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- The Guardian, Tuesday May 20 2008
Gordon Brown's political fightback yesterday crossed new frontiers, at least for him. Dipping another tentative toe into the world of interactive politics, he launched Ask the PM, an online version of prime minister's question time hosted by YouTube.
"Politicians get a chance to ask questions ... I think it's time the public had a chance," Brown explained on his YouTube clip. By teatime he had nearly 350,000 views and video questions were trickling in on solar electricity prices, drugs education, student fees and the Lisbon treaty.
So far, so quite good. Questions were coming from young people, the kind of missing voters about whom politicians of all parties obsess. But Brown will not answer until June 21, by which time they may have moved on.
But such exercises are always fraught with peril, dismissive mockery never far away. YouTube's clip of chancellor Brown picking his nose is twice as popular as his PM's debut last June. "Why aren't comments allowed on your site?" a sceptical 18-year-old asked yesterday.
Politicians and wider government, local and national have been running to catch up with new communications technology for 200 years: newspapers and trains, radio after the first world war, TV after the second. In Britain the mid-century's two great orators, Churchill and Nye Bevan, failed to adjust to the conversational style required on TV. Macmillan did it first.
In her heyday, Mrs Thatcher's use of the photo op and soundbite looked pretty slick. The fax and mobile phone were also speeding up the political pace by the late 80s. But the internet changed everything, as David WebCameron now shows. Politicians who thought it was just another pontification platform missed the crucial point: interactivity.
But how to use it? Email (crucial to fundraising in the US as well as for communication), MPs' websites, David Miliband's pioneering blog, podcasts, webcasts, user-friendly sites which give effective access to public services: all have their niche uses and their limits.
E-petitions, a late Blair innovation, have become a stick with which to beat ministers, most famously on road pricing. And UK internet access seems stuck around 60%: the poor don't have the information others take for granted.
But, much more slowly than in the US, where parties are weak and primaries are participatory, e-democracy is expanding. However, experts such as Professor Stephen Coleman, who famously examined Big Brother fans and political junkies for the Hansard Society (the BB fans came out better), insist that clearer, rules-based accountability, not IT or online voting, is crucial to reconnecting disaffected voters with politics. Still a long way to go.
Staff
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