Journal.
The UX of Labour's election
It took moving to London fourteen years ago, in the run up to the ’97 election to get me politically active. And whilst I’m not nearly as involved as I once was, when I was an active campaigner and even, for a brief spell, a Labour councillor, this was an election that really captured my imagination and got me thinking about the impact of the internet on Labour’s lost election.
This is not a reductive ‘was this the internet/social media election?’, you’ll be relieved to hear. Like any proper tribalist, my interest is really in how Labour ran its election, and perhaps more interestingly, how its activists did: because, and here’s the point perhaps, that the internet is diminishing the importance and influence of top-down campaigning and facilitating a messier, more organic, less controlled campaign.
In the past, elections have been dominated by two things: morning press conferences and poster launches: setting the message and providing visual backdrop. The latter in particular, now seems rather quaint and hardly registered this time around — the momentum of the election being driven instead by the television debates and a more fluid response to events on the campaign trail (largely seeming to consist of member of public breaking through carefully organised campaign stop and actually speaks to politician).
Douglas Alexander, Labour’s election co-ordinator, was keen to establish this as word of mouth election. In part, Labour had little choice in this — faced with the prospect of being massively outspent by the Conservatives, Labour had to forget about buying expensive media space and bombarding key marginals as it might have in the past. Instead, Labour steered clear of an election auction on adwords and attracting friends on Facebook, and instead concentrated on mobilising its members and supporters via its well established Membersnet network, Labour Doorstep and independent networks like LabourList.
This ground-up approach contributed to some surprising results, where Labour reached well beyond its own activist base, from Gisela Stuart holding on in Egbaston, to Sadiq Khan retaining a key Tory target in Tooting — incidentally producing my favourite moment of an otherwise bleak election night coverage, as his euphoric supporters chanted ‘Yes We Khan’ at the count.
But the really interesting stuff wasn’t being produced centrally by the main parties, but by niche campaigns that took hold as the election progressed. My Gay Vote and Power2010 were particularly strong in this respect, the first providing a supremely elegant illustration of what the parties actually did when it came to equalities legislation (not what they said), the second tapping into the growing sense as a hung parliament loomed that the electoral system itself was disenfranchising many.
David McCandless succinctly visualised the gay rights issue on The Guardian’s excellent Datablog. Interestingly, with the appointment of Theresa May as Equalities Minister, this issue continued to resonate with a Facebook petition demanding her removal from post on the basis of her past voting record.
Perhaps the most celebrated online campaign, was Clifford Singer’s MyDavidCameron – satire by Photoshop. By turns funny, insulting and witty, it brought to life subtler points about David Cameron’s believability and the Tories’ hard won credibility.
Twitter was used from the party centre as a less effective means of broadcasting key lines, and I was interested in its use during and after the television debates by Labour and the Conservatives to consolidate their spin room positions: telling, particularly, to see pundits on Newsnight and elsewhere trot out said lines word perfect, and learn just where they took their messages from.
More usefully, many of the left’s best minds — Sunder Katwala, Deborah Mattinson and David Aaronovitch to name a few — are on Twitter, and their collective insight really enriched the election experience for me. Indeed, Twitter’s move to centre stage has been illustrated by its uptake by most, if not all, of the candidates for the Labour leadership. The surest sign of Andy Burnham’s intention to run, was the creation of his Twitter account in the week prior to his declaring. Some candidates, Ed Miliband in particular, have engaged on Twitter and started to tentatively break down some of the barriers between public and politician. But again, it is at the grass roots where the impact was at its most thrilling, watching the Take Back Parliament campaign mobilising on Twitter and creating memorable sights outside the coalition negotiations.
As Jemina Kiss rightly pointed out in Parties did not make the best of social networking in this general election, there was no defining moment from the main parties. However, it was the election in which a few things happened to my mind. First, that Labour rather smartly used the web primarily to engage its own people rather than to attempt to remotely persuade voters: instead getting its people face to face with voters and perhaps mitigating a far worse result on the night. Second, that activists found the power of their own voice and expression best online: both in satire and in addressing critical issues in engaging ways. And lastly, the gap between politican and public remains worryingly large, but the ability to engage with, and communicate to, the party’s brightest minds has never been easier. The politicians can, I hope, only follow suit and are showing some encouraging signs of doing so.
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