Why 'lobby groups' aren't working - and why it's all over the press...

A few weeks ago I blogged on the role of political campaigning in democracy - and in particular the role of groups such as 38 Degrees in 'lobbying' MPs and Ministers.

I'm fairly sure that Dominic Raab MP didn't read my post but he and his now infamous elusive email address went big in the press today, as a result of his attempts to fend off 38 Degrees and their 'independent minded' supporters who apparently struggle to construct their own, independent, sentences and arguments.

Here's the Guardian's article and Iain Dale's take on it.

Head to head: Oona vs Ken

Oona's helped out Ken on his own campaign trail in the past

One of the annoyances of having a party leadership selection process running in parallel with a London mayoral candidate selection is that Facebook sends me countless invites to hustings events for either. Last Monday 26 July I ventured, in a rare move, out to Southall in West London to what I thought was a Labour Party leadership hustings organised by the Co-operative Party, an organisation with which I hold much sympathy. The latter part of my assumption turned out to be right - as it turned out, when I arrived, there were significantly fewer chairs at the top table than I was expecting. And a surprising lack of party staff to move things along. Nonetheless, our good friends at the Co-op had attracted a significant number of people to the event, compered by the ever-droll Steve Pound MP, which turned out to be an excellent chance for Ken Livingstone and Oona King, as the official Labour mayoral candidate nominees, to make their case.

I have to admit, once I arrived I did have fairly set views on my preference for London mayor, and have been used to having them challenged quite a lot recently by my boyfriend and others. I voted for Ken in 2008 and, for the last few years, and I've been of the view that, with a better campaign less-focused on the inner-London boroughs and an appeal to a more aspirational Labour vote, he could win City Hall back off Boris. After all, Ken's got something of a reputation as a comeback kid, what with his battles with the Labour hierarchy in the early 2000s and entering Parliament in the 1987 General Election, only to leave Westminster in 2001 once he'd returned to London local government. Of course, he's far from perfect, what with his confrontation with Evening Standard Journalist Oliver Finegold and various other skirmishes. But I have a lot of time for a politician with boomerang-like abilities - and his passion for, and ability to speak to, and for London. His words after the 7 July tube and bus bombings were well-judged and sensitively aimed.

But, I'm coming around to the idea that despite Ken's ability to come back from the abyss, London may have moved on. I hope that Oona King genuinely does have the fresh ideas and the new approach which she claims she has. Because, if there really is a palpable hunger within the London Labour Party, and the London electorate as a whole for Oona's qualities, then she really may be in with a chance of ousting Boris Johnson. Several London councils went back to Labour control in 2010, and despite the huge swing to the Conservatives in 2008, the Labour vote still held up very strongly in inner-London boroughs in particular.

Maybe this means that on this occasion, the debate is less about the policies, and more about the ability of a single personality to elucidate a metropolitan, socialist politics. After all, as Oona herself said at this hustings, she was previously one of Ken's greatest supporters- she just happens to think that she can do the job better now. After Ken's big falling out with Labour ten years ago, few party members would disagree the triumphs of Ken's congestion charge policy, investment in the East London Line and his vigorous campaigning for the 2012 Olympics and Crossrail as a catalyst for investment in London for the present, and future. Why would Oona want to undo those (perceived) successes?

The point of this hustings however, was to differentiate between King and Livingstone and their specific proposals for London. On balance, I found Oona to be the lighter of the two on matters of policy. Oona is clearly disadvantaged as the less well-versed in London politics, although arguably this is irrelevant given her experience in Westminster during the New Labour years. Most bizarrely, when faced with a question on Fair Trade (to be expected with a Co-operative party audience), Oona evidenced her credentials with her campaign within the House of Commons to ban Cadbury's chocolate in favour of Fair Trade products. That's all very well Oona, but surely London's ethical trade with the rest of the world is bigger than what you stock in an MP's tuck-shop? I don't wish to denigrate the good intentions of the Fair Trade movement - I support it wholeheartedly - but I expect a mayoral candidate to have bigger ideas than that. It's the sort of politics which I practiced in my student union nine years ago...

