“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.

This is a guest post by Hugh Flouch of Harringay Online

People love living in Harringay, but there are a few quality of life issues that won’t get the attention they need unless citizens and elected representatives enter into a democratic compact to fix them. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is the time to be having the conversations which can build towards that covenant. Local websites provide a great forum for them.

So, starting in February, at Harringay Online we’ve been building up our stock of information on the local elections, from how they work to what we can find out about the candidates. I don’t want the elections to completely dominate the site, since by no means everyone is interested, but I do want to offer people, perhaps for the first time ever, an opportunity to find out who the local candidates are and what they might do if elected.

I’ve pretty much always voted in the local elections, out of a sense of civic duty as much as anything else. I imagine that’s not unusual. By covering the local elections, I hope we’re filling in some gaps for people like me and perhaps encouraging those who’ve not bothered to vote in the past to get involved, if for just one day out of every 1,460.

There are three wards which fall partly or entirely within our neighbourhood. That’s 29 candidates. To start with we’re trying to build up online portfolios on each of them. So far we have basic information on most of them, including bios. We’re also digging around, and lifting the curtain, seeing what else we can find out, mainly through a Google-based search.

We’re adding short video interviews with as many candidates as we can as well as the leaders of the main party groupings. Quite a novelty to see video of your local candidates in your living room, if you think about it.

Finally, we’ve taken a leaf out of the Democracy Club‘s book and we’re uploading copies of all local election leaflets

We’re still hoping to organise a hustings, but a number of logistical problems mean that we’re cutting it fine. Our plan is to use a “real-world” venue and also use Cover-it-Live to take the event into people’s homes.

As well as giving local people a better sense of who’s who and what they think, we hope that this indelible record will go some way towards holding our elected officials to account in the years to come.

The initial reaction of the candidates was mixed as was their willingness to be involved. Some were enthusiastic; others were extremely cautious. They’re coming round. Trust seems to be building as they recognise that we’re trying to be scrupulously fair.

In my naivety, I assumed that the politicians would be our biggest challenge. As things are turning out it may well be that the biggest issues will be thrown up the heartfelt passions of some HoL contributors. Curating discussions fuelled by those passions whilst successfully riding out accusations of being in the politicians’ pockets is proving to be a wild ride at times.

However, as long as members continue to add posts like this, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing:

I think this kind of scrutiny is superb I wasn’t going to vote in the Euro elections but did so because of Harringay Online putting the link to working out how individuals views tally with which party. Perhaps I’m rather superficial but that little exercise fired me up not only did I vote but told friends and neighbours who aren’t a part of HOL and they all did the online quiz thing. This created great discussion and at least four other people who weren’t going to vote did so. So, the citizen power of HOL stretches beyond just its members!!

Many of us can’t be bothered with politics and HOL has made me think about voting and invite the neighbours in – the elderly, those for whom English is a second language – for a cup of tea or a sherry and a pakora to discuss the message on the video.

… or ‘we get the politicians we deserve, pt1′:

Via Mick, this is worth a look over at the Daily Mail for people who recycle The Independent.

Pic: Click for credit

“Academics …. found that “not giving straight answers to questions” scored an average of 8.45 when people were asked how much of a problem it was on a scale of zero to 10. “Making promises they know they can’t keep” scored 8.13, the same rating as “misusing official expenses and allowances”, while “accepting bribes” scored 6.43.”

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry about this. It ignores the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in a way that no-one with an ounce of sense should do.

For me, perhaps the dominant theme for this election – as with many previous elections – will be the Prisoner’s Dilemma – or the BF, as outlined in this slightly homophobic post.

As Colonel Nathan R. Jessep puts it here, “the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”

Both of the UK’s main parties knew that the expenses scandal damaged politics and lost them votes. Both stoked it by shopping each other. A duck-house? I’ll see that and raise you a porno channel!

Both of the two main parties are privately committed to a nasty combination of tax rises and spending cuts shortly after polling day. Both refuse to detail where the cuts and rises will land.

In both cases, this is the Prisoner’s Dilemma at work. On the tax-and-cuts question, the voters will punish honesty without an ounce of mercy. In both cases, the media is the ultimate beneficiary. All but the most idiotic of journalists fully understand this dynamic. It is what puts bread on their tables.

Yet like a lawyer that fails to advise a client of the quick painless way to settle a case, the media refuse to frame the debate in this  way.

And this is where my inner Marxist comes peeping out. Politics is not about niceness, presentation or honesty. It’s about the clash of material interests. Politicians, commentators, pressure-groups, lobbyists, newspaper proprietors and political funders are all avatars in that conflict.

