If you haven’t already listened to Radio 5 Live’s interview with Sir Nicholas Winterton, which followed on the heels of a similar interview with Total Politics, have a listen to that BBC interview now.

The story which broke on Thursday was still rolling two days later, as I woke to a debate on my local radio station asking “should MPs travel first class?” It won’t surprise you that when asked the question in the context of Winterton’s outburst, most callers were of the opinion that MPs should be made to travel standard class. In fact, sod standard class, they should be dragged on a rope attached to the back of the train while working people queue up to use the toilet (between stations, naturally).

Yet, as someone who commutes five days per week in standard class, I find Winterton’s point uncontroversial when examined dispassionately.

A private environment

First – it is in the nature of many people (myself included) to look over the shoulder of people who are reading / using a computer, in any environment. We are natural nosey parkers. This is something I lamented last month while checking my inbox on the gay social networking site Thingbox, whilst on a train. (Those of a sensitive disposition should note that the screenshot contains some rather close to the bone humour, and, ahem, strident language. I have concealed the identities of the guilty.)

In first class, most train companies put three seats in to a space which would take five seats in standard class. Many customers will have their own table. Just as a point of logistics it is harder to rubber-neck the papers / screens of your fellow travellers. It could also be argued that there is a culture of discretion.  As MPs often help those who are in the most dire of straits, we should consider whether casework correspondence in particular could be read in standard class.

A productive environment

Every now and then a day comes along when every hour counts – and on those days I confess even I, pleb of plebs, have forked out the extra £20 to upgrade to first class. Why? Because you’re pretty much guaranteed a seat, it’s quieter, and you’re able to spread papers out in a way that is impossible in standard. Stephen Nolan was wrong to say “there are tables in standard class”, the trains used on my commute are one of many not to have tables in standard.

Outside of commuter peak times, Winterton is also right to say that there is more noise and activity, with families and others using the service – this tends not to be the case in the toff carriages.

These things are uncontroversial facts – they’re the reason first class exists, and why so many businesses pay a premium to allow their senior staff to travel in this way. So do I think that MPs (many of whom have to take long train journeys at least twice a week to and from their constituencies) should be able to travel in an environment where they can work on sensitive issues with a clear mind? Yes. Let them eat complimentary cake.

When should the privilege be revoked?

Where Sir Nicholas went wrong was in how he said what he said, and the attitudes behind what he said. Winterton has clearly forgotten that first class travel is part of the privilege of being elected, and not a God-given right handed down to him by virtue of his being a knight of the realm. His apparent view that no-one works in standard class is farcical, and implicitly screams just how out of touch with the real world he is. Particularly pernicious were his constant references to the millions who use standard class every year as “they” and “them.”

Sir Nicholas’s attitudes are a born out of a sense of privilege, fed by the closeted world of many MPs. Winterton can stroll under the road from Portcullis House to the Houses of Parliament without ever leaving the secure zone. In New Palace Yard a taxi (on expenses, naturally) can be called to whisk him to Euston station, and he can stroll across the concourse to his first class seat in splendid isolation. His ticket is free, the food is complimentary, and at the other end another free taxi will take him home. Only the most modest of people would be able to live like that for the best part of forty years while avoiding a superiority complex. Perhaps it is time for Sir Nick particularly, in his last few weeks at Westminster, to squeeze in to a seat in coach and reconnect with the people who put him in parliament in the first place.

The steady erosion of trust in politics and politicians, even though we know past trust has been abused, will never deliver the parliament we all hope for. My own preference on the thorny issue of travel, in what some will see as a stereotypically wishy-washy liberal answer, is for the new rules to expect that MPs should travel by standard class, but be able to upgrade to first class on a case by case basis when necessary, without question. MPs would be left to make their own choices – if not handling casework or other sensitive material, they can ride in coach with the rest of us. Some will play along, others will play the system. Coupled with continued transparency of expenses, we can hold our local member to account for their choice. That’s a system that seems to me to be responsible, fair, and realistic.

It’s impossible to answer that question without first defining what an “Internet election” is. Traditionally to my mind there have been two possible definitions:

1. An election where a stasticically significant number of seats, ten or more, change hands either as the direct result of online campaigns by political parties candidates, or because positive online campaigning was a critical factor.
2. An election where any number of MPs, as low as a single MP, is undeniably ousted from their seat by a negative campaign either by political opponents or independent critics, mustered online.