There were several questions around transport, and one subject in which a dividing line was evident was on dedicated schoolbuses for London's schoolchildren. I've been in favour of such a scheme since a report was published on the subject five years ago, and found the deadlock between the two candidates rather irritating. Ken adamant that such an idea won't work as "there's no more road space" whilst Oona extolled the virtues of it - quite rightly pointing out that parents,pupils and the public alike want security and safety on their morning and evening journeys - giving the travelling public a break during the school run. Ken did not present any tangible evidence as to why present dedicated TfL schoolbus journeys (of which there are very many in London) could not give way to a dedicated 'yellow' bus system with specially recruited drivers and monitors to look after their young passengers as exists in the USA. Ken further defected Oona's proposals with costs - £350 million to lease or £500 million to buy outright a fleet of buses. It didn't help that in these straightened times, Oona hadn't identified where the money for such a fleet might come from.

My own question was on policing numbers, and whether both candidates thought that the current standard of policing could be maintained with fewer policing officers. The Safer Neighbourhood team is all over my area like a rash, which is a good thing, and it's no surprise that (touch wood) that my bit of Balham has a particularly low burglary rate. Both Oona and Ken were pro-directly elected invididuals to look after policing, which is what we've already got of course with Boris at the head of the Metropolitan Police Authority. Ken had concerns about central government undermining local efforts to deal with crime (the Shoot to Kill policy being cited as an example - where ACPO (the Association of Chief Police Officers) and the Home Secretary had decided on a particular policy decision and the Mayor had not been consulted. A true test of the coalition's decentralising mettle could be to be more comfortable with policing policy decisions being made by directly elected individuals, as opposed to central government. Will traditional law and order Tories be able to resist the urge to intervene if these directly elected individuals become more widespread in other areas?

Both candidates gave inspiring final statements - Ken highlighting his view of the role of the London mayor in an uncertain world where ordinary people are now facing unprecedented cuts, and that "London needs to be at the place where the new world is being born". Oona, once again, summed up by asking the room "Do you want to win London?" implying that the opposite was a distinct possibility for Labour supporters if they failed to back her as Labour's candidate.

Me, I'm still undecided despite a strong case being put forward by both candidates (and with both having very different credentials). But I suspect that whatever happens, the public will have decided that, despite a bike scheme here and a 21st century Routemaster there, people will want a serious candidate in these less stable economic times.

Political campaigners: friends of democracy?

Deputy Labour Leader Harriet Harman
escapes an example of Grant's
 'outsider' interest groups

In a free society, the right to campaign in politics is held up as a cornerstone of democracy. The art of influencing our elected representatives has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, with the lobbying industry arguably having better access to government than ever before.

Walking through the exhibitors' areas at the major party conferences highlights the agenda that non-governmental organizations, charities and even government agencies have in policy-making.

Public affairs companies see themselves as gatekeepers to our elected representatives, undermining an individual's right to influence their elected representative directly. Whereas lobbying could traditionally be seen as the preserve of blue-chip companies that don't have a public affairs department, it is increasingly charities that employ public affairs and government relations advisors to campaign for their interests. Inevitably filling these roles are those with a Westminster pedigree - the badge of legitimacy being that they've all either worked as researchers to MPs or Ministers, or in think tanks and policy-making organisations favoured by the government of the day. They come from a background where, unlike their colleagues in the marketing and corporate communications professions, the professional qualification is based not so much on where or what you've studied, but who you know, and where you've worked. There is no recognized qualification for this branch of communications, unlike marketers who are accredited by the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) for example. Despite the complete lack of transparency and openness, they are the people who get heard in Westminster.