When we compare the performance of those players, in recent years, the people that we elect have been very significantly weakened.

Party Conference season: Vital equipment.

It’s Friday, and the party conference season beckons. One or two of you may have already been in Liverpool for the TUC, and there is quite a little community of people that have to go to all of them.

For some councillors, this may be their first proper look at how their party works. My own tip is to find out where the journalists are hanging out and to go there – it’s a lot easier to get bought a drink under those circumstances, that’s where the gossip can be had and the movers-and-shakers can be found.

If you haven’t got your accomodation booked already, I’m afraid you’re in for a few hours commuting each day. And if you haven’t got your pass yet, expect at least six hours queuing.

If you have got digs, remember that high expectations lead to disappointment. A rumour went around the Labour Party in the mid-1990s that Blackpool would not be hosting any more of their conferences because Peter Mandelson was told that he shouldn’t have stirred his tea if he didn’t like sugar in it.

Also, prepare for a bout of ‘conference flu’ on Tuesday or Wednesday morning. A good fry-up will either kill or cure this ailment, and every chemist within walking distance will be sold-out of Resolve.

Note: Bring your own packet from home

But for now, if you’ve not got anything better to do, you can nip over and read my friend Sadie’s Dean’s guide to bag-carrying at party conferences. And here’s some advice for MPs (much of it transferrable to councillors) on how to deal with a new enthusiasm for teh interwebs. The rest of Dean’s guides are here, the slightly less serious part of the Working for an MP website W4mp.

Final advice: Here’s a warning from the past about what sort of thing you may see if you go to a disco at a party conference.

You have been warned.

In France, the Socialist party want to reform the practice known as cumul des mandats, where an MP or Senator also holds elected office at local level in his home town. The argument is that wearing two hats in that way distracts national level politicians from their main jobs, and promotes cronyism and pork-barrel spending in their local areas.

An article in Le Monde has some eye-opening statistics. 80% of French parliamentarians are also councillors, compared with 20% in Britain, Germany and Italy. Of the 185 socialist deputies in the French National Assembly, 80 hold executive office on a local or regional council, and a similar proportion of socialist senators do the same. Of those who don’t hold executive office, most are backbench councillors in their local areas. The figures for the UMP (Sarkozy’s party) are pretty similar.

Who knows, if the socialists get their way, how many French parliamentarians will give up life in Paris and retreat to their communes. Perhaps not very many – but could you imagine any MP or peer in the UK preferring local office to national? It’s a symbol of the centralism of the UK, even set against the France of the préfet and the Code Napoléon, that being a footsoldier at national level is so clearly preferable to leading the ranks in your home town.

Party funding reform could put Labour and the Conservatives closer to the Lib-Dems funding model.

If there is a point at which most of the authors of this blog (I can’t speak for all of them) differ from most of the sites that we link to, and that link here, it may be on the queston of ‘active citizenship’.

Where it seeems to be an almost unexamined given to argue that we  need more active citizenship, and that it’s usually a good thing, I’d argue that there is a blessed equity in our current system where most people don’t get involved in decisionmaking most of the time.

I outlined the Victor Meldrew problem here a while ago, but a shorter, simplified and provocative version of it is this:

Active citizens are time-rich nosey busybodies and do-gooders that promote their own self-interest at the expense of the people that don’t have the time, energy or obsessiveness to engage in public affairs. At least if we force these people to channel their energies through political parties, they will have to spend most of their time competing for the once-every-few-years votes from the rest of us – those of us who don’t have the time, energy, inclination or fanaticism to go to consultations, circulate petitions or run campaigns.

OK, OK, there’s probably a lot of unwarranted unkindness and caracaturing going on there, but it was intended to lay out one side of an argument.

Here’s a good post from Matthew Taylor’s blog discussing what political parties need to do to survive:

We need a funding system which is fair, transparent, and sufficient for parties to engage. Most of all, we must channel money away from negative national campaigning and into grassroots engagement. It is hard to do but far from impossible, especially if parties – as a quid pro quo for greater state funding – are required to be totally transparent in all their spending at every level. But this means the Conservatives supporting reform at a time when they are benefiting from a huge spending gap in every constituency, and it means Labour has to grasp the nettle on union funding.

I’d argue that any reform of funding – if it is to promote a more decentralised politics – would have to be provided to elected representatives in a form that can’t be snaffled my party bureaucrats.

