I’m planning on attending tomorrow, but there are no direct trains to London from Newark-on-Trent that early. It’ll mean driving to Peterborough and taking a train from there. 4am start. Grrrr.

Why couldn’t it have been lunch, or even ‘brunch’?

Go 4th? Man…never trust a site that poorly coded…

Screenshot from my machine

Like you say, it’s all about the grassroots.

Labour don’t seem to understand that these initiatives only become powerful when they are driven from the bottom up, not from the top down. Labourlist is no better (or different) than cabinet members writing on Comment is Free. Obviously ConservativeHome is not funded by the grassroots but it is independent of the party and has its own opinions and agenda, hence its large appeal.

What they need, but can’t do, is open debate, without bullying (Draper), without condescension (Draper), without shouting the party-line over dissenting voices of folk who ought to be natural Labour voters but dislike much of what’s gone on under the now pretty toxic new labour banner (er, draper, again). It would also help if LabourList wasn’t also trying to farm folk’s e-mail and real world addresses: that’s plain electioneering, which doesn’t mix well with discussion and debate.It’s too centralised (oh, and Draper’s stalking of Dale’s Twitter followers is plain wrong).
Campbell’s site is largely a big puff-piece about himself, Prescott’s is better (that’s not saying an awful lot). LabourSpace is doomed to fail, because a) it gives the impression that labour wants your ideas, but will take the credit,b) implies labour hasn’t any ideas, c) is reminisecnt of the Big Conversation bollocks, where no dialogue ever took place. It’s like an employer’s suggestion box and lacks interactivity.
Some labour MPs do get it: I dislike Tom Watson, but he’s more clued up, while Paul Flynn’s blog is refreshingly open.
One lesson from Obama might be that web engagement doesn’t work on an official/semi-official party basis,but on an individual/candidate level and that’s probably especially true for the UK, where party discipline is chokingly tight.. Few heavily structured organisations (political, commercial or other) engage successfully online,: those that do tend more to be looser coalitions or alliances than those with hierarchical structures in the real world, which seem incapable of shedding those rigidities and the need to be on-message online. The medium is a loose, sometimes chaotic, but liberated and diverse one, so only those prepared to accept a very broad spectrum of opinions (hey, this place accepts Newmania..!), approaches and tenors prosper.

The only way Labour is going to energise an active base, is if they fundamentally change the way they approach governing.

They’re a government under siege by the media. But they’re under siege because they choose to be. Blair/Campbell made a decision to pander to The Daily Mail and the Murdoch press, and this became an albatross. They themselves built the cage that has prevented them from being genuinely progressive.

Also, the reliance on consultants and convoluted public-private initiates has created a bloated and impotent policy structure.

Why do they make things complicated for themselves?

If Labour want a motivated base of liberal progressives, then they need to be a liberal and progressive party that these people can have faith in.

Labour have proven themselves to be talented at passing legislation, but incompetent at producing lean and effective laws. And in this age of managerialism, they have proven to be poor managers.

The next generation of Labour politicians needs to include people with experience of finance and management. Not just lawyers, career politicians and journalists.

Labour Lost ?

Interesting that good old emails are the best weapon, we are investing in some email marketing for our little company as well as phone calls . Its surprisingly cheap to do this sort of thing , a day was spent ( on the calls ) writing scripts and discussing the image and then you let the professionals loose. E -mails really come down to phone calls as you need the right address.
I think this must be the future of campaigning , small teams using techniques from low level marketing and employing specialist firms to get the message out .

Couod be that the small business experience of the Conservative Parry will once again beat the perpetual students of the left

Finally, where are the good speech writers who can pen the inspiring words that can really get people pumped up??

Obama has Jon Favreau, and president Bartlett had the great Sam Seaborn. ;o)

daily politics…yesterday. was also in on the act. re blog blog and blog some more. The key and most valid being made is that the populace is not being engaged. despite all. this.

