“The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” George Burns

Over the next few weeks, my MP (a newly-elected Tory) will go through the parliamentary lobby in support of a range of bills that he knows little about.

@tom_watson - a pin-up for networked politics? (click for pic credit)

Sure. He may have a few reflexive opinions on the general subject matter, but beyond that, like most MPs, he’ll focus upon a handful of issues that he stays on top of: Personal bugbears, issues raised my his more persistent constituents, areas in which he’s been allocated a Parliamentary or Party role.

And however he casts his vote, the letters pages of the local newspapers will regularly castigate him. He’ll often respond by topping-and-tailing cut-and-paste letters provided by someone else in his party.

In this respect, my MP is quite like Tom Watson – the pin-up of the networked politics. I’m sure Tom toes The Party Line when he’s not sure. In other words, my MP and Tom conspire in the fakery that sustains Party politics.

I say that my local MP quite like Tom. But he’s also not quite the same. Earlier this summer, for instance, Tom attained a status that very few politicians have ever held. He could have walked into a bi-partisan pub and had drinks bought for him from all sides because he behaved in a way that most people think good MPs should.

But was Tom really a one-man force of nature – a campaigning multi-tasking up-all-night political polymath, on top of the details with carefully phrased rapier-like questions?

I yield to no-one in my admiration for him, but I really don’t think he was this superman. I say this because he did something a bit cleverer than that: He rode the network into battle. His 3,225 Facebook friends and 51,984 Twitter followers gave him extra eyes, ears, hands and brains. They allowed him to stretch his Parliamentary Allowance and give him all kinds of resources that he won’t need to claim for on annoying IPSA forms.

Sure – he worked hard and picked his fights well. But his real talent was in finding help – and not just of a material kind.

Where his followers weren’t slipping him data, they were chewing over the evidence, road-testing a few ways of describing developments giving him phrases that were useful when the cameras were on. When they were doing none of those things, he got feedback – encouragement and reassurance.

When you know you’re onto something, it gives you that extra bounce. His self-image here didn’t need to develop that self-loathing edge that sustains fake indignation. A politician as exposed as Tom would never get away with that these days.

By embedding himself in the network, he had little choice but to apply high standards of self-criticism. Either be a genuinely good guy, or act his socks off every day.

Now contrast Tom with Sir Stuart Bell – the unobtainable member for Middlesbrough.

Sir Stuart hasn’t held a constituency surgery for 14 years. He is made even harder to contact by the fact he doesn’t have a constituency office.

According to the paper, his response to questions about this has been to point out that he meets with members of the public by appointment instead, and people can reach him by telephone at any time.

So reporter Neil Macfarlane set about trying to find out how easy or otherwise it was to get in contact with the MP. Over several months, the Gazette rang Sir Stuart’s Westminster office and his home number over 100 times. No-one ever answered. That’s despite claiming staffing costs of £82,896 last year. Contrast that with Teesside’s four other MPs, all of who have their phones answered at the first attempt.

Sir Stuart isn’t on Facebook or Twitter either as far as I can see. And – when we find out what he thinks – I doubt if it’s ever as nuanced or road-tested as Tom’s positions. The contrast in self-awareness as well as political competence will be eye-watering.

So there’s a heirarchy here: On the top, Tom Watson, the go-to example of the networked politician.

Somewhat below him is my MP (no slouch with social media by the way, but as guarded as most MPs) who is in a marginal seat and is accordingly, visibly, busy.

Then, a long way further down, there’s Sir Stuart, who has managed to hide way for 14 years without hosting a surgery because, in Middlesbrough, they’d probably elect a Donkey if was wearing a red rosette (Tory equivalents are undoubtely available folks!).

I’m sorry it’s taken me to get to it, but here’s my question:

If you’re good at networking, are political parties as important to you as they were? Does Tom need to get his cut-and-paste replies from Labour HQ as often? Does he need to rely upon the whips to guide him through issues he doesn’t understand as often? Does he need to scour local committee rooms get find local canvassers who will knock on doors for him at the next election?

