Robert Colvile (London, The Telegraph & Centre for Policy Studies): Last month, Barack Obama raised almost $1 million a day - the vast bulk of it online. In Britain, meanwhile, our impoverished parties push the rules to the limit - and beyond - to raise sums that look pitiful by comparison.
Here, many politicians don't quite get the web, either maintaining a polite distance (particularly when they read the vituperative comments appended to blogs and news articles) or ignoring it completely. But this, as I argue in a new paper for the Centre for Policy Studies, is a mistake, if only for reasons of basic demography. Of those currently at university, 97 per cent are regular internet users - the "digital natives" who move between online and offline communication with barely a shrug, organising real-life parties on Facebook or swapping instant messages in lieu of a phone call. These are tomorrow's voters - and politicians.
So far, the established political elites have failed to prepare for this new world. The BNP's site scores so highly - with as many hits as all the other parties' sites combined - not because it is brilliantly slick, but because the mainstream parties have failed to seize the opportunities the web offers. Their sites are relatively static, repositories of press releases and propaganda rather than entities that engage with and create communities around their visitors. Why should this matter? Because there are two things about the way the internet works that have genuinely revolutionary consequences. The first is the openness it enforces. No longer can a politician say different things to different audiences: an archive of all his pronouncements will be available for all to see. Similarly, information about health, education or anything else is as available to the mother in her study as it is to the minister in their office in Whitehall; and if she wants to say something about what she finds, it is easier than ever to make herself heard.
Then there is a more subtle effect: tone of voice. The internet privileges what Dave Winer, who has a strong claim to have been the first blogger, calls "the unedited voice of a single person." Those who thrive online are those who are the most informed, or wittiest, or rudest, or most honest - in other words, palpably human. The kind of PR-speak employed by our politicians as they joust with a Humphrys or Paxman, or sloganeering aimed at the television news, is ill-suited to the online world: politicians must step off their pedestals and engage with the audience. These changes will not happen overnight: after all, it was decades after the invention of television that politicians like Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher emerged, who had an instinctive command of, and a political approach tailored towards, the medium. But the internet age is coming - and the people who embrace it will have a decisive advantage over those who resist.
This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in The Daily Telegraph, where Robert Colvile is a features editor and leader writer. His pamphlet 'Politics, Policy and the Internet' is published by the Centre for Policy Studies and is available from their website.