I’m hoping that Matthew will be able to join us at on of PICamp’s Reboot Britain sessions where the question of active citizenship will probably be treated in a much more balanced way than I have done here.

Oh, and PS, do you like the new blog layout?

Dennis Skinner - thought to be sceptical about consensus politics. (Pic: Riana Dzasta)

It’s an interesting twist to the question I’ve been asking, on and off, over the past few weeks: What kind of representatives do we want?

So far, the options have included jurors, rogues and public paragons of virtue. But over on Spiked Online, Brendan O’Neill suggests a somewhat alarming possibility: Maybe we need people who are locked in a partisan struggle – people who will die in a ditch to defend the interests of a social class or ideological clique. Maybe we need (shock … horror) politicians to represent us?

In short, he suggests that the whole expenses scandal is the product of a regrettable retreat from politics – a move to make Parliament meet the petty demands of it’s rivals, and a refusal to prioritise and accommodate political conflict:

“New Labour has discovered that transparency begets, not trust, but further suspicion – the more politicians make their personal purity into their major selling point, and the more they imply that parliament is a potentially corrupt and sleazy place, the more they invite scrutiny of their every foible and Kit Kat purchase.”

He goes on…

“Between 1997 and 2001, the Commons’ Modernisation Committee – also known, Orwellian-style, as ModComm – published numerous substantive reports. Only two of them proposed strengthening democratic debate in the Commons; the rest proposed making it more ‘efficient’. One change, which ‘further limited parliamentary scrutiny’, was the introduction of ‘programming motions’, which effectively brought the guillotine down on debates about new legislation in the interests of ‘saving time.”

The whole article is worth a read, begging the question: Do we really want our laws to be made by someone whose prime concern is to demonstrate that they’ve come up with a cost-effective means of arriving at legislative decisions? Surely O’Neill is right to argue that MPs expenses will not be the end of the story, and that some more trivial aspect of the way politics is conducted will take over where the Daily Telegraph‘s revelations leave off?

And do we want to see more political cut-and-thrust in public life? While the conventional wisdom is that partisan politics ‘turns people off’, is it the case that a tooth-and-nail system of adversarial politics is what we really need to get democracy working again? Do we need more politicians like Enoch Powell, Dennis Skinner, Mrs Thatcher, Tony Benn and Barbara Castle?

Irish elections: generally more posters than in the UK

So much is changing so quickly. Newspapers and broadcasters are changing. Governments now communicate using radically different means to the ones that were practiced a decade ago. Here’s Exhibit A.

We now have free interactive tools that enable us to hold huge multilateral conversations based upon collaborative filtering and reputation management. We can find useful strangers easily – and I don’t just mean with dating websites.

Of course, these changes throw up hazards. New doors have opened for budding demagogues, busy-bodies, lobbyists, snoopers and quacks. But it also throws up huge opportunities.

For me, the glittering prize – from a democratic point of view – is the potential to promote decentralisation of power. Putting the levers of power in a place that is geographically closer. Breaking down the rigidities that made participation impossible.

In the same way that the DIY ethic of blogging and social media has helped millions to somehow dilute the alienation of modern living, it has allowed many of us the chance to test our voice, contribute and to take some responsibility for public discourse – often for the first time.

But if we are to realise the potential for decentralisation, we need to do more than just build and use the new tools. We need to understand what the tools need to be used against – and what they need to be used for.

Take political parties, for example? This blog has bored you in recent weeks with a relentless defence of these entities. And as I’ve not used it yet, I’ll point you at this old post that offers a fantastic quote that explains why parties are important:

“….a remedy to poor governance in large inherently decentralized countries is building strong national political parties whenever possible. Strong parties help to provide elected local officials with efficient political incentives, because their chances of  election depend both on national party support and the satisfaction of the local constituency. This allows the striking of a balance between national objectives and local accountability.”

So, if if the multilateral conversational spaces that are emerging will dispense with political parties, we need to realise that this has consequences – and we need to address those problems.

Over the next few days, I’d like to flesh out a few of the causes of political centralisation and suggest possible goals for the users of interactive media – things that we can do, and temptations we could resist. But my first one is this: If you wish political parties away …. well…

… be careful what you wish for.

Given all the talk of localism in recent months, it is pretty disappointing to see Caroline Spelman, the Conservative shadow Local Government minister, making the following statement (via the BBC) on Council Tax rises:

At a time when millions of workers are facing pay freezes or unemployment this year, it adds insult to injury to drive up bills by a further £41 a year, on top of previous years’ rises. Labour’s refusal to follow the example of Scotland and freeze council tax bills in England is unfair on English taxpayers, who yet again have received a raw deal.