And most importantly, Tom has created a situation where he has to behave publically like an honest human being. In being well networked, has he redefined what representation is?

And should we be voting for people on the basis of their personal network more than their party rosette?

Update: More on lazy politicians here.

Mark Pack has a very good post up on Lib-Dem Voice – advice for budding politicians: ‘30 things every would-be politician should do this summer‘ (he was inspired by a similar post for aspiring journalists elsewhere).

I really don't know if Niccolò would endorse this advice...

Thirty is a big number – too big for me. But I’ve got a few observations that I’ve been working on that I’d like to offer – in beta – that are intended to help people who are already politicians adapt to the way that interactivity has changed the way that public life is conducted.

There are new possibilities, pitfalls and expectations that need to be met. Here are my ten (draft) ground rules for interactive public representation.

Some of them involve a fundamental rethinking of the standard advice that has been offered to young politicians through the ages:

1. Cut your workload by effective listening. A lack of thinking-time results in indecision and procrastination. Find ways of asking for solutions to small problems and internalising the answers without it disrupting your work. Establish a network of informers – people who will give you short summaries of the key questions that you are facing and answers to little questions. A briefing on how you consume shared information will help here. This is what Twitter can do for you.
2. Build a network of people that you deal with. Social networks are important – they ensure that you have a well of goodwill to draw upon. New technologies allow you to stay in the peripheral vision of large numbers of people. You can even approach a sub-set of your networks and invite them to take very simple steps that will promote your work more widely. To join your ‘relay team’.
3. Find ways of keeping that network informed without doing any extra work. Increasingly, you can show your networks that you’ve read / done / attended something by adapting your personal systems. Many effective communicators use social networking tools effortlessly once they’ve investigated how some APIs and RSS feeds work (you can ask a social media geek to spend a short time sorting this out for you if you need to). This can effortlessly solicit useful recommendations and let the people who work with you know what you’re really interested in. Remember, we all vastly overestimate how much the people we need to know about us actually do know.
4. Switch ‘broadcast’ off. There are ways of effortlessly providing your network of informers with positive feedback and evidence that you have heard them. This will motivate them to provide you with more, better information. The really valuable thing that social networks offer is a cluster of articulate people that you can eavesdrop upon (in a non-sinister, non-intrusive way, naturally). Broadcast is becoming less useful to you anyway for reasons that I’ll come to shortly.
5. Don’t ask for solutions – ask for descriptions of problems. To do the former will attract lobbyists and force you into a frustrating auction of promises. Doing the latter will give you time to think, allow rival pressure groups to neutralise each other, and help build a consensus around any decisions that you ultimately make. Your network of informers and staff need to understand that you expect high standards from those who brief you but this often encourages rather than discourages them. Psychiatrists never tell you what do to. They tell you to talk through your problems. The right answers suggest themselves. That’s ‘the talking cure’.
6. Show your working. By making decisions in a more transparent way, you can explain trade-offs, enhance your reputation for inclusivity and avoid accusations of partiality. The ‘crowdsource a description of the problem’ advice helps here. In the past, this involved bureaucracies and checks and balances. It created monopolies and gatekeepers. It is so much easier to do this now in a highly visible, productive and human way. This is what a blog can help you with.
7. Certainty stops you thinking and silences your advisors. Projecting an air of open-mindedness and a willingness to be persuaded results in better decisions and fewer unintended consequences.
8. Avoid unnecessary partisanship. Politicians always overestimate how much it impresses others. It creates unwanted enemies and cuts off the valuable flow of information that your networks can bring you. Politicians often confess that their best advice sometimes comes from candid and not-unfriendly opponents
9. The ‘big idea’ is dead. Think about it. When is the last time that a politician or organisation ‘unveiled’ a ‘solution’ or a ‘Big Idea’ that no-one had thought of before? Remember how well that was received? Forget it. People don’t want to read your prescriptions. They want to work with you to write them. Your problem – indeed, this may be the biggest ethical challenge that you face – is how you ensure that your interactivity doesn’t skew your decisions in favour of the interests of ‘active citizens’ and away from those of people with mild preferences or those who are unable or unwilling to interact with you when you’re framing your policies.
10. Be good. There was a time that politicians could inhabit a closed order in which they were only judged by the standards of their caste. Those days are over. By being open and interactive, by building a network of friends and informers, by showing your working and being inclusive in the way you make decisions, you will be able to take your place among the more trusted and respected associates that the public encounter every day.