But a third possibility is emerging.

My belief is that when we look back on the General Election of 2010, for all the effort poured in to them the defining story will not come from My Conservatives, or the Liberal Democrats’ soon to be launched competitor, Act.

It could come from a signature pre-planned campaign. If, for example, the TaxPayer’s Alliance aren’t working right now on a postcode searchable system in which voters can see what their sitting MP has claimed on expenses, and what their opponents have said their approach to expenses will be, then they need to sack the person responsible for their digital effort and re-hire quickly.

More likely, the defining online moment of GE2010 will come from Twitter.  Watch this short video before you go any further:

The video shows Twitter’s trending topics for October 13 2009. It shows the clear emergence of the #trafigura hashtag as the dominant topic of conversation in just three hours – an explosion aided by (cough) people like me keeping the tag alive overnight from about 10pm on the 12th. They weren’t just any hours either, but the awkward hours at the start of the working day – 08:00 to 10:00 where people are still drifting in to work, and an organisation isn’t at its peak responsiveness.

Millions discussed Trafigura on Twitter. By the time Trafigura hired someone who understood social media, just three days later on October 16th, their staid YouTube response was only able to garner a few hundred views. Many simply weren’t interested in the story any more, and those who were interested weren’t inclined to help the company out by passing on the existence of the video. They’d burned millions of bridges with millions of people, simply by being slow to react.

Every party, and every candidate, has to decide now whether they’re going to understand and engage with social media, or fear it. It’s a nightmare for political parties to get their heads around – social media has no respect for constituency or regional boundaries, no understanding of the need for parties with complex structures to navigate their internal democratic processes before they pronounce, and in particular, no mercy for those who cannot respond somehow, in some way, immediately.

If the parties haven’t understood it already, they need to now. The General Election of 2010 is already the Internet election – the power of one foolish remark by a tired key figure, amplified by Twitter, could cause your national campaign to implode if you aren’t ready. There is no choice whether or not to engage online, the playing field has been swapped from under the feet of the political parties while their attention was focused on the Lobby.

Purely in terms of defending against the threat of social media, irrespective of embracing the opportunities, if parties haven’t already done the following, they need to move quickly:

• Don’t think that reading Guido Fawkes’ blog is the same as monitoring the web – treat Guido just as you would a journalist from the mainstream media. In terms of influence his blog is as mainstream a media outlet as The Telegraph online. Engage him as you would any other hostile journalist. And Guido’s not alone – have a list of bloggers with a similar impact to the MSM.
• Train all your press officers as active participants on Twitter. The Lobby and other key journalists are already there, and will be being fed stories through Twitter constantly.
• Extend your media monitoring teams to set up Twitter searches for ‘@’ replies, so you can see not only what your key targets are saying, but what is being said in reply. Include:
  • Your candidates and their opponents
  • The journalists following your campaigns
  • Key national political media
• Merge / co-locate your digital and media teams, they need to feed information to each other instantly.
• Have a plan for how you’re going to engage on a national level. Where will you be? Who will speak? Look at the polling data – particularly the demographics. Are you better off on Facebook? Twitter? YouTube? Can you cover them all?
• Be ready to create video at short notice. If you’re hit by a critical YouTube video, there’s little point responding on a webpage on your party site.
• Train your local campaigners. Make sure they’re running a reduced version of your national social media monitoring. Ensure that they can quickly alert your national digital team to anything they may have missed. Particularly, but not exclusively, for sitting MPs look at the campaign and ask yourself this – “If I found myself on the receiving end of a Tim Ireland / Anne Milton campaign, would I know how to react?”

And finally, the national parties (and for that matter any large agency, charity, or company) need to examine their usual tactics for handling negative stories, and ask if they still stand up in the age of Wikileaks and Twitter. You can’t injunct them, you can’t cajole them, you can’t bully them, and you can’t deny their voice. You can only engage. Are you ready?

As Armistice Day continues to somewhat inevitably fade from the public consciousness, the two conflicts in Iraq and the conflict in Afghanistan have made Remembrance Sunday ever more relevant and prominent. Today we have no choice but to look the human cost of political decisions directly in the eyes – it must be deeply sobering for those entrusted with national leadership.

