Last week I was at the fine Frontline Club near Paddington station for a dinner conversation cum presentation on the Internet and the next general election.

The lead participants were Guido and Iain Dale broadly representing the Right and Alex Smith (Labour List) and Matthew McGregor (Blue State Digital) ditto for the Left.

The general feeling was that British politics were changing fast as the Internet forced far more transparency and accountability into public life, but that the level of e-organisation and e-fundraising achieved in the USA had yet to reach these shores. The main Parties here had not yet worked out that voters were no longer passive and dutiful recipients of their closely controlled messages, but rather partners and force multipliers.

Matthew McGregor pointed to the success of an activist e-campaign to raise money to attack the British National Party. 

(Note: a previous conference which I attended a couple of years ago in New York put it well. The argument went that raditionally politicians saw themselves as hunters, shooting messages at identified targets. Now they should look at themselves as farmers, people patiently planting seeds and then gathering in the votes: "Ideas which spread, win".) 

I asked the panel a not altogether coherent question, along the following lines:

There are only three possibilities in life:

  • Either Extremes expand to squeeze out the Middle.
  • Or the Middle expands to squeeze out Extremes.
  • Or an uneasy and unstable balance is struck somewhere between Extremes and Middle.

Does not the Internet reward vociferous populist sloganising at the expense of the methodical work needed to run anything, let alone a government? Is not there a risk of accelerating polarisation, that extreme/radical ideas expand fast to squeeze out previously mainstream ‘middle’ ideas (see eg the BNP, itself driven by ‘activists’)?

Whereas the general idea of popular direct transparent e-democracy compared to stuffy old corrupt Westminster is appealing, what will happen when the British public signal strong support for capital punishment or leaving the EU?

Guido blithely argued that he was running his mighty site to cause single-handed trouble for the political class, and not much else: Policy is boring.

The others saw the point but argued in summary that the political establishments would have to manage to react to these trends in a reasonable way.

We’ll see what today’s European Parliament results show us, as the Labour Party evaporates before our amazed but grateful eyes.

Hard to imagine anything other than a strong underlying Eurosceptic surge in the UK?

And maybe demands for a referendum on the EU Lisbon Treaty or even the UK’s EU membership surging anew through e-initiatives like this new Union of Voters:

The Union of Voters will fight for the interests of all voters against today’s class of professional politicians.

1. There should be no such thing as a ‘safe seat for life’ – voters should be able oust any MP in whom they have lost trust.
2. There should be referenda when all the establishment politicians agree but the people don’t.
3. Political parties should look to voters for their funding, not big business, big unions or big government.
4. Politicians should not be able to hide their expenses, income and connections from voters…