OK, OK, they’re not finished. And none of them ar

(Note: A minor edit was added at 9.58am to point 9)

Firstly, Catherine has an interesting post up here. No conclusions yet, but definitely worth following.

Secondly, Tom Watson – in one of the final votes of the last Parliamentary session – rebelled against the government for the first time in his career over the Digital Economy Bill. I’d say I’m in a minority in admiring Tom’s reluctance to break the Party Whip on anything, and I thought this tweet at the time reflected particularly well on him. Now he is crowdsourcing his personal manifesto on digital matters using Uservoice (read this post first though).

Thirdly, Anthony – an occasional star here – has established this site – Talk Issues – under the auspices of The Democratic Society to promote a less personality-led approach to the forthcoming election. I’m not sure that I fully buy this idea that elections should be polite issue-led exchanges. I’ve argued it before, but politics is not about niceness, presentation or honesty. It’s about the clash of material interests.Wanting elections to be about ishoos is, I suspect, slightly missing the point of what elections are.

Sure – a handful of votes will be switched in response to the handling of the wonkier questions that will come up over the next few weeks, but broadly, people are still voting on a combination of the staged competing characters of the leaders, a range of carefully-pitched bribes and a range of nebulous fears about the capacity of different candidates to govern.

For those of us who would like local politics to be more highly valued, two slightly conflicting observations were made by prominent political bloggers last weekend.

It is possible that the Tories are regretting using pics of David Cameron to front their 2010 launch?

The first was by the ever-perceptive Potlatch writing about James Purnell, and digging into the question of ‘professionalisation’ of politics:

“Purnell – like Ruth Kelly and Ed Balls – ticks both journalism and policy advice. This is a slightly different issue from the long-standing, Weberian concern with professionalisation of politics. A professional politician is one who is expert at campaigning and winning elections, but has no experience or life outside of this. New Labour was more about the scientisation of politics (sorry if that’s not a word), in which expertise in economics and public affairs became a precondition of political authority.” (emphasis mine)

Potlatch (Will Davies) seemed to see a deepening of the trend towards a more professional political elite – one in which a rare combination of skills was a pre-condition to success. It does have echoes of the almost caste-based Enarque phenomonon in France in which a professional supporting bureaucracy grows up around political parties, consisting of the children of other Enarques.

The second was on Political Betting – a site that convenes genuinely valuable political data* (most political blogs attract opinion – what we would like to happen. PB is specifically about identifying what is actually going to happen) in which Councillors were offered as an underestimated political force.

Political centralisation is widely seen as a consequence of the way that carefully managed branding around charismatic individuals has supplanted the more earthy questions of local representatives, lively public debate and a more engaged electorate. My own Labour Party experience features countless examples of MPs being warned – in a roundabout way – that the only reason they are in Parliament is because of the party logo – and that any individualism on their part is unwarranted arrogance.

If you ask most political pundits, they may be keen to tell you that the election will be decided by a battle of the brands. That Lord Ashcroft is in a position to finance a Tory victory and that local issues are largely irrelevant.

