The IT revolution is
transforming politics and opening up a new dimension of inequality. The
Labour party can be as technologically savvy as it likes, argues David
Runciman, but it cannot become a vote-winning machine again until it
sets out a role for the state in the political economy of the digital
age.
On the day Labour launched its
manifesto, I went to the party’s website with the hope of reading it.
But before I could get to the text, I had to navigate my way past a
portal that offered me the chance to ‘create my own manifesto’. What
this meant in practice was that anyone could input the issues they cared
about most, and the manifesto would then be reconfigured to flag up the
policies that spoke to those concerns.
It’s hard to think of anything that
better sums up what was wrong with the Labour campaign. It looked
responsive, technologically savvy and consumer-friendly: politics as a
menu of options for an increasingly distracted and diversified
electorate. But in reality it was patronising, gimmicky and a monumental
distraction.
It simply confirmed the impression that the Labour
strategy had reduced politics to a series of transactional offers that
could be moved around at will to create an ersatz political philosophy.
Labour hoped to harness the transformative power of the internet to
further progressive politics. It ended up trivialising both.
Read more: Digital Politics: Why Progressives Need To Shape The Digital Economy
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