I have to admit I like Prescott and Campbell’s blogs. Draper’s I haven’t been reading, but for me Prescott and Campbell seem to have got (or at least be getting) the point of it all.

Prescott is amusing, obviously cares and makes an attempt to engage. It’s a little unfair to say he shouldn’t run a campaign against bankers’ bonuses – it would’ve been fair when he was Deputy PM and in a position to do something about it, but he’s a backbencher now.

Campbell is interesting and refreshingly honest. I look forward to seeing how his blog develops.

I suspect if you like either of Prescott or Campbell you will like their blogs; if not you won’t.

re 9. all very good points.

Prescott is on his way to becoming a national institution.

and Mr “We don’t do god” , I think, will become
.
.
(with his painfully honest account of matters mental health)
.
.
????

“Finally, where are the good speech writers who can pen the inspiring words that can really get people pumped up??”

.
.
.
any thoughts on what would be apt today.

I will stick my own thought into the pan………..

“It is time for all good men and women of this country to unite”
It is time to think past petty politics. of the past. their time will come but not today.

today is tiime to be think beyond the past. today it is time to unite. once again. for your country.

I think I see these aspects several weeks in:

* An attempt at an internal party bully pulpit for the leadership – and so about re-establishing comms channels that have corroded.

* A move to get less formal communication from the leadership. Positive if they write their own pieces.

* A rehash of the old pre-buttal approach – i.e., basically pre-emptive Tory bashing. I don’t see another strategy since no one will believe them any more.

* I do not see dialogue. Maybe that’s a “yet”.

* A place to explore the leadership opinions in more detail than is done in press releases.

I see the same problems as Aaron – the leadership isn’t really interested in dialogue, and have never been, beyond as part of the presentation. That won’t stand up in blog-land.

I wonder whether they have shifted from “communicating with 60 million” to “communicating with 60,000 party members and media”. The “60 million” would be a 5 year project and any blog strategy would have to be an attempt to affect the channels that feed in to Sunny’s beloved “media narratives” as step one. From that angle, plan B for Labourlist – which will never be admitted – is about building position to have an impact in case they lose the next election.

I differ from Aaron in that I don’t think any renewal can happen without essentially dumping a rotten generation of leadership. Then there’d be a chance to see what comes next, if anything – but it needs a revolution internally and I don’t think a recrudesence of the old left is the future either.

I’m thinking that the most effective Tory response might be “stick to the knitting” and hope to watch it run into the sand. It really depends on whether Lab manages to build a unified internal coalition and which tradition gets the upper hand.

Matt

“Campbell is interesting and refreshingly honest.”

Alistair Campbell…honest…DOES NOT COMPUTE…

Working in mental health and having had MH problems myself, I can and do empathise with Campbell over his distress, but that does not make him honest, reliable, trustworthy or any less bullying/bullish. Folk with MH problems are just as reliable or unreliable as the next person (we are the next person). Judge him on his political and public actions (which are disreputable) not his MH issues.

I’m not only referring to his disclosures and campaigning on mental health issues – like most Labour Party members I admire and respect Alistair Campbell and don’t hold to the caricatures everyone else believes in.

“So what’s the upshot of all this? Online activity won’t help them win the election, and with Brown still undecided on what to do about the economic crisis, this Labour government is going to lose the next election. ”

I agree that Mr Brown with his fear of the very rich is on a sticky wicket.

I however do not agree that Labour will lose the election.

“It’s arguable that is a good thing.”
Think all outcomes as one cannot do anything about them once they have taken place are a “good” thing.

“Blogging will always be a niche activity”

oops. forget to delete “blogging will be a niche”

“ppl with MH are like the folk next door” – well ofcourse.

and I hope that we all agree with that.

Mr Campbell is , I think, past his political career apart from tribal stuff.

He will however, I believe, make a brilliant (and honest) contribution – on matters MH.

and that , at the extremeties of life, is arguably more important than what the government will do today,tomorrow or the day after. UK is a rich country. we will all be ok. The current situation is more to with rebalancing of our priorities in life that anything else. I think.