I think that this is becoming contestable. I don’t think that anyone expects Labour to fight a ‘presidential campaign’ with Gordon Brown as the sole focus for the voters. But even the Tories are concious of the way that social media activists are capable of damaging the brand value of a leader – and they are stepping back from hanging the campaign on David Cameron. As Guido Fawkes reported recently, they have also dropped the tag of ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’ (and I hope its not seen as a partisan point when I say ‘thank god for that!’)

If it’s true that – in a more peer-to-peer polity – one of the deciding issues is the number of local councillors that you have, perhaps this presents those councillors with an opportunity to reverse the trend that has continued as long as the mass media has dominated the political space?

Is it time for Councillors to demand powers that are commensurate with their ability to win elections?

* Let me just add this: Political betting is a really great political blog. Really good. Subscribe to it if you can?

The January 2010 issue of Wired Magazine has a bunch of policy-related proposals under the slightly familiar heading ‘Let’s Reboot Britain’.

It’s always a slightly trying time, reading Wired when it strays into politics and public policy. For an example of what I’m talking about, this article (Synopsis: I know! Now somebody’s invented teh internet, we can have referendums about everything all the time!) captures the mood and raises the question of how some of it ever slips by an editor in the first place.

But there’s also one that is well worth a look: The idea of publishing all laws in beta format. For those of you who aren’t techie-inclined, this means that laws could be released in the way that software is. Most software – in it’s early versions – isn’t actually that good. It’s often released cheaply or free of charge and feedback loops are established and monitored carefully. The best software often starts off clunky and full of holes. Perhaps good laws could follow a similar trajectory?

There is another post about the need to encourage failure – again taking the paradigm of technical innovation and applying it to civil society.

I mention these because they represent potentially innovative approaches. But they would also involve a huge reassessment of politicians. It would require a more consultative personality and a recasting of the notion of ‘leadership’. It would need the lust for certainty to be understood as a sin again.

And continuing my current uncharacteristic love-in with The Conservatives at the moment, the idea of publishing elements from a manifesto in draft and then inviting the public to ask questions, seek clarifications and propose improvements runs contrary to the traditional political Zeitgeist in which u-turns and muddles are cardinal sins. Taking it even further, Jeremy Hunt is promising to put all Green Papers online as a commentable document during a Public Reading Stage. A few weeks ago, the cheeky sods did the same thing with a leaked government IT strategy document – again, combining mischief with a deft understanding of what is possible.

The need to respond rapidly and firmly to the shrill demands of the rolling 24 hour media was a cornerstone of New Labour. It can be explained – at least in part – by the fact that Labour has traditionally had a more adversarial relationship with the media than the Conservatives, but it didn’t make for particularly good policy-making as this TV documentary illustrated.

If the Tories can break this cycle, it won’t be a bad thing by any means.

(Update: I’ve fixed the second link in this article now – apologies).

One of this blog’s new contributors, Halina Ward, is currently in Copenhagen at the Climate Change Conference. The main reason she is there is to write a post for us (ahem). One thing she has passed on to me is a scepticism about the problems surrounding ‘bottom up’ solutions to the problem of carbon emissions. Rugby players know what a hospital pass is, and it seems to me that we present politicians with one when we demand such solutions.

It seems to me that carbon emissions will only be cut by governments that are possessed with what Machiavelli described as Virtù – the historical vitality that only comes from a high level of legitimacy. Machiavelli had in mind a Prince who had successfully marshaled a population to liberate them from a despotic neighbour. In modern terms, it is a politician that can command some respect. One thinks of Tony Blair in 1997 or Mrs Thatcher after the Falklands.

The biggest challenge facing those who wish to cut carbon emissions is the distorting impact that pressure groups will have in frustrating the general will. Not some referendum snapshot, but the willing action of elected representatives to act in the public interest once they’ve reflected upon it properly. Their distributed moral wisdom. The idea that community organisations have the capacity to take on the might of those commercial pressure groups is the purest of fantasies.

Disrupting this ability is strongly in the interests of such pressure groups. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that those who have promoted the anti-politics mood in the UK have been the (un)witting allies of wealthy lobbyists.

