansard Society's rather interesting sounding 'The Power Game: Politicians, the Media and the Control of the Political Agenda' (Will Davies attended that one). Jowell was quite frank in admitting she wasn't sure whether political parties could stop falling membership. Any new member attending a general committee and experiencing the jargon was unlikely to return, she commented.

Iraq and top-up fees kept resurfacing from questioners and again when Kierra Box finally was allowed into the session. Kierra, an 18 year old activist who co-founded Hands Up For Peace, main point was that there was no trust because politicians didn't listen to people, especially the young. Her point was eloquently made because unlike all the other panellists she wasn't given a chance to make her opening piece. When finally given her chance Kierra broke into a rant against the lack of grassroots connections in the Labour Party. She gave a nice example of trying to call her local MP but found that it was a national party line with no connection to the politician in question.

Douglas Alexander ended the debate with a key point: How do we resolve the expectations between the age of interactivity and the reflective speed at which Parliament needs to operate? How do we reconcile million person marches with the fact that MPs vote on their own judgements and aren't merely delegates?

All in all, the event ended with many questions and few, if any, answers.

Just posted over at Ideal Government:

Peter Reed's earlier post addressed the challenge of creating joined up government by proposing non-governmental intermediaries aiming at specific markets of citizens.

I would like to offer readers a different model. But first, why is 'joined-up government' desirable? I think it's pretty straightforward to see that most of us don't really care who supplies a service, we just want it to work. So when I renew my car's tax disc at the Post Office I'm not concerned over whether it's Royal Mail, the DVLA or the Department for Transport responsible. I just want the disc so I don't get fined.

The sames applies for any kind of service I can imagine. Need a new kidney? Fine, give it to me and fast. Information on whether Brighton beach is safe for swimming? Yes please. And so on… as long as the service is of a good quality, accountable and available I'm not fussed. Of course for logistical purposes and to ensure accountability we need ministries, agencies and so on. Government would be just unmanageable without it and Parliament would be incapable of keeping tabs on matters.

But when it comes to service consumption we want it to be easy to find and use – in other words joined up. We don't need departments for online service delivery. What we need to do is use content management technology and XML-based standards like Resource content:encoded Framework to connect services and pull information from departments together into a single government portal.

Not portals again you all cry! Well actually yes. But instead of just always pointing to somewhere else this new site would actually do the services itself. Let's look at an example. If you visit Directgov looking for work you are presented with external links to the following brands which seem to offer overlapping services: Jobcentre Plus, Worktrain, Jobpoints, Jobseeker Direct, New Deal, learndirect… Confusing to say the least. If we travel into the future and visit the new government portal and look for jobs what do we get? Immediate access to jobs listings, advice and locations of the nearest office to visit for more help. No more external links, just services right there and then. If we want we can personalise the portal to our needs. I own a small business so show me the VAT return services. You are a single parent, you want to see how tax credits work and when you'll get yours. We all need to feel confident that such personalisation isn't at the cost of our privacy. Such confidence won't be built by technology but by processes and legislation.

Directgov is complicated and it really doesn't do much at the moment itself… Directgov currently has 76 links on its homepage compared to 13 for Google. While the search on Directgov is pretty good few would argue that you can go to more places with Directgov compared to where Google can take a browser. Simple, standardised technologies could reach across all the government silos to provide easy access for citizens.

This isn't about bashing Directgov, it's a MASSIVE improvement on what went before. I'm just painting a picture of what we could have: simple, easy online government which is department-agnostic. That's what I'd like to see in my ideal government.

Labour have managed to hang on to Peter Mandleson's seat in Hartlepool with a severely diminished majority of 2,033 (compared to 14,571 previously) for successor Ian Wright who just outdid the LibDems.

As far as I can tell the election campaign boiled down to who was really more local than who. Jody Dunn, the blogging LibDem candidate, wasn't quite from Hartlepool proper and may have lost out as a result. Still she shouldn't be downhearted, it's a stunning result in Labour stronghold which had every top New Labour bod visiting (except Blair).

The night finished with the Fathers 4 Justice candidate dusting Dunn in purple powder while she was trying to make her speech. I'm not sure what the point of that was, surely the governing party Labour should be the target of fatherly powder dustings?

Key points to take home… The LibDems nearly took this safe seat when Iraq was barely a campaign issue. UKIP astonishingly beat the Tories into 4th place (3,193 votes to 3,044). Respect came in 5th with over twice the vote of 6th place Green Party (572 to 255). The Tories can take some comfort knowing that many of their votes would return from LibDems and UKIP if it wasn't a by-election. Respect did ok-ish because their candidate was a well known leader of a hospital campaign. To finish this whole review off take comfort that the Monster Raving Looney Party got twice as many votes as the English Democrats!

Did Jody Dunn's blogging help or hinder? Hard to say really. Labour did cite some of her posts against her in their campaigning. It was a rather dirty campaign. But on the other hand LibDems raised quite a bit of money through her site. I think overall the blog was neutral for the campaign but positive for Dunn who, if she wants, will be able to stand again pretty much anywhere.

Final point… turnout. It was just under 46% compared with 56% at the 2001 general election. The Guardian reckons this is inline with other recent by-elections but I'm astonished. With all the party conferences and the media circus around Hartlepool I'm stunned to see such a low turnout. I find that very worrying indeed and perhaps in a day or two it will emerge as the real story of this election. Ok fat chance but I can always wish.

Sources: BBC News, Guardian (The By-election blog also has some good stuff, in particular issue round-ups for all the candidates on defence, education, environment and health along with some banter against rival Guacamoleville)