I can’t speak for Labour, but the Lib Dems tend to be paralysed by three things: 1, A desperate wish not to offend ANYBODY 2, Infiltration by idiots (some might count yours truly among that number) and 3, total and utter lack of money.

The membership department can’t cope with the work they have and can’t afford more staff, so the new members don’t get welcomed as they should, and people get quickly disillusioned…

Sunny,

I was amused that Bush had 7.5 million supporters, of whom 1.5 million were volunteers. Circa 6 million zombies?

Your main point, and unfortunately Roves’, is right on the money though.

Douglas, I’m thinking in the US terminology, a ‘volunteer’ is what we’d call an activist, ie someone that will volunteer their time to do some work for the campaign.

That proportion of active/inactive members is about right for political parties over here as well from what I can see.

MatGB,

Yeah, I know. It just amused me, that’s all.

It was a cheap point, but it was supposed to be a cheap point.

There is a very serious issue behind the above article though. It is that the nature of activism may be changing. As well as cold-calling or leafletting, social network contacts are also an effective tool, whether on-line or off-line. I think this is a development that we’d ignore at our peril.

Notice the key word: ‘grassroots’.

And the numbers of Labour grassroot members is..? It doesn’t matter now whether Labour sees the light they don’t have the capacity to pull something like this off…

Um, Sunny, the subject is great, but the analysis is flawed.

Isn’t it disingenuous for parties to create grassroots spin-offs from the top-down?

The virtual precincts mentioned are essentially a misleading fraud designed as a vote-gathering machine, not as practical politicking either to provide a new channel for policy delivery or for feedback.

That kind of behaviour will always be treated with suspicion among ‘non-combatants’ and the increasing use of the tactic is one more reason why politicians are held so often in such great contempt.

I agree that parties need to do more to seed activity and fertilise it, but it defeats the object and is counterproductive to encourage any astroturfing.

Well, they still have a party membership. Both the Libdems and Labour should use them for a start.

Sunny, didn’t MatGB address that point at #3? Frankly if I were a member I’d feel dirty to be ‘used’ in the way you imply. I hope some self-describing feminists tackle you on the idea.

It’s going to be hard to motivate the Labour base in the current climate. And many Lib Dems’rs probably fancy Cameron over another Labour government anyway, even if they’ll still be working to increase their share of the vote.

Maybe after 4-years of Slippery Dave, activists will be more energised. Remember, the culture wars in the US are immense and they permeate every facet of American civic culture. Only during the Thatcher years did we have anything approaching this level of ideological conflict. Blair’s centrism and Cameron’s aping of it, have stripped British politics of this sort of energy. We choose between “managers”. We don’t choose sides in a war of ideologies.

I think American and British politics are radically different, and while comparisons are enjoyable, they’re extremely limited. This is also why our political parties are skint. Why would you give money to any party, when they’re all fighting for the same oxygen in the political centre?

I think the internet will empower smaller (single-issue focussed) parties, rather than save the ageing monoliths that have dominated British politics for a century. Or at least I’d like to think so.

What you are forgetting is cultural difference between the US and the UK. Off the bat I can point out several factors as I perceive them:

1) The US has a higher take-up of broadband internet and its citizens are in general more web-savvy. In addition, US traditions of civic association/ community organising lead to a political culture more amenable to the creation of web-based political communities.

2) In a wider sense, the US is more receptive to ‘innovation’ than the UK. This is why we often see a California effect in policy developments, ie we lag behind the US and copy their trends, often in a half-hearted manner. The same for web-based organising. Initiatives are started and not followed up, or performed half-heartedly.

3) In general voters in the UK are more cynical and less likely to be persuaded by grassroots campaigning that looks more like ‘astroturfing’. This is good in that it shows perhaps a certain level of sophistication, but bad in that it stifles good ideas as people just say ‘oh its just another ruse by politicians’.

4) Political life in the US is more interesting than it is in the UK. America is the leading country in the world and there is a higher capacity for citizen involvement when voters feel like they could really change something on a global level. In contrast, we are a faded imperial power.

5) America is a big country and local party organisations provide a laboratory for experimenting with different techniques. This is stifled by the UK’s top-down political culture.

Depressingly, I think there is a large grain of truth in what you say Jeff. Though it does occur to me that we’ve had the trade union movement – which was a good example of collective working and action. So its not entirely a dead idea… is it?

Jeff@10 makes a fair comment, but although I can understand the analysis, I’d tend to dispute some of the conclusions.

Americans might be ‘more web-savvy’ in general, but I doubt it is true on average. Broadband take-up faces different challenges in different areas and there are some interesting patterns which emerge according to demographics and geographic distribution which need investigating further, though there is some suggestion that there is correlation to both voting tendency and affiliation.

I also think the picture is more mixed than Jeff suggests where it comes to innovation, as the scale of the countries creates different problems when it comes to leaders and laggers in their respective fields. In this sense the UK is much more unified and receptive, while in the USA it is possible to notice great divergence.

Point 3 is something I agree with, but point 4 needs to be challenged. It strikes me that Jeff may be biased towards US strengths on account of some personal connection – US citizens may be more receptive to the idea of politics and take more account of the role it plays in daily life, but this leads to massive overstatement of the relative power they have in bringing about change on an individual level.

If we draw together the example of the Trade Unions and the Labor/Labour movements on either side of the Atlantic it is interesting that politicisation occurs at different stages and therefore has a different relationship with public representatives. In the US this has lead to significant loosening of the ties between labor and the Democratic party which can sometimes be to the point of loss of accountability, while in the UK the direct link between the TUC and Labour creates a damaging rivalry which often extends into a conflict of interest.