Good article. We should be realistic: blogging isn’t going to replace the mainstream media anytime soon, and it’s only a small portion of political nerds such as ourselves who are seriously influenced by political blogs (plus all the people with anger issues who leave comments at Guido’s blog who clearly need somewhere to let off their demented rants). Blogging should be seen as a complement to political campaigning. As a Labourite, I think blogs like Labour List and Labour Home could be used most effectively when they’re co-ordinating practical campaigning – i.e. getting people organised and out to by-elections to knock on doors, ring up voters, stuff envelopes etc. Just look at what Daily Kos was doing in the US election. As well as having the standard opinion posts it was also fundraising for its preferred candidates and encouraging people to get involved in the ground-work of their campaigns.

On the Huff Post and other “big” blogs.

The Huffington Post currently reaches around 3-4% of the population in the USA. I don’t think even that is major market penetration (?). Would welcome comments.

When I read these big blogs that some think are the future, they seem to be quite close in style to Guido than say PP. Definitely more Mail/Express/Mirror (tempted to add the Indy to that list) than Guardian/Telegraph. It is highly personality and attack-based and I’d call them the tabloid press that doesn’t exist in the USA.

So, are the HuffPo, Kos and their equivalents on the right actually raising the game?

I haven’t yet seen a real analysis of Arianna Huff’s content strategy – lots about funding and a celeb contacts book, but nothing on content except the recent move into “lifestyle”. Part of it is weight of posts – a quick skim suggests 60-100 a day. Maybe when a UK blog starts doing that it will be significant.

I note that DD has infrastructure in Labourlist for an “off the bus” setup, although it’s done via a metadata (author names) kludge, rather than a real Multi-Blog setup.

Matt

Interesting stuff.

My own feeling is that blogging is becoming more of an anti-platform where the initiation of interaction is more important than the basic content.

Where connections are built, coalitions can develop and from there campaigning pressure can mount. In a sense it is like old-fashioned residents surveys and the pavement politics of the digital universe where non-spatial communities come together according to personal interests.

The analysis of Obama’s online campaign strategy makes sense only in that each medium adds layers which can feed into the next and encourage people outlets where they can increase their commitment levels.

I mean LC wouldn’t work without email coordination and event organisations, such as this new media breakfast, would it?

@ Sunny -

blogging for 60 million people not 60 bloggers. I’m afraid that’s being hilariously optimistic. Blogging will always be a niche activity, albeit an activity that has the potential to involve the brightest and most committed of political people. But it’s certainly not going to involve the entire electorate.

60 million vote? I thought that was the entire population of the UK not the electorate. IF Draper is blogging for new born babies then that just about sums up LabourList.

@ Alisdair -

It’s too centralised (oh, and Draper’s stalking of Dale’s Twitter followers is plain wrong).

If my information is correct, Draper and Dale are Facebook friends, too. But that could be wrong, yet easy to check.

@ Jako -

and it’s only a small portion of political nerds such as ourselves who are seriously influenced by political blogs

I disagree. When I was blogging during the presidential, 1 I got a lot of hits from people who were anti-Obama, 2, some of them changed their votes TO Obama. And these were people who were not ‘nerds’ of any kind – just ordinary people. I didn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, have any influence on the outcome – as I won’t in the next UK election – that is a foregone conclusion – but there are many, many people who now read blogs for a more independent view than the MSM.

Take the point of The Huff at the press conference – yes that was both a thank you and a payback for their backing during the campaign – but that will happen more often.

The backward thinking in the UK just doesn’t ‘get it’ with internet technology – hence Draper’s dismal blog.

If you do blog – and want people to read it, you have to put up with the opposing view – Draper et al, don’t so their blogs will die a slow, painful death.

20) interesting points.