Kevin Harris has forwarded this article about the role that councillors are obliged to adopt in relation to planning.

Nothing in it will come as a surprise to anyone familliar with the role of a modern councillor, but it’s a nice round up of an issue that will continue to perplex anyone with an interest in local representation. (Shorter version: that councillors have to adopt a jurist role on the question of planning. If it can be demonstrated that they have a predisposition on a particular planning matter, this can disqualify them from deliberating on it).

It reprises a few old posts here asking about whether councils are advocates or jurors. I’m not going to comment on this one in any great detail apart from to observe that councillors now have a potential to convene and conduct conversations quickly and spontaneously in a way that they never used to be. This is what social media can do best: It can allow anyone to invite everyone to dump their evidence in one place.

This ability (when the bulk of councillors become accustomed to having it) hints at yet another role for the councillor to adopt. Not juror or advocate, but as the curator of evidence and opinion on local matters. In offline terms, think of the way that detectives setup an evidence board in the incident room that we’ve all become familliar with in police procedural TV programmes.

Either way, it points to a role where councillors are expected to be more inclusive and conversational and less adversarial.

To illustrate this, I’ve been racking my memory for examples of where someone has used lots of different social media and bookmarking tools to simply gather all of the information on a particular subject in a neutral and even-handed way so that visitors can get a good overview prior to making a decision. I know there are lots of examples, but I just can’t think of one now (help me out, willya?)

Last week, the Guardian carried a feature on ‘The Coolest Mayor in America‘ – John Fetterman of Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Fetterman’s success raises a few slightly trivial aesthetic questions about what it takes to be a successful politician. It also raises bigger, more profound ones as well.

Fetterman doesn’t look like the traditional buttoned up political clone. He looks like he’d fit blend in to the audience of a Slayer gig or a Biker Bar more than a sausage-on-a-stick reception at the civic centre. Even David Cameron has allowed himself to be photographed occassionally without a tie, but somehow I think that even this would be step too far for an ex-member of The Bullingdon Club….

Fetterman is 6’8″. He prefers overalls and work-boots to suits and ties, along with plenty of other signals chosen to communicate a no-nonsense non-superficial approach to problems.

He has tattoos on his arms to signal his commitment to his community (his postcode is on one arm, the dates of a couple of notable deaths that happened ‘on his watch’ appear on the other). It’s a signal of determination in an age in which politicians are seen to belong to a caste that is removed from the day-to-day life of the voters. It also signals an unwillingness to negotiate – perhaps, the acceptance of a mandate from his voters.

It should be noted at this point that very few textbooks on effective representation are very keen on politicians accepting mandates.

In an age where presentation itself has been seen to be self-defeating, one has to question if we’re simply in the kind of spiral that writers such as Douglas Rushkoff have been chronicling for some time now: A bidding war between marketeers and consumers to mask a sales pitch in peer-to-peer authenticity.

In Rushkoff’s Media Virus and Coercion, we see traditional marketing departments replaced by cool hunters – hip adults who position themselves as close to their market as they can in order to shorten the cycle between the street and the mainstream. We may absolutely distrust the big marketing campaigns now in a way that we didn’t – but there’s no evidence that the changes that have effected the marketing industry will ever hit a stable point of happy compromise in which marketeers and their customers trust each other.

This may not ultimately bode well for democracy either.

Fetterman’s politics appear to be reasonably progressive homespun populism. The presentation, though, offers yet another persona that politicians can subscribe to. And for those of us that are generally sceptical of personality politics, Fetterman offers some possible reassurance here.

In recent months, I’ve drawn up a range of personality types for politicians here:

• The judge
• The juror
• The ‘man in the white suit’
• The cleric
• The buccaneer

Fetterman offers us another couple of templates: A cynic would say that he is a ‘cool hunter’. A more charitable option would be that he is a civic social entrepreneur (his approach to climate change has more than a touch of the ‘swords into ploughshares’ about it.