Anyway, without wishing to be maudlin, whatever your reason for remembrance and reflection today I hope Perotin’s Beata Viscera helps you along your way.

(Starts after 8 seconds of silence. Translation.)

To the Church of St Peter, Chillesford today. There’s always a slight moment of apprehension when you try the door of a rural church – you never know whether or not it’s open to the public. This church had an approach which was simple, but put the visitor at ease straight away.

I’ve been looking for an opportunity to try out the video camera on my new phone (HTC Hero), and though I’m a bit disappointed with the recording quality, here’s the resulting vlog on that church, and some thoughts on opening up public buildings.

There’s so much top-notch work coming out of the government comms teams these days that  it comes as a surprise to see them cock up something as straight-forward as a press conference backdrop.

The shot above shows a press conference earlier today:

• That could be a short essay behind the PM. It’s not exactly “yes we can”, is it?
• “Copenhagen” has been changed in to a mark, with a footprint  graphic too small to be clearly seen on screen. It doesn’t really add anything to my understanding, it’s just another message.
• The Copenhagen website address is obscured, and there’s a different address on the podium.

Sky News used less than ten seconds of this presser, and there were three too many things fighting for my attention. The end result is that minutes later, I can’t remember a word the PM said.

However, to be fair, looking closely at the photo above it was either a couple of roll-up stands, or the PM with a chandelier growing out of his head – sometimes you have to make the best of a bad lot!

Alarming news from the Guardian tonight who say that they have been banned from reporting the text of a Parliamentary Question, which is published on the parliament website, and covered by parliamentary privilege.

Lawyers Carter Ruck have secured an injunction which prevents the reporting of this written Question to the Secretary of State for Justice:

Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

Carter Ruck are behaving like  a menace to democracy. If you have a twitter account please post a link to question 61 at http://bit.ly/cpIn5, using the hashtags #Trafigura and #CarterRuck.

Leave aside for the moment that trying to injunct information which has been published online is like trying to plug a seive one hole at a time, you may say ‘does it matter? Isn’t Parliament full of expenses fiddling crooks anyway?’ Well, yes it does matter… If any legal outfit is allowed to get away with obscuring or concealing the work of an elected Parliament from the people who elected it, then the potential consequences are far reaching and deeply serious for the politics of this country.

Carter Ruck have gone much too far in this ill-judged attempt to stand between people and Parliament. The injunction must be overturned, and if there’s a decent person anywhere at the top of that company, they’ll publicly apologise for their actions.

[PS I'm indebted to Steven Barnett for pointing me to the Wikileaks account of the Carter Ruck injunction, and for reminding me that there are still questions over the conduct of Barclays]

There was a curious anomaly in the otherwise excellent paper which launched conference, A Better Politics for Less. The paper proposed the merger of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (a body which does what it says on the tin) with the more obliquely titled Learning and Skills Council who, among other things, fund Further Education.

Merging the two bodies who fund college and university education seems logical, even neat. It means however, that the Liberal Democrats are proposing the creation of a mega-QUANGO at the very moment a Bill is passing through parliament to break up the LSC and devolve their funding powers to local councils. Government legislation embracing devolution and localism to a greater degree than Lib Dem policy? Perish the thought.

Being laid up with the traditional conference cold has given me plenty of time to reflect on our biannual shing-ding. Though I may have been feverish at the time, the conclusion I’ve reached is that for our party to make the national parliamentary breakthrough it has worked so hard to earn, we do indeed need a new approach to devolution. A new devolution settlement is needed in our own party – one in which our party’s democratic machinery devolves power up to the leadership.

The Federal Policy Committee

The letter by members of our Federal Policy Committee to the Guardian during conference appeared on the surface to be both self-indulgent and damaging. While there is little doubt it damaged the party in the media, we must acknowledge two things – the signatories believed they were protecting a core part of our party democracy and so acting to strengthen the party in the long term, and they had the guts to put their names to their opinion. This is more than can be said for the anonymous briefers who leaked their displeasure over the lack of consultation on the ‘mansion tax’.

There will be those who believe that the mansion tax debacle is another example of why the leadership cannot act alone – my feeling is that the party was hurt not by this target-seat friendly headline grabbing policy, but by the subsequent ill-disciplined infighting in front of the national media.