I would however like to add one or two of my own ideas:

engagement. (virtual – mind you)
a1) activists who are out there knocking doors… would be nice… if via the power of the net & webcam, they had a faclity whereby they would make it possible for the voter to speak to someone they could relate to – a celeb (labour supporting) or a politician – about whatever .

a2) this concept could – if extended further lead to a virtual “town” hall meeting.

b) and extending from the phonebank concept (which is top down but still pretty good)…why should the activists not relate their experiences live or later to their very own support group – from a moral support/sharing of experiences viewpoint. technology is there to make this possible.

@12 Matt Wardman: I see the same problems as Aaron – the leadership isn’t really interested in dialogue, and have never been, beyond as part of the presentation. That won’t stand up in blog-land.

I agree.

I differ from Aaron in that I don’t think any renewal can happen without essentially dumping a rotten generation of leadership.

Harsh but probably fair.

@ ash -

You also have to have policies that the electorate want to see. Neither Tory nor Labour have any, as far as I can see. Other than the same old, same old.

@ Will (23). Not convinced that Draper and Dale get on at all: Facebook friendship’s not really like real-world friendship is it– I mean Sunny’s my facebook friend…(true, but I cite that jokingly, as I like this site and Sunny, though we may disagree).
On that twitter stalking by Draper, it’s not illegal or against the rules, but is just wrong, as in being bad form:

I differ from Aaron in that I don’t think any renewal can happen without essentially dumping a rotten generation of leadership. ~ Matt W

I don’t see how you disagree with me, as my scenario has zero chance of happening – and I am fully aware of that. )

26.

thanks.
very much so. but the electorate are not stupid. policies are being made on a daily basis we all know that as everyone is out of their depth. However..

the issue is something quite different. It is about who do we trust in a time of crisis. Untried untested young ‘uns

or those who pick them up from the dust, and get on with it.

“Draper and Dale ”

i am chuckling at the thought of both of them on stage at the Progress onlinethingy.
it is free for those, by the way,

who do not wish to pay until they are able to experience 1st hand what the entertainment/enlightenment value of it will be.

put simply – yu only pay for it if yu want, and then yu decide how much yu would like to pay.

and that in itself is a brilliant concept.
and who said that the left is bankrupt – of ideas.

Jako, did you used to frequent NS?

@ Alisdair – 27

I agree – but Draper has to get his content from somewhere?

@ ash – 29

the issue is something quite different. It is about who do we trust in a time of crisis. Untried untested young ‘uns

They have in the US – if I recall correctly one of the main epitaphs of the Republicans was that ‘Obama has no experience’.

I believe John McCain will be choosing that one – or “Didn’t know the economy was so ill”

33. an excellent reply. but as yu know the US and the UK differ…

I could say more. But I rather not. thanks for the reply.

“Obama has no experience’.”

why not mention his outstanding qualities. The most prominent one being to carry people with him. and what do we do (with our situation being worse than the US).

and in future I would appreciate that you are not selective of my quotes. It was clear in my post that I do not believe that the Tories can pick themselves up, dust themselves and get on with it.

clearly you have some special insight if you wish to equate Mr Cameron with Mr Obama. President Obama ( and by definition the whole of the US) disagrees with you.

yu started it.haha.

Can I return to my Huff Post, Kos and the rest as being essentially partisan and tabloid in form almost a la Guido.

How will that increase the quality of US politics (apart – arguably – from giving a “progressive left of what passes for centre in the US” platform).

I haven’t followed them in the detail some have, so I could be wrong on that point – but what I have seen has been pretty personalised and nit-picking. That’s one reason why I’m not that enamoured of the presidential campaigns we saw on both sides.

Sorry – missed out “point” after “my”.

Matt, I think you’re comparing the Huffington Post, Daily Kos etc to US broadsheets. Don’t. They’re not a left-wing answer to daily newspapers, or an extension of them. They’re a left-wing answer to right-wing talk radio. Even though their reach is greater than most other blogs, the point of them is still to motivate the base, act as filters for information and try to set an agenda.

The problems with a lot of what Labour (and the Torys as well) are doing is that it feels a lot like watching your grandad skateboarding.