A glimpse of the lobbying industry draws the conclusion that it is the successful political campaigns are the prize of the well funded and educated in the machinery of the British political system. In a key piece of research first published in 1978, Professor Wyn Grant, an expert on interest groups at Warwick University, cited the labels 'established' and 'non-established' to distinguish between 'insider' and 'outsider' type participants (Maloney, Jordan and McLaughlin, 1994 and 2008, various publishers). Grant's typology acknowledged the important divide between the relatively few groups with privileged status, and the greater number of groups who find themselves consigned to less influential positions. The 'insider' is associated with a particular style of policy-making, an organization or institution seen as politically acceptable such as Stonewall, actively consulted on civil partnerships and equality legislation, and child welfare charities such as NSPCC and Barnardos getting the ministerial ear when it comes to youth policies. There are the obvious fringe groups such as eco-protestors, Climate Camp, the superheroes of Fathers for Justice and the gay rights group formed by Peter Tatchell, Outrage. None of these groups seeks a serious role in the consultation process, with their emphasis on direct action and media stunts.

Grant's labels still look familiar 30 years on, although, arguably the growth of social media tools and a general explosion in media coverage of all kinds of interest groups that seek to exert an influence on policymaking make the job of distinguishing between the insiders and outsiders much more difficult. The hardest task for a politician may be to determine which groups have a legitimate say in helping to decide government policy.

These sorts of questions may be asked of organisations such as 38 Degrees, which, according to its website, was set up by wealthy entrepreneurs such as Gordon Roddick, partner of late Body Shop founder Anita, and Henry Tinsley, former chair of Green & Black's Chocolate.Taking its namesake from the angle at which it takes an avalanche to happen, the group employs three full-time staff to encourage over 160,000 38 Degrees 'members' across the UK, to undertake actions ' as simple as signing a petition, or as complicated as hosting a rally'. Its members, who are vaguely liberal and left-leaning, are all 'leaders', with campaigns ranging from calling for the BBC to be saved from cuts to calling for a register of lobbyists, as well as campaigning for a 'yes' in a referendum on the alternative vote. Campaigns effortlessly cross established political boundaries, not seeking the approval of any particular party. There are few well-grounded policies, or long-debated positions - instead, 38 Degrees thrives on user-generated campaigns, less a coherent programme for change and merely a modern form of middle-class moaning.

Its weapon of choice is mass emails, a progression of traditional letter-writing campaigns favoured by non-governmental and voluntary sector organisations. Easy to complete template messages can overwhelm a poorly resourced backbench MP with little notice. Some politicians have been keen to court their support, with aspirant Labour leader Ed Milliband taking part in a phone conference with hundreds of members on climate change. Others have found their methods tantamount to 'cyber-harassment'. Stella Creasy, a newly-elected Labour MP for Walthamstow, became a target of 38 Degrees very soon after being elected in May 2010, tweeting her displeasure:

"Apologising now to any genuine person from E17 who has emailed me - with 1000 38 degrees emails to wade through I may have lost yours!" 11:56pm, May 11th.

The deluge continued to flood into Stella's office overnight:

"@marcushobley 38 degrees campaign completely unacceptable and counterproductive...and still getting emails from them now!" 12:04am, May 12th.

This resulted in Stella appealing to constituents to cease from contacting her with genuine issues so she could get through the backlog of emails "as am still getting 50 emails every 20 mins from 38 degrees so can't see normal ones" in amongst genuine residents of E17".

A phone call to Stella's office resulted in a brief conversation with a constituency worker: "I wondered if it was possible to talk to Stella about the work of 38 Degrees - have you heard of them?" - which met the weary, knowing response, "Oh, yes". The staff had dealt with a reported 1500 emails, out of which only four were genuine Walthamstow residents.

People such as Stella, and no doubt, privately, many of her parliamentary colleagues may question whether organisations such 38 Degrees enhance democracy, or indeed hinder it, with questionable legitimacy and invasive methods. It could be argued that while Grant's 'insider/outsider' model may be blurred, it is fashionable for MPs to ride the wave of social media and web-based campaigns. Little research exists to hint as to whether parliamentarians take any notice of viral campaigns which rely on mass participation - but there is much to suggest that those 'in the know' - with a direct route to Westminster and Whitehall - are ultimately the most successful at getting their voices heard.