When Nick Clegg launched his bid to lead the Liberal Democrats, he did so with these words: “If the Liberal Democrats are to change the tired old pattern of British politics, we are going to have to be bolder. We are going to have to move out of our comfort zone and take greater risks.” He was right. Nick and his team have been slowly pushing the boundaries of the party’s comfort zone. With a general election just around the corner, it’s time to expand that comfort zone significantly.

The letter to the Guardian refers to the “29-strong” FPC. That strength is rapidly in danger of becoming a weakness. The biggest legitimate criticism of conference is that it lacked a compelling narrative. Great stories are not written by committees. Introduce a large table and complimentary biscuits and there will follow inevitable compromises, deals, half-measures. This process risks dragging the party to the safety of its own middle-ground, takes our fingers off the electorate’s pulse, and leaves the leadership without a radical and distinctive agenda to promote.

Federal Conference Commitee

In the case of conference, there is the party’s Federal Conference Committee to contend with also. The FCC, for all its great work, for all the real progress made in recent years in professionalising conference, still has some way to go in recognising the parity of conference’s role as a media showcase as well as the sovereign policy forum in the party.

As we head in to a General Election, the Liberal Democrat party is a pilot ship being navigated in the manner of a super-tanker. When a nimble change of course is required to navigate choppy political seas, the captain hits the throttle only for the message to come back “your request for more power has been duly considered by the 29-strong engineering committee, and we do not believe the necessary fuel can be afforded at this time.”

I don’t want this to read like an all-out assault on Federal committees, whose members dedicate time and passion to their work. The point is that the party’s governance structures need to give the leader more freedom to lead.

Reacting to events

According to one blogger, “[Nick] regrets not being more forceful about flipping and capital gains tax with the expenses scandal.” We were fortunate in that the errors of the Lib Dem parliamentary party were less severe than the others. Had Nick Clegg had reason to deliver the sort of tough justice delivered on his MPs by David Cameron – effectively completely deselecting Andrew MacKay for example – there is a very real question about whether he would have had the authority to do so. For an English MP,  possibly. For a Scottish or Welsh MP, the situation becomes murkier.

These are relatively trivial examples – there are more I could cite where valuable time is spent negotiating deals behind the scenes, which could be spent instead on reaching out to the voters, not in to the party.

As a starter for ten, I propose a new devolution settlement in the Liberal Democrats.

For a period of one year, the following powers would be devolved to a leadership team consisting of the Federal, Welsh, and Scottish party leaders, and their respective chief executives:

• The final say on the content of the party’s manifesto (extending beyond a right of veto), after having taken the advice of the FPC and the Manifesto group.
• Complete authority to determine the programme for the opening and final days of their autumn conferences, and the full programme of spring conferences
• The authority to de-select on reasonable grounds any MP, MSP, or AM
• The authority to suspend any committees deemed by all three leaders to be serving no useful purpose
• The authority to review and redirect directly controlled campaign resources
• The authority to introduce alternative methods of candidate selection in any seat

There will be those who will say this proposes the demolition of our party’s democratic processes, taking power away from any number of federal, national, and regional committees. This might be true if indeed the power were taken – but would be a positive statement of the party’s faith in its leadership if it were given. Devolved for one year, effectively a trial of a new party governance structure.

Bill le Breton argues that Nick needs to get a grip on his immediate team – I say he needs to be given a grip on his whole party. That authority which is devolved, can of course be taken back, especially if it is time limited – but in the meantime, far from stepping beyond our comfort zone, we’d be smashing through it at 70mph as we head in to the next election. It’s time for the Liberal Democrats to let their leaders lead.

I ended my summary post with the question “how did the party websites become so universally dull?” It’s easy to leave a question floating, much more dangerous to attempt to answer it. Below, I lay out my thoughts not as a polished prescription, but as a conversation starter for the parties.

As we aproach a general election and I open a political party website, it can be a little like sitting next to a stranger on a long train journey. I might be lucky enough to find someone interesting and engaging, who is up for a stimulating conversation. If it goes really well, maybe we’ll exchange contact details, have a few drinks, and a beautiful friendship is born out of a chance encounter. Alternatively, I might get the latent drunk – peacefuly asleep until the very last minute, when he suddenly starts shouting meaningless babble over my head at no-one in particular.

