British Politics Dives Into the Web

Text messages and e-mail are nice ways to keep the party faithful plugged in and pumped up, but they are useless to uncommitted voters and anyone else who doesn't sign up for them. I didn't canvass the entire U.K. voting bloc, but the "average people" I spoke to weren't rushing to the Web sites to sign up for digital campaign literature.

"The only things I have had have been a flier through the door from the Conservatives, Lib Dems and the Greens," said James Smyllie, a 26-year-old media buyer who lives in the liberal Shepherd's Bush neighborhood of London and votes Conservative.

Wendy Smith, 46, a secretary at the law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP and a resident of Mayfield, East Sussex, said neither she nor anyone she knows has received any kind of political e-mail.

Richard Allan, the outgoing member of Parliament for the Sheffield Hallam constituency, said the power of old-school persuasion works better anyway.

"If you have serious resources to put a nice piece of paper in their hands a half-dozen times, and knock on the door and have someobody with a nice, smiling face greet them, it's so much more effective than a text [message] or e-mail," he said.

Allan, who represents the third-ranked Liberal Democrats, said his party is experimenting with technology anyway. A distant third in House of Commons seats as well as in the race for No. 10 Downing Street, the party has more room to try new things, he said, such as a "baby podcast feed" and blogs to score support among younger Internet users.

"It's a question of a small business trying to break into a market that's dominated by two very large businesses," Allan said. "One of the things that teaches you to do is to use the tools that you can find." He added that blogging and podcasting is just a 21st-century update to a long Lib Dem tradition of blanketing districts with locally focused newsletters on party activities.

It's a strategy that might work as an investment in the future, and in itself could garner the Lib Dems more support as succeeding generations of U.K. voters get acquainted with the Internet from the cradle on up. That doesn't mean that the dominant Tories and Labor won't keep up with the pace. Labor's McMenamin said that Commons candidates remember to mention the Web site in their speeches, while Conservative candidates hold live Internet-based chats with constituents, said spokeswoman Gabby Mertin.

But the most telling evidence of the kind of technology that really wins British elections shows up in a video on Labor's Web site. In the video, pugnacious Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott leads viewers on a five-minute tour of none other than the " Prescott Express" ... a campaign tour bus. The video shows staffers hard at work on laptops and mobile phones, but the star of the show is the bus. And that makes perfect sense. Even a decade into our "webbified" world, politicians still can't live without a good set of wheels to get them to where they'll kiss the kids and greet the grannies.

Non-Stop U.K. Video Action

British campaign professionals weren't the only ones who spent a lot of time and effort gearing up for Thursday's elections. I watched plenty of the videos each party offered on its Web site, and all I can say is that David Lean and Luchino Visconti must have split the directing chores. People living in the United States at campaign time tend to grow impatient before the average 30-second TV or radio ad touting this or that candidate ends. Going to the U.K.? Try dealing with campaign videos that can run five minutes and longer.

There is a reason for this, nearly everyone I spoke to told me. Paid political advertising doesn't exist in Britain -- it's banned. Instead, parties receive varying numbers of free television slots to present their cases. Those spots can run from two minutes up to 10, so "there is more of an expectation amongst the public at large that ... it would be at that length," said Labor spokesman McMenamin.

Before any of you non-American readers make cracks about the attention span of the average Yank, this is not a question of attention deficit disorder. In some cases, the British spots look and sound great, not to mention keep the viewer interested. But it's hard to sustain that interest past a minute. Judge for yourself. Videos from the Conservatives are here, Labor here and Lib Dems here.