Carbon Caps = Hard Hats

My big question, though, concerns the decline of party politics. We seem to be saying that we don’t want them any more. Does a one-off vote for a single individual mean that our politics is more or less participative?

I’d say it’s the latter.

Power to the people!

The #rebootbritain hashtag on Twitter went haywire on Monday as over 700 people attended the event – I spent over an hour on Tuesday night searching through it and the earliest session I could get to in that time was a 4pm one – it actually challenged #michaeljackson for prominence on Twitter’s trending indicator.

Because I organised six of these sessions, I was confined to them and missed some other attractive ones. Of the six, the session of that I may have the most notable outcome was the one I helped Tim Davies to put together. He’s detailed it here, and the whole enterprise is a tribute to his imagination and industry.

If there’s one thing that I think Tim and I totally agree upon, it’s that these questions have a strongly political nature. They’re not simply neutral bureaucratic or managerial issues (indeed bureaucratic neutrality isn’t a notion that stands much examination, is it?)

To underline this, we jointly organised a session entitled ‘Political Theory 2.0′ at Barcamp earlier this year.

I tried to illustrate the political nature behind the need for an ‘Interactive Charter’ a while ago here, and we tried to make the session one that was focused around campaigning rather than worrying around the details. Whenever people come together to discuss these things, I always get the sense that they’re dancing to the sterile box-ticking rhythm of middle-managers rather than addressing the real challenges (or, more simply, the big challenge) that we face.

It’s the insight that marked Marx, Churchill, Che Guevara, Margaret Thatcher, Lenin, Tony Blair and Genghis Khan from the rest of us:

You make nothing happen until powerful forces are more frightened of you than they are of the others.

How many reams of reports, pilots, guidance, assessments, audits, research papers, initiatives and written-up brainstorms have we read telling us what that the dogs in the street have known for a long time? Surely all of these exercises are examples of co-option into an incompatible agenda?

We simply say we want to make organisations that touch our lives more transparent, interactive and responsive. We could shorten that and say we want them to behave in a human way. It’s not an unreasonable or extreme demand.

We want them to talk to us, listen to us and reason with us. We want them to ignore us when we’re being petulant and stupid and we want them to notice when we mention something that they hadn’t though of.

They know they should do it. In some cases, they’ve known that they’ve had the means at their disposal to do it for some time. A handful want to do it but can’t face the internal aggro. We’ve spent the last six months drawing MPs accross the coals because we know that some of them will jump when we shout at them.

Now, the real challenge is in Whitehall and in the Town Halls. The permanent staff who will still be there when the politicians have been red-carded. The management consultants who have been able to use each contract they win to create two more for themselves.

The QUANGOs that spend eight-figure sums each year purely to detoxify decisions that politicians could take. The campaign groups that set the pace but mask their paymasters’ agendas that are not in the public interest.

It’s time that we forced all of these organisations to come clean. Addressing the fifty hurdles that have been identified will enable organisations to take a giant step towards that openness. It’s what Trotskyists used to call a ‘transitional demand.’

We won’t do this purely by reasoning with them. As the MySociety campaign on Parliamentary expenses showed, you have to give them nowhere to wriggle. There is no point at pitching this at middle managers. None of this will be achieved by a conventional get-together of egg-heads or clever geeks.

The only way to make organisations do this is to use a combination of carrot and stick to get the people at the top of organisations to make a decisive change that they can’t get water down when the heat is off.

And though I’m happy to frame it as a political question, I’m confident that it’s one that will find supporters and opponents in all of the major political parties.

At the meeting that we had on Monday, I believe that we resolved to collectively do the following:

• Jointly check that the 50 Hurdles wiki is relevant and accurate – let’s get it right.
• Jointly pull together all of these things that we’ve been saying to each other about how marvelous interactivity is and how many problems it can solve – and put it into a short businesslike document that is much harder to ignore.
• Jointly think through the problems that a supportive big-wig would face and look at ways they can be overcome
• Pull it all together into a charter that anyone at the top of an organisation can sign.