Political party website content generally takes one of three forms. First is rolling news and comment – press releases, and web news stories. Second  is information on campaigns and policies. Finally, information on conferences, and things like resources for activists – content for the internal audience.

Given that there will be a heavy supporter bias in the visitors to any political party site, rolling news well done is an opportunity to keep activists and supporters engaged and motivated. A balance is required between news and comment on the issues of the day, and news and comment on the party itself. This latter group of content – information about the people in HQ, the process stories, candidate selections, has a significant, and I would argue growing,  pulling power. However, parties are too keen to push this news to infrequently produced paper newsletters, or to Home sites.

Many party sites – Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens being the worst offenders – lead instead with a lazy rehash of the daily line to take. This approach to content  can alienate supporters and create a sense of detachment from party leaderships and their troops on the ground – party activists are often the last to believe the party line. Immediately, these websites begin to talk over the heads of their users. Credibility and interest is lost.

Campaigns are the principle opportunity to reach out beyond the traditional supporter base by rallying ad-hoc support around specific issues.

The Right:  5/5

Both the BNP and the Conservatives scored 5/5 in my content tests.

The BNP have a very active news centre, a sort of righter-wing online Daily Mail, which incorporates news from HQ and around the regions. There are high numbers of comments under each news story. Although written in the style of media releases / reportage, the stories appear to be principally generated with the BNP-supporting web audience in mind.

The BNP appear to have successfully placed rolling news updates at the heart of their web content, and have an internal structure which delivers regional news to the national site. I cannot see any evidence of a print newsletter for BNP members, making the website the key channel for delivery of internal party news.

The Conservatives provide online content through blogs, news, speeches, and campaigns. Particularly of note is the high quality campaigns page, though this feels rather buried in the design of the site.

The Conservatives make heavy use of a regular stream of video (see elsewhere for more), and content provided for press releases is different to the content used in the higher profile online news section.

The parties of the left have proven slower to react to the need for a steady stream of online content, and the power of the web in gaining and motivating support.  These parties need to engage in some frantic effort to prepare themselves for next year’s general election.

Video

Video helps to bring a party website to life – it is a way to sharply and succinctly emotionalise or editorialise a complex issue. A good party website will have a steady stream of video produced, with a call to action included in each video. These need not necessarily be big-budget blockbusters, and a slight home-made feel can be a positive benefit.

I’m going to make a vaguely educated guess that a large portion of political party website traffic comes from people sat in offices. Be they newsrooms of international news companies, or the desks of party activists slogging away at the day job.

Users based in offices can face fundamental obstacles -  their computer may not have working sound support, or they may not wish to be overheard in their office watching a party’s videos. How do you get round this? You might add subtitles, or  create a video which leads on words and pictures, rather than talking heads.

Compare and contrast two recent attempts at the animation route. First Labour:

and then the Conservatives:

The Tory video is produced to a much higher standard. For a start, it’s got a script, not an extract from a press release. Unlike Labour, the music has a connection to the on-screen message, there is narrative use of colour and typefaces, and there is a clear and coherent message – it tells a story. However, the Conservative video is not perfect – the call to action at the end of the video has a more opaque purpose than Labour’s, and their custom player strips out all of the social capabilities of a system like YouTube – thousands may have watched, hundreds may think the content is five-star, but we’ll never know.

What to do?

If any political party is still indulging itself in debating the question of whether the 2010 election will be ‘the internet election’, then they have fatally underestimated the power of online.

Here then, is my starter for ten:

Properly resource your web teams, and either integrate them into, or place them on equal footing with, your press office during the election period. Guido Fawkes can hurt you as badly as George Pascoe-Watson, and without the overnight lead time of the first editions to prepare your reaction. The public will start commenting immediately – how quickly, how effectively, and where, will you rebut?

Open up your sites so that party workers / activists / supporters can provide you with content. Look at the success of your respective Home sites, and seek to emulate their content, rather than their functionality. Give user generated content equal prominence to the party line – create a buzz, show us your supporter base. You’ll have to filter it, of course, because your opponents are bastards and they would hijack an open stream without hesitating. You need to face in and out of your party simultaneously.