What makes this posturing worse is that there is a real case for the Government to answer on the funding formula, non-domestic rates, LABGI and so on – all of which could be argued from a localist position. And yet we get this attack, which implies that central government is where voters should place the accountability for council tax rises.

Does Ms Spelman think the Westminster Government sets Council Tax? If she realises that councils do, does she know which party is in control in most of them?

Tony Blair: A bit more concerned about controlling his party's message than his predecessors were.

OK, in recent posts, I’ve moaned about the demands for political transparency that are being fuelled by new interactive media applications. Let me try and put this into some perspective:

In my opening ‘defending political parties‘ post, I acknowledged that there are a few early knockout punches that could be delivered to the argument that political parties are a good thing.

Here are some examples: Firstly, all political parties ‘control their messages’ (unless they are an electorally unsuccessful party) and do anything they can within the law to silence opponents, discourage sceptics, and orchestrate the way that the public are seen to to receive their ideas.

Were you or I as boorish, the dinner-invitations would dry up fairly quickly. In this respect, politicians behave like successful commercial brands.

They conduct personal campaigns against their opponents, playing the man instead of the ball. They bully anyone that they need to in order to get their message across. They compete in the market for votes with the ruthlessness and cynicism with which businesses compete for customers.

If one of their number is caught with a hand in the till, they cover up or excuse it as far as they can. But if the alleged culprit is – in fact – innocent, they can still be expect to be abandoned without mercy if things get too hot.

The concerns that parties raise in opposition are often forgotten as soon as the ministerial backsides sink into the ministerial limo. They can play very fast-and-loose with the actualité at times. They are opaque where they could be transparent.

They are not consistent in their communications, and different audiences are routinely told what they want to hear. You can never trust a political party to do what it says it’s going to do, and you can expect manifesto pledges to be treated like clauses in a public-procurement contract: Things to be wriggled out of as soon as the deal is done.

But that’s enough about their virtues. No party could ever win an election, or govern effectively without committing all of the sins listed above, and few governments have ever been faced with an opposition that isn’t prepared to match them on these points. The alternative to strong political parties is a tyrany of Victors.

This is not to say that politicians don’t sometimes do bad things as well though. If they do all of the above, and introduce generally good legislation, I suspect that most of us would all forgive them.

But when they behave in ways that lead to poor legislation, it’s harder to pardon. When they are not conversational it leads to poor policymaking. Failing to be conversational results in unforced errors.

When they pack decision-making committees with their cronies and often favour blind loyalty over creativity, thoughtfulness or innovation, fearing adverse press reaction to division, the quality of deliberation goes down, bringing the quality of government down with it.

They over-react to challenges and they allow short-term political positioning to distort their judgement on policy. They refuse to acknowledge alternatives or the legitimate concerns of their own backbenchers.

They often introduce legislation – not for the purposes of actually changing the law – but to signal something to the electorate. They publish too many pieces of legislation and brush legitimate concerns aside by drive them through parliament too quickly. They are often drafting the next version before the bill in question has reached the statute book.

They are spectacularly risk averse, and they follow opinion polls where they could be offering leadership. They toady up to the most opportunistic and dishonest journalists and only take on pressure groups that they know they can defeat.

++++++++++++++++++++

In this post so far, I’ve listed the shortcomings of political parties in roughly the order that I think they should be listed. Using a Roman Catholic template, the venal sins are at the top, the mortal ones at the bottom. The further down we get, the closer we are towards what the late Bernard Crick referred to as the populist mode of democracy.

If political parties were to avoid the mortal sins lower down this post, I’d argue that they could be forgiven the venal sins at the top. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the venal sins are now pursued with a great deal more vigour by the media and public opinion while the mortal sins are largely ignored.

Political parties are undoubtedly failing us in this respect. The quality of governance is going down. The distributed moral wisdom that Tony McWalter called for is less in evidence today than it was in the past.

There are many of us who work with new interactive technologies in the belief that they can improve politics. From what I can see, a great deal of effort is concentrated upon the minor problems near the top of this list. Demands for trasparency often result in benefits to single-issue pressure groups and reinforce many of the centralising tendencies in the modern state.

I’d argue that we should instead be focusing on the major problems further down. How can we help politicians improve their deliberative processes? How can we drive up the quality of legislation?

If interactive tools have one acheiveable goal, it is to identify the causes of political centralisation and to counteract them.