This document has to be a tool for those people who work in organisations that they’d like to change in this way. We’d like to use MixedInk to convene this charter and anyone can contribute. Tom Watson MP was at the session and he said that he would put down an early day motion (EDM) supporting the resulting document. By the autumn, we could have something that we can campaign around.

We can look at how we get those who describe their role as one of ‘leadership’ to publicly commit to an acceptable timescale – and monitor how they’re doing.

Because remember, comrades, that the great only appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!

PS: I hope that a journalist somewhere is watching how Andrew Stott sidesteps this question – it should provide the basis for quite a good Public Administration textbook!

Benchmarking: Missing the point

Here’s Joanne Jacobs on the Australian ‘Government 2.0 Taskforce’ making a fairly universal point:

Even where a public fund is used to identify new tools, the majority of these will either slip into obscurity after launch or will be greatly applauded for a while but not widely adopted or contributed to, by the policy makers themselves, or those who are not already active participants in public engagement.  So the great ‘achievements’ of technology taskforces are celebrated in one thick and largely unread public report, and the new initiatives sparkle at their sauvignon-blanc launches, but thereafter are populated only by the usual suspects.

Instead of insisting in a specific set of standards, I rather wish government officials would make a habit of putting a spotlight on a new initiative every day. It might be tiring, but it would make more interesting reading than the avalanche of speeches, reports and criteria that usually pour out of these groups, and it would certainly make public engagement more attractive.

When I worked for politicians some years ago, I recall the dread that some of them had when they had to go and tour educational projects designed to get young people involved in the music industry. I’ll never forget the rictus grin of one well-known ex-minister being filmed listening to some banging choons at a FE College.

The minister was plainly not an educationalist and knew that it was probably as good a receptacle for funding as any – but didn’t really have a clue why 20 middle-aged white people who didn’t like UK House and Garage were standing in a room with a handful of young Bangladeshi kids who wanted them to just go away and let them get on with it.

I’m fairly sure that the reason that politicians and bureaucracies feel the need to fret around measurements, to recycle endless reports and pen long speeches that display a insincere and bewildered enthusiasm for participative projects is because there isn’t a shared view of where all of this fits in to the constitutional settlement that we have at present.

Maybe I’m being a bit thick, but as far as I can see, it’s very simple:

• You don’t need to change any of the processes that you use to fix policy
• You don’t have to allow yourself to be dictated to by individuals with an agenda
• You don’t have to be bullied into adopting policies against your better judgement
• You can break the monopsony of advice provided to you by civil servants, pressure groups and think-tanks by going over their heads and asking the public to describe and model issues for you

So put aside those awful experiences you’ve had with e-petitions and make sure you don’t have any more of them. Forget that brutalising experience you had when you wrote something for Comment is Free and got called nine different kinds of c**t in the comments thread.

These are not managerial tools. They’re not for benchmarking. Their prime users aren’t the Sir Humphreys of this world. They are primarily political tools. Most of the good ones are free of charge and you don’t need to be a genius to work out how to use them.

They allow all of you to do the things that only political parties could do in the past.

Simply find ways of putting yourself where the public are already (think of those ‘street stalls’ that your local party runs on the High St on Saturday mornings) and find ways of getting them to describe the things that annoy them without them shouting at you.

The benefits are simple:

• You will make better policies
• You will be bossed around by your civil servants a bit less
• You will be able to raise your personal profile within your political party
• Your policies will be approved of by the public a good deal more than they are currently
• The public well feel consulted and involved

You don’t need to be a geek to do any of this either. It’s really simple – now relax, ignore all of those long reports and benchmarking exercises. Redeploy the people writing those reports to something more useful and just try anything new that you see to find out how far it …. er …. ticks all of those boxes.