If you’re an elected representative, don’t staff it out. Get on to Twitter, Facebook, and the your party’s website yourself. Don’t see online as a luxury – start by using it as an effective channel for motivating your activists. If you’re in a party HQ, make sure your candidates have guidance on what not to do.

More video please. Tell us the story of the campaign trail. Buy a load of Flip Ultras and despatch them to your key marginals. Provide guidance so the teams on the ground promote the video locally, but pull that video back up so we can see the national picture from your site.

Yes, use your site as a portal for donations and new joiners, but go to the effort to convince us you’re worth joining before pushing a big red ‘JOIN‘ button in our faces.

Talk to us, not at us. Listen to your audience, and respond. If you don’t have someone manning your ‘corporate’ Twitter feed who is authorised to issue replies on behalf of the party, you’ve failed already.  If that prospect is too terrifying, you could consider a Twitter ambassador. Hold online Q&As. Let us comment on your news and policies. Respond quickly, and thoroughly – even to the loonies. Especially to the loonies.

Finally, if you are the person or team charged with running your party’s website, ask yourself one question whenever you upload or approve content – “is this dull?” If it is, send it back. You’ll be doing us all a favour.

Generally, my preferred measure of global website popularity comes from compete.com, who in this case only record traffic for the BNP and the Conservatives.

According to compete.com, the Conservative Party saw 4,698 unique visitors in June 2009 to the BNP’s 3,343. Unfortunately, in this  case Compete is not the best site to use – Compete’s figures massively under-report the actual traffic, probably because the majority of their data is gathered in the US.

Alexa

Without access to the likes of Hitwise, this forces me into the rather unpredictable world of Alexa. I don’t normally assign a great deal of weight to Alexa figures, and will avoid rehashing the arguments for and against their data here. However, I wasn’t prepared to use Alexa ranking as part of the scores, so they don’t have any bearing on the end result.

You can see in the chart above that in global terms, when excluding the BNP, each of the political sites is much of a muchness when it comes to traffic.

Where a lower figure is ‘better’, the global rank Alexa assigns to each of the major sites is:

1. Conservative: 116,400
2. UKIP: 173,731
3. Lib Dem: 181,085
4. Labour: 189,384
5. Green: 234,390

The BNP have a much higher rank, 27,526 – a fact that is boasted on the front page of bnp.org.uk. I would suggest this figure is suspiciously high and has most likely been manipulated by BNP supporters installing the Alexa data gathering toolbar. However, I don’t doubt that proportionally the BNP website is one of the most popular political party websites in Britain – possibly the most popular.

As with political blogs, political parties of the right perform rather better than their left-wing counterparts.

Clearly underlining the message that content is king (and you need strong content to build up a dedicated community) is the fact that ‘party celebrity’ blogs significantly outperform their own party sites in the rankings. For example the Conservative blogger Iain Dale has an Alexa rank of 69,419 – nearly 47,000 places above his own party’s website.

Over the past few weeks I have been studying the websites of the big British political parties. Generally ignoring their presence on social networking sites, or any microsites, I have examined the effectiveness of their core website – I wanted to know how serious each of the parties is about using their home on the ‘net to reach out to their key audiences. Political party websites receive relatively low levels of traffic, which is one of the reasons why the parties find it important to get out there on to the wider ‘net – if during your lunchbreak you quickly surf Facebook, perhaps a news website, or your email, you would probably never dream of including a political party in that list.

So the parties need to get out there and grab your attention wherever you are. Back at home however, the party’s own sites may get low traffic, but the visitors are generally high value. They include:

• The media
• Party activists / PPCs / staff / potential members of staff
• Existing and potential voters (including members and supporters)
• Political stakeholders (eg Electoral Commission)

These audiences are served through the provision of:

• Excellent content. Party narrative / messages (including rich media, eg video)
• Media releases and statements
• Means to join / support the party financially or through email
• A database of candidates (and local / regional parties, outside of election time)
• Policy information
• Means to contact / interact with the party

I used nine tests to examine how well the parties are serving their audiences, and these are the results…

The best political party website in Britain

Relative to the rest of the field, the Conservatives come out as the clear winner, nearly 20% ahead of their nearest competitor.  This is well deserved and no surprise, as it is by far the most fully resourced of the sites. Perhaps more surprising is that the nearest competitor is the BNP – and that the Labour party come bottom of the pile. The Liberal Democrats are beaten by both the BNP and UKIP.