A 'short, sharp, shock' about police brutality in the 1970s

Picture the scene: it’s election night in a police interview room in East London, and the Conservatives are about to sweep to power. The pregnant wife of a young black man, Leon Delroy, has been found dead in a pool of blood and Delroy is brought in as the chief suspect.

Sus was written by the acclaimed dramatist Barrie Keefe (best known for writing the film The Long Good Friday) and first staged just after Margaret Thatcher’s election victory in 1979. It ran at the Young Vic theatre in London, appropriately at a time when controversy over stop and search laws is still very much at the centre of public debate, and with some political parallels too.

The storyline revolves around the interrogation of Delroy under ‘sus’, an informal name for a stop and search law that permitted a police officer to act on suspicion alone. The law was eventually abolished in 1980, it being seen as a contributing factor to the Brixton riots that year.

The audience sits very much in the interrogation room, complete with the dull glare of strip lighting and the crucial dramatic device of a telephone, used to set the context of what is happening outside. The actors even smoke real cigarettes on stage, adding to the sense of suffocation for Delroy throughout his plight.

The two protagonists in this story, white police officers Karn and Wilby (who, as the Camden New Journal put it, “make Gene Hunt look like a character from Heartbeat”), portray the type of police officer we hope has long disappeared.

Sardonic, racist and odiously officious, the actors in this production deliver a performance in this play which, in the space of the play’s single act, turns darkly humourous, laddish banter to an increasingly cold, thuggish brutality.

Sus ran at the Young Vic from 8-26 June 2010, was also recently released as a film, also written by Barrie Keefe, starring Ralph Brown and Rafe Spall.

Election 2.0?

If it wasn’t quite the Sun ‘wot won it’, it certainly wasn’t Facebook or Twitter in 2010. The General Election proved that social media did some novel and exciting things to encourage young voters out of their perceived apathy, but put simply, there was no Obama-like mechanism to galvanise the part of the electorate with most recent gift of suffrage.

Whereas the 2008 US Presidential election relied on micro-donations through sites such as Twitter, the UK election showed that the mainstream media were still capable of pulling off more campaign coups than many observers might have predicted. As early as 26 April, the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones argued that “the bloggers hoped they would boss this campaign, breaking stories, setting the mood, and leaving the flat-footed old media types trailing in their wake…but the newspapers, and in particular the broadcasters have proved far more influential, with the TV debates dwarfing every other aspect of the campaign.”

In the run up to polling day, a convincing argument could have been made that social media would have an almost magnetic effect on the 18-24 age group. There were some political soap operas played out on Twitter, but nothing that turned changed the debate that the three main party leaders couldn’t manage by themselves. Stuart MacLennan found himself rapidly deposed as the Labour’s candidate in Moray after some not particularly probing digging into his Twitter history, but the moments of drama were undoubtedly the preserve of the big broadcasters.

In a more prominent way, the infamous vandalised Conservative billboards maybe signalled a more telling analysis of the way the internet influenced the election, or not. This episode of web anarchy, played out on Facebook, had such a humiliating impact on the Tories’ campaigning strategy that when faced with several hundred digitally manipulated spoofs they were forced to rethink their entire approach to posters - and soon got their own back with their unexpectedly positive approval of Labour’s depiction of David Cameron as 1980s misogynist cop Gene Hunt. It was party political poster wars which caught the popular imagination far more than any web based ‘get out and vote’ campaign - and a great many younger members of the electorate took part in the fun - but no-one yet knows whether these sideshows reflected a genuine interest in the campaign.

In an effort to prove its worth to the national debate, Facebook’s Democracy UK site appeared just weeks before polling day, a belated effort launched with the claim that “social networks will prove to be as central to political debate and the general election as the post, the phone and television have been in the past.” Although political parties have for several years had a presence on the site, amassed through online armies of ‘supporters’ groups, there was never a concerted effort by Facebook to engage its 23 million UK users in anything other than a running commentary on politics. On 10 March however, it linked up with the Electoral Commission to offer every single user the opportunity to download a personalised voter registration form, and has since attempted to track whether those who took part made the leap from clicking ‘I like this’ to marking a cross on a ballot paper.