40.

think that with Ed Balls talking about cross party consensus

that is is coming more from a party of wise elders than elders skateboarding. I think.

Some of you may have noticed Derek Draper’s piece on the Guardian CiF page (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/11/labour-media ) about LabourList. It’s provoked a wonderfully carnivorous response from the CiF posters, myself included. Draper has only himself to blame; it’s a self-serving, disingenuous piece which claims to offer something new:
“And in the spirit of what we are setting out to achieve — providing a platform for genuine debate on progressive issues — our contributors have come from across the broad spectrum of the Labour movement.”
Comparisons between LabourList & the Huffington Post only serve to highlight the clear differences between them.

I have only one problem with Labour List: it’s shit.

More in a bit…

>Matt, I think you’re comparing the Huffington Post, Daily Kos etc to US broadsheets. Don’t. They’re not a left-wing answer to daily newspapers, or an extension of them. They’re a left-wing answer to right-wing talk radio. Even though their reach is greater than most other blogs, the point of them is still to motivate the base, act as filters for information and try to set an agenda.

My thesis has been that they are fitting into the online gap left by the absence of a US national daily print media (USA Today aside) reporting the news in detail online.

One further observation is that doing a wildcard* Google search suggests the Huff Po now has millions of pages of content online – which is not far short of guardian.co.uk. I’m still reflecting on the implications.

site:www.huffingtonpost.com *

>They’re not a left-wing answer to daily newspapers, or an extension of them. They’re a left-wing answer to right-wing talk radio.

If that’s true, then who’s going to raise the tone? And are they any more useful than Rush Limbaugh in the grand scheme of things?

Well, in terms of being a place for high-minded debate, no, they’re no more useful than Rush Limbaugh. And someone else will have to raise the tone, if that’s your aim. But as I said, they’re pretty good at motivating the base – and I’m glad there are people doing that for the Democrats as well as the Republicans.

“I have only one problem with Labour List: it’s shit.”

Actually, in “think before you type” news, that was as childish as Fawkes. Apologies.

@ Matt (45)

who’s going to raise the tone?

Hmm, well my money’s not on Draper to do that…

Bah.

..Coffee..
..Choke..
..Keyboard..
..You Sod..

Interesting stuff. I agree with the idea that you need to treat the online political engagement stuff very differently to the ways in wih new technologies allow you to adapt your message communication/propogation strategy.

I’ve said before that if I were the party campaign team I’d regard supporter email acquisition, support for labour organisers and activists, and methods for transmitting key messages (like leaflets, canvassing techniques, narrow policy interest briefings) as much. much. much more important than engaging with bloggers.

I think this is the party itself is focussing on, and quite right too. (Douglas Alexander is good on this)

That said, as Matt says, blogs are important in one area in getting stories up, creating a buzz that people need to listen to and helping to set the political agenda. I actually think the party is as good as the Tories on this sort of thing. It’s just that the kind of buzz you can create is very different when you’re in government to when you’re in opposition – Tory Troll and Boris watch, while not “Labour” sites, show that very well.

Side note – I sometimes feel a bit wierd in that I blog because a) I like politics, b) I like writing and c) I like writing about the politics as it makes me happy when someone chooses to read what I write about. Which isn’t a particularly impressive mission statment, and means I quite often don’t get involved in the story of the moment, and forget to join in the buzz creating narrative shaping stuff. Which I then feel bad about.

I console myself by having a fairly low opinion of “opinion-blogs” (including my own), because in the end, all it is is burbling online, and I don’t really think what I do/say is going to change anyones votes. The only thing it might credibly do is influence a few parly researchers, be read by journalists and occassionally get me on the telly.

To even do that well, i think it has to be in my voice, not that of the party, even with someone as loyal as me.That’s one of the reasons i think the most successful Labour politicians blogs (Tom H, Kerry) are ones that play very much on their individuality and own ambitions and interests as MPs. One thing I’d argue is that those individuals should get more credit and support- I’d like to see Kerry more often on TV as a talking head, as well as a blogger.

