British Politics Dives Into the Web

By Robert MacMillan
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 4, 2005 10:12 AM

Great Britain's three main political parties made a big effort to revamp their Internet operations in time for the 2005 campaign ... not that it will make a single bit of difference in how the elections turn out.

More than 35 million Britons -- 60 percent of the population -- use the Internet, and more than 5 million of them have gone online to visit candidate or party Web sites this year in the run-up to tomorrow's general election. But even as U.K. politicians brush up their online presence, they must be wondering if it's a futile exercise when the pundits agree that the election will be won and lost in the streets, not in cyberspace.

At the very least, it must strike them as the British remake of an American movie. The 1996 U.S. presidential campaign saw candidates using crude Web sites to present general information, and by 2000 having a slick site was a requirement for any serious candidate for Congress or the White House. Last year's presidential race saw the candidates using the Internet in several exciting new ways, not to mention former presidential contender Howard Dean's much-hyped ability to raise big cash through numerous small online donations.

Despite predictions in the United States that 2004 would usher in an era in which Web campaigning would rival the 30-second TV spot in importance, elections are still about knocking on doors and glad-handing on the sidewalks. The same appears to be holding true in Britain.

"I think it would be a mistake to assume that the Web has become a significant campaigning tool either at the national level or at the constituency level of candidates," said Stephen Coleman, a professor at Oxford University's Internet Institute and an expert on the use of the Web in elections. "They have a fairly symbolic value. You need to be seen to have one, but [the parties] are not quite sure what to do with them."

Labor Party spokesman Adrian McMenamin talked up how interactive the party's Web site is, and he's right. But "to be honest and realistic about it, the key use of it is basically [to rally] the converted," he said.

That doesn't stop the parties from trying to win over the unpersuaded. Labor and its arch rival, the Conservative Party, have spent time crafting handsome, clean home pages that are loaded with information yet don't make visitors feel like the sites are chaotically arranged. Both Web sites contain attractive videos, party platforms and invitations to donate to or join the parties.

Labour.org.uk is a study in simplicity. It offers visitors several key choices, including a map of Britain that allows users to zoom in on where they live to see "what Labour's done for you." There is also a prominent link to Prime Minister Tony Blair's campaign diary , presented as a text-and-video combination.

The diary is the perfect resource for anyone who wants to see Labor's marketing approach to Blair's reelection bid, an emotional dodge-and-feint popularly dubbed "the masochism strategy ." It is unorthodox to say the least. In the April 25 video entry, Blair is set to meet with a focus group. Before he arrives, one member of the public predicts that the prime minister will evade his question. Blair doesn't, but after the group breaks up, another panelist says he feels Blair shied away from answering a different question.

McMenamin said the strategy is designed to "demonstrate that Tony Blair... will listen to criticism and give a straight answer to people."

The Tories, meanwhile, offer a Web site that is as conservative as their name implies. With a minimum of color (except for the arresting photo of a Union Jack undulating in the wind), conservatives.com offers the same roster of information and services. The campaign diary, however, is not of Blair's challenger for the PM slot, Michael Howard, but of his wife, Sandra. This is a pretty intelligent move, actually. Howard looks like just another politician. Mrs. Howard, on the other hand, can't help but coax a few voters into the fold as she's not only a former model (which never hurts), but her entries are flinty, aggressive and -- surprisingly -- appear to be really written by her.

The parties also try to get the word out via text messages delivered through regular e-mail or to mobile phones. The messages are short and simple, the approximation of a no-frills 30-second ad that American viewers would get on the radio or TV. "The choice before the voters May 5 is very clear," reads a message from the Conservatives. "They can either reward Mr. Blair for eight years of broken promises and vote for another five years of talk; or they can vote Conservative, to support a party that's taken a stand and is committed to action on the issues that matter to hard-working Britons." Following, in capital letters, is: "It's time to take a stand on the issues that matter. Vote Conservative on 5 May."

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.

A Party of Parties

While Conservatives and Labor nearly always take the top spots in an analog to the Republicans and Democrats and the Lib Dems take the "third party" title, Britain is a truly multiparty polity and there are many other groupings with all sorts of variations and differences. Check out this Web site for a list of links. Among them is the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, not to mention a party built around marijuana legalization . And as many people know, English is not the only language of the British Isles. Fewer people over the years speak the various Celtic languages ( Cornish and Manx have been declared dead, though each has a dedicated coterie of non-native speakers keeping it alive), but Wales's pro-independence party Plaid Cymru offers a Welsh homepage, and Northern Ireland's political parties offer Irish Gaelic pages as well. I have not been able to find any pages offering Scots Gaelic options except for the Scottish Socialist Party. As for pages in the "Scots" dialect of English, I'm not so sure there's a demand these days. What kind of MacMillan am I?

Fleet Street, the Election and You

The Washington Post's London correspondent, Glenn Frankel, shows up in a Daily Telegraph article which confirms my fear that some of you might never get this far into this scintillating column. Frankel -- at considerable length -- answers this fundamental question: Are Americans paying attention to this race? His answer, I'm sorry to say, is, "Not very much, I'm afraid."

He notes ongoing coverage from The Post, the New York Times, and Time and Newsweek magazines, but says for the most part that newspaper articles are few and far between. "As for television news coverage, forget it," Frankel says. "Most Americans have never heard of Michael Howard, and might mistake Charles Kennedy for a distant cousin of the late John F. Kennedy. Even Gordon Brown barely registers on the name-recognition scale."

Fortunately, there is plenty of coverage from London's big dailies and tabloids and news services:

* The BBC has an elections page that should be the envy of the rest of the press. It contains the latest news, as well as special features such as a newspaper roundup, poll tracker, voting guide, videos, a glossary of elections terms and a reader feedback section. It even includes a games section with the Swingometer, a journalist blog and exhaustive profiles of every seat in the nation.

The Guardian's elections page contains a great seat-by-seat map, as well as profiles of every MP, a cartoon gallery and plenty of other coverage.

The Times of London has my favorite activity, a game that allows you to rate your own political affiliation based on a set of questions. The best part is that the game, provocativly titled "Mandela or Mussolini," allows players to see where each questions lands them -- toward left-wing, right-wing, liberal or authoritarian. Sample question: "You are watching the television with your mother-in-law one evening. Flicking channels by accident, you see that the BBC is showing the latest X-rated movie 'Lots of People Copulating at Once' well before the watershed. Are you: outraged, embarrassed, intrigued, entertained or asleep?"

The Daily Mail's elections page promises live results as they come in, along with a Whitehall Blog by editor Bennett Brogan, and a breakdown of the individual party platforms or "manifestos." This is particularly welcome as the manifestos are easily available online, but make for extremely boring reading.

The Sun, one of Britain's most notorious tabloids, contains a surprising amount of elections news. For those who might find it all a bit dry, there are plenty of photographs of naked women. It's a non-sequitur, but some viewers probably will enjoy the chaser.

Far from languishing in thrall to the "MSM" (Main Stream Media), the run-up to Thursday's elections has been tracked in loving -- nay, obsessive detail by hundreds of bloggers. Oxford's Coleman may be a big cheerleader for the Internet's role in campaigns, but he does not exaggerate when he suggests that this is the year of the blog in U.K. politics. Rather than hold forth on their value or credentials, I'll provide comment-free links to three sites that provide perhaps more reading material than the Bodleian and British libraries combined.

Blogherald.com's roundup, with links to news organization blogs and more;

Keele University professor Richard Kimber's election blogs list; and

The U.K. Poli Blogs site.