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Twitter was the place to be during the TV debates, particularly for younger, educated and liberal minded voters - making real time observations on the leaders personalities, policy statements and tie choices. From the insightful and serious, to the sharp and witty, Tweeters upheld a very British tradition of holding their potential leaders to account with a dose of healthy satire.

The evidence infers that younger voters were more discerning in their information preferences though. In Ipswich, a marginal seat that swung from Labour to the Tories at the election, two sisters give their verdict on whether the online campaign affected their vote:

Sarah Clark, 23, said: “Initially, I wasn’t going to vote because I knew nothing about the candidates. But I did watch the summaries of the leaders’ debates each morning before I went to work”

Sarah plumped for the Conservatives in the end, and specifically mentioned the Sun’s ‘dumb guide to the election’ which was published during the campaign - with no access to social networking sites at work, traditional channels of media were her primary source of information.

”I’m on Facebook but I didn’t use it to help me decide my vote during the election” she added.

Online communication, and social media in particular, made more of a difference to Sarah’s 18 year old sister, Angie, a first time voter who says she watched one of the TV debates, but wasn’t sure that newspapers helped her make up her mind in choosing which party to vote for:

“I found there was more information on Facebook groups which I’m a member of, and I went on a lot of the party websites to help me make up my mind”.

Research published in the days immediately following the election appears to reflect the mix of information sources young people preferred. A YouGov survey undertaken between 12-14 May suggests that 36% of 18-24 year olds used Facebook as a source of information during the campaign, with 34% visiting a political party or candidate’s own website - suggesting that social media was a crucial signpost in directing younger users towards more traditional web content. Most significantly, 31% of younger voters said that online information influenced the way they voted ‘not very much’ and 16% chose not to consume election content online at all.

This research, and others surveys since, hints that social media just wasn’t the game changer that it was expected to be. Until we have been presented with the overwhelming evidence that social media paves a direct route to the polling station for the younger electorate, well-established traditional channels may still prove to be what counts during those crucial four weeks.

No surprises there, thankfully!

Well, thankfully I've come out for Labour yet again! Love this site:

Read between the lines - Tory education policy proposals

I've been at best ambivalent towards Labour's notion of academy schools over the past thirteen years. I never felt the need to join the ranks of old-school socialists who outrightly opposed these key tenets of Blair's education policies as, having long left the state education system, I neither experienced it first hand as a teacher or a pupil and was far more interested in higher education policy when these places were first set up. I also strongly felt that academies hadn't yet been fully proven. Only now will the first batch of pupils be starting to emerge from Labour's academy schools into universities and the world of work.

So I was particularly struck by the vagaries of Tory education policy today, the day the General Election was finally called. We were reminded during Cameron's somewhat over-confident speech this morning that the Conservatives would let people "with a passion for education" start a school.

Well, that's nice of them - they're clearly thinking of people like me. I'm absolutely passionate about education too, but I also firmly believe that education should be firmly in the hands of professionals, and not a mysterious, and as yet-unnamed collection of 'charities, parent and teacher groups,trusts, voluntary groups and co-operatives' which their draft education manifesto refers to. I also happen to be absolutely passionate about our railways, and I really do believe in their power to enable people to make sustainable transport choices, but at the same time I've never been a train driver, or worked for a railway company or ever had any academic qualification in transport operations. I think I'd probably be a bit of a liability left in charge of our railways.

So Dave, what makes those people who are passionate about education really good education providers - a really efficient yet untested way of providing public services? What tests will they be subject to? How do we even know that they will provide this service at better value than the state currently provides, in an arguably untested system of academies and specialist schools? It seems like change for change's sake, and an easy way of promoting new found Tory co-operative principles.

Dave is right - there's a big choice when it comes to the future of our public services, but even with the unknowns of Labour's academy experiment, I'm prepared to give New Labour the benefit of the doubt for trying out an idea that at least had the support of education professionals.