My distinction abut the way to stimulate political initiative is that leadership by model is bad, while leadership by example is good.

para 3 *UK is more unified and receptive as a whole

Its interesting that the trade union movement grew up at a time when British imperial power was at its zenith. I think my point 4, to clarify, is that its to do with subjective experience. For example, lots of young people support Barack Obama because they feel that a reorientation in US politics will affect the world; this could not happen in the UK as our leaders are not of the same consequence. Whether these Obama kids are correct in their analysis is another matter entirely.

Another point is that trade unions are collective organisations developed in a certain historical and societal context. By contrast web-based grassroots campaigns are born of necessity as traditional campaigning techniques become unworkable as nobody wants to go knocking on people’s doors/ do fundraising tombolas or whatever, people are not as attached to partisan politics and move towards picking and choosing like a marketplace etc.

Trying to think of a pithy conclusion but can’t.

Fundraising and making contact with members of the public are two different areas, which though linked are not interdependent in all cases. I think it is important to be able to find the right forum for communication on the appropriate level for the issue.

Door-knocking has it’s place and presents its own challenges, but public meetings and all sorts of group gatherings need to be considered, rather than having a singular MO.

Jeff, you say that web grassroots campaigns are born of necessity as traditional campaigning techniques become unworkable…move towards picking and choosing like a marketplace etc. I worked for Desirs d’Avenir, which was a participative grassroots campaigning organisation, and people didn’t pick and choose as much as we went to where they were involved in some kind of collective action. What we found is that the 1% solution is so critical, only about 1% of people are systematically active on any campaign or issue, but help them go out to their networks they’ve got to spread the word and get people involved.

People are much more likely to want to join a campaign if their friend, colleague or relative is inviting them on board, it’s about trust and relationships. From experience working on these, Move On, Desirs d’Avenir or Get Up are more empowering for their activists than the Obama campaign. At least not yet, the benchmark would be that Obama develops a participative policy process to produce his manifesto. Is he going to do that?

Surely a problem in this country is so that so many politiciansa have little or no experience outside of politics ; many of whom started their professional life at university. Very few in the cabinet are working class who are craft trained , worked in heavy industry or served in the Armed Forces.Listening to many cabinet members induces flash back to school- being lectured by some earnest middle class teacher who has no experience outside their suburban cocoon. No party speaks for the self employed or those in small business: the Labour Party is for the government employee( largely white collar and administrative) and the Conservative Party for international finance. The increase in violence within inner city UK which has been occurring for the last 8-10 years has until recently been ignored. Consequently there are large swathes of aspirational working class and lower middle class voters who see politics as irrelevant to their lives. As a rule Americans tend to be more enthusiastic about new ideas , almost naiveley so.
People in Britain tend to be more emotionally detached. Unless people come forward to can show more in common with a large part of the British electorate , then I do not see enthusiasm for politics increasing. We have the absurd situation of a former leader pf the Conservatives and guards officer married to a the daughter of a peer taking more interest in trying to solve incredibly difficult social problems in the most run down parts of the UK than the Labour or Liberal Parties. Many member sof the BNP have criminal records , often for violence. The BNP were campaigning against violent crime. When the record for violence by a BNP member was pointed out to a disillusioned voter her reply was that he would have the experience to deal with the problem. The number of people taking part in elections is declining and in some the turn out is as low as 20%. Until we have politicians such a Bevin, Attlee, Healey, Callaghan, Whitelaw, Heseltine, Mason,Prior , Campbell, Ashdown who can earn the respect of people across the political divide, then technology will not make up for peoples contempt for the system.

Charlie, you’re absolutey right that the way parties are structured these days, experience outside of politics is not an advantage, in fact it means you haven’t spent enough time climbing the greasy pole in Westminster, so you’re going to be at a disadvantage.

Equally, the use of new technology or copying a grassroots campaign like Obamas and taking the visible attractive bits like the web tools or the message “choose change/hope/whatever”, will probably alienate people even more that you’re fobbing them off with some spin about being open and grassroots and listening when you don’t actually open up the real decision making processes so that people can see their ideas taken into account and debated openly.

that’s open source politics, i would prefer politicians to be more modest, rather than build your own snappy flashy website, why not go out to the virtual & real precints and listen to what people are saying about the issues that matter to them and join in the debate. doesn’t mean you have to agree with everyone just to play the everyday man, but actually people will respect u more if you debate a member of the public/blogger and say why u disagree with them and what u would propose instead, naive or what?

I for one don’t give a tinker’s cuss what method of campaign organising the major (or minor) parties adopt because the real problem is that none of them have any policies I want to vote for.

Gordon is so terrified of looking weak that he won’t admit to ever having been wrong even when it’s obvious. The rest seem to follow his lead. Painting himself into this authoritarian corner is counterproductive because it leads him to suggest that he will continue to make the “right” decisions (but cannot tell us what they are). A man with the slightest shred of honesty would acknowledge that there is no one “right” answer to complex questions. All you can have is a theory about what is going on in the world, an idea of what you want to change and a view about who this will benefit at whose expense.

The way to re-energise the electorate is to say what you believe in and take your lumps from the people who disagree. Any major leader of any substance has nearly as many detractors as admirers. That is how you get debate and debate is how you get people to get off their arses and work for the world they want to see.

Pretending to know what’s best for everyone is bound to end in apathy all round. Moreover, when there are real problems with the climate, the financial system, global security and the food supply, pretending to have all the answers makes you look like the biggest fool of all.