Final point, a lot of the things the left “needs” online isn’t within the power of the party to do. We really need a “talkingpointsmemo” factual reportage style site more than another Labour opinion blog, but that requires someone to set it up, put the effort into it and break a couple of stories. Someone who does that will do more good than almost anyone online could.

Interesting, Hopi.

>I console myself by having a fairly low opinion of “opinion-blogs” (including my own), because in the end, all it is is burbling online, and I don’t really think what I do/say is going to change anyones votes.

I think place to look for blogs seriously changing things will be either Scottish, Welsh, Irish politics or the English Regions – since the numbers and building links offline make it so much easier to get penetration, and the regional local media is on it’s knees and much easier to compete/collaborate with. There is also much less competition to reach the attention of politicians in the regions.

It could be something like Curly in Newcastle, or alternatively a high-profile regional blog such as Created in Birmingham taking an interest in political life. In Brum there is also the prominent infrastructure provided by Paul Bradshaw that could help.

One of the directions I’m looking at is to focus on detailed coverage in 2 or 3 regions (maybe London / Birmingham or Manchester and the East Midlands) over the next 18 months to see what happens.

Rgds

Hi Sunny, does the Next Right graph really include MyBO among blogs? MyBO was a social network and performed the functions you describe as being done by emails (primarily organising events and volunteers, but also acting as a way for people to phone canvass and get doorknocking data for their own neighbourhoods and beyond). There were groups and communities on MyBO, just as there are on Facebook, and some if not all had blogs linked to them as a way for users to share their stories about how they used the other, more productive grassroots tools.

I think despite its comparatively low usership, it was an incredibly effective platform and technology. Some further analysis:

http://www.ciozone.com/index.php/Management/The-Barackobama.com-Difference.html

Sorry I missed out various comments on this:

Hopi: Final point, a lot of the things the left “needs” online isn’t within the power of the party to do. We really need a “talkingpointsmemo” factual reportage style site more than another Labour opinion blog, but that requires someone to set it up, put the effort into it and break a couple of stories. Someone who does that will do more good than almost anyone online could.

Agreed. I’ve in fact said this to everyone I’ve talked on the issue at length.

Rayyan – agree with what you said. On the figures, not 100% sure. Since SocNets were roughly around 5 million, I assumed the DailyKos/HuffPo crowd were lumped in with MyBO.

On that article – interesting, but as I spent a fair bit of time using and studying the website (we had to pull info for the campaign office!) none of that is particularly new to me. The trick for any party in the UK would be:
What do you do if you don’t have a particularly good candidate?
How do you decentralise to local constituencies?

Sunny, I’d say the first thing is to look for good candidates that can at the very least speak well on viral videos and in front of small crowds, and ideally have great backstories, but of course we have to work with what we have! Like you say, it’s a trick any party faces at the moment: but I do think all of the progressive parties need to start looking for good candidates at a local level in time for 2010 if they haven’t selected already. A decent amount of public speaking training, making sure the candidate is 100% sure about what the party stands for and what policies they should highlight, and fully understands what the internet is and isn’t useful for – basically making sure any candidate is completely bulletproof like Obama was, so to speak.

Decentralisation – depends on where it is. I’d say that even local elections in a place like London should be fought on a regional basis – i.e. appeal to people as Londoners – as that can feed into a good regional campaign. There are lots of local community campaigns going on in different parts of the UK; political parties need to be a part of those, and candidates need to put down roots in those communities if they haven’t already in order to understand how their local party should operate. I’ll try and blog on this in the near future and let you know about it.

Given your experience campaigning across the pond, I’d appreciate it if you could fill in this survey for my research and pass the link on to other campaign volunteers/staffers you met:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=8g9IAUL6YqC1GY3pPbBWWA_3d_3d

Blog are very important in sharing news. Creating a buzz among the people to listen and a political view point that is made and shared with the rest of the community.