British political parties are still falling behind the efforts of some other parties internationally – the obvious comparison is with Barack Obama’s MyBO campaign community, but other smaller parties abroad are also discovering the power of supporter communities ahead of their UK counterparts. South Africa’s Democratic Alliance is using free software to engage supporters, and I am grateful to Mark Pack for pointing out to me that the Green Party of Canada are using full-blown free ‘customer relationship management’ software for voter ID and activist engagement.

Strengths

Taking the field as a whole, the party websites are effective at communicating their policies in writing, and to varying degrees they serve their press and media audience well. When it comes to listing local candidates, again the sites generally do OK – with the notable exception of the BNP who appear to have chosen to keep their candidate list secret.

Weaknesses

All of the parties fail to provide regular opportunities to engage with key party figures through the site – this is a real failing of the political party websites, and the sooner the parties are able to sort themselves out and open themselves up to discussions with the public, the better it will be for all of us. Political party representatives are consciously choosing to avoid technologies which would bring them closer to those who elected them / would elect them to power, and that should be unacceptable to us.

There is one notable exception in the shape of David Cameron’s Cameron Direct, but even this is simply traditional town hall meetings, filmed – there are no opportunities to put questions online.

Content is king

‘Content is king’ may be a simple mantra, but it’s one some of the parties are failing to understand. Curiously, the best providers of online content are the Conservatives and the BNP – the resources of one dwarf the other. One chooses to invest serious sums of money in technology, design, and staff salaries on their website because they can. The other invests huge amounts of time on its website because when it comes to communication channels, it’s almost all it has.

The other parties are generally failing to ensure a steady stream of content is written specifically for their websites – there is a direct connection between this, and the fact those sites are generally dull and unengaging. The absense of killer content to engage key audiences undermines the effectiveness of a site almost more than any other measure in my test.

Visuals

I didn’t attempt to score the sites on how they look, but visual identity is an important party of the party’s overall ‘brand’ impression on voters.

The Conservative party have developed a slick integrated brand identity for all media (including web), and the Labour party have a smart typically ‘web 2.0′ style website. The Green party have developed a contemporary integrated look and feel which applies across their regional sites as well as the main site. All three tick the graphics box. By comparison, the visual identity of libdems.org.uk is amateurish. The BNP’s online visual identity, while more current than the Liberal Democrats, might best be described as functional. While UKIP have taken big steps forward recently, there is still something of the garden-shed amateur to their site.

Community is the X-Factor

My short study leads me to conclude that if a political party wants to be distinctive online, community is the X-Factor. Political parties, through cautious management and slow reactions to changing trends, have effectively ceded the management of powerful large groups of supporters to their respective ‘home’ sites such as Conservative Home, Labour List, and Liberal Democrat Voice. The buzz around each party is to be found on these sites, and there is often little cross-over between the party sites, and the party-supporting sites.

Take two contrasting examples. The Conservative’s Blue Blog has been a failure. The only posts to attract a reasonable body of comments are those by the party leader. Posts which attract one or two informed comments generally see those comments go unanswered – it seems clear to the visitor that the Blue Blog is little more than a top-down, non-interactive repository for the sort of local newspaper articles which political interns churn out all the time.

On the other hand, the BNP’s website is a roaring community and comments success. The BNP have chosen to build their home site in to the main party website, before anyone needed to build it outside of party HQ. In doing so they have taken on a significant risk in the event of a serious party schism or rebellion against their leadership, but for the meantime they appear to have the most active political party website in the country – something which is reflected in the fact that their visitor levels match or exceed that of the much larger Conservative party.

Conclusions

Political parties still don’t get the Internet – perhaps not through ignorance, but because they are choosing through caution or lack of resources to try and keep voters and other key audiences at arms length online. The average voter, touring the political party websites, is given the impression that politics is happening somewhere ‘out there’, over their heads. No political party website feels welcoming to their key audiences – supporters, potential supporters, or the media. It begs the question – who do these websites think they’re talking to? How did they become so universally dull?

Over the next few weeks I’ll be publishing a stream of posts which go in to each of the nine tests, and pitch the sites against each other – it is in many ways a personal report card from me to the parties – and no-one got an A.

Other posts in this series:

• How the results were calculated
• How the party websites rank globally