Europe Decides

There has been a lot of spin from all the parties in the run up to the ”Super Duper Thursday” elections on 03 May. To listen to certain Labour and Lib Dem friends of mine if either party is left with any councillors AT ALL in South East England on 04 May it will be a triumph of epic proportions. Similarly, to listen to Tory chums one could be left with the impression that anything over a couple of hundred gains in England and the party is well on its way to Downing Street - and of course, they expect to lose ALL their MSPs in Scotland blah blah blah…

Being as objective as I can (and I was a Lib Dem staffer for many years, so please bear that in mind) let’s try and define what ‘good’ genuinely looks like for the parties in May:

Labour

Governments of all colours get kicked at mid-term elections in the UK, Labour will claim. There is some justification for this…but only some. What matters is the degree of the kicking! If Labour lose fewer than 300 councillors in England it will indeed be a good result for them. 300 - 600 will be bad, but not awful. Anything over 600 will be a battering. Personally I think they could lose up to 700. They should remain the largest party in the Welsh Assembly, but will lose seats. The silver lining on their psephological cloud will be if they can remain the largest party in Scotland. To be overtaken by the SNP in conjunction with a battering England will be very bad news indeed. It is certainly a possibility.

Conservatives

The Conservatives will do well in England. No doubt about it. Most of the seats up for election are in the shire districts - their happiest hunting ground. So, the question is only how well. 500+ gains are a near certainty, less than that would be pretty odd giving the Government’s non-Midas touch at the moment. Anything over 750 gains and the Tories can be well-pleased. The crucial test is whether they can poll over 40%. Given that national opinion polls put them in the high 30s this is achievable. The bad news for David Cameron, if there is to be any, will be in Scotland. He is not that popular north of the border, his party has only 1 MP and a membership and activist base that has been comatose in recent years. If the Conservatives hold their 17 MSPs it will be reasonable, but this is already a low base to go down further from. As Oscar Wilde may have said “to lose one MSP may be considered a misfortune, but to lose two would be downright carelessness.” We shall see.

Liberal Democrats

The Lib Dems will certainly have a mixed set of results in these elections. I fully expect that they could lose 200+ seats in England. Anything less than that will be OK (though not good exactly), anything much higher would be bad news. This is the biggest round of elections in our political cycle; stretching the party’s resources more than their two bigger rivals. The Lib Dems are powerful campaigners, but they are most successful when they can target. Good news will come, they hope, from the devolved elections. Picking up seats in Wales is a possibility and will show the party is capable of building on their gains in the principality at the last General Election. Similarly in Scotland the party may gain seats. This is particularly impressive given that they have been in coalition government with Labour for the last 8 years. This would point to further gains in Scotland at the next General Election. Their fingers are crossed!

The Nationalists

Plaid Cymru should pick up a few seats in Wales, but will not come anywhere near Labour. All eyes are therefore on Scotland where opinion polls still point to substantial SNP gains. Anything over 40 seats will be very good for the Nats. Anything nearer to 50 will be a triumph! Labour have less than two weeks to turn it around….

Politics is a funny business and the English local elections will have little to do with local politics, no matter how much the different political parties talk about communities, schools and law and order.

There is something rather backward looking about the launch of Labour’s election campaign, with Blair highlighting the “10 years of investment in local communities” and inviting voters to take a step back and look at progress on issues like anti-social behaviour. There is a good reason for this: Blair has no real mandate to pronounce on the future, since the one certain result following local elections on 3 May is that he will very soon be out of office.

Roll up, roll up: who should we be watching in the months and years to come? If Gordon Brown succeeds Blair, we will surely see a shake-up, with the loyal Brownites expecting to be rewarded and the erstwhile Blairites taking a knock or quietly re-positioning themselves. The current list of possible leadership contenders includes a number of the veteran left-wing MPs (remember them?) such as Michael Meacher and John McDonnell, but the future of the upper echelons of the Cabinet is surely in the hands of more youthful members. Despite having just ruled himself out of the leadership race, one to watch for the future is David Miliband, current Environment Secretary, who has effectively managed to ‘mind the gap’ by being highly rated by Blair but fulsome in his praise for Gordon Brown. Another interesting character is Jon Cruddas, a former deputy political secretary to Blair turned critic.

The Conservatives will be gearing up for the local elections as a litmus test of the ‘Cameron’ effect, with the latest YouGov/Sunday Times survey of voting intentions at the next general election showing that current leader David Cameron leading the Conservatives would be 8 points ahead of a Brown-led Labour party.

So who will be at the forefront of the Conservative party in 2010 or 2015? Adam Afriyie, a former businessman, is certainly one to watch, as is the former journalist and author Michael Gove, and the ‘energetic’ newcomer Grant Shapps. A lively debate on influence in the Conservative party is already underway on its own blog, described by Cameron as ’sometimes infuriating but always good value’.

The internet has long been heralded as the answer to voter apathy. Sadly, to date computer wizardry has largely only activated and motivated those already involved with politics further reinforcing the divide between the online haves and have nots. The UK elections on 3 May could be very different though as politics has really and truly come to the internet.

In the last year all the main UK political parties have launched internet-based campaign tools designed to cut through a skeptical and, sometimes, hysterical British media allowing parties to communicate their messages directly to voters. This is not a new idea. Door knocking has been doing much the same for decades. The difference here is that voters are being empowered to do something with the message once they’ve read, heard or seen it. The ‘forward’ button may allow easily communication of a link, guerilla-marketing video clip or funny e-mail but now with the rise of social media sites people, genuine random folk not just politicos, can get closer to those aspiring to represent them than ever before.

The Conservative leader’s WebCameron video blog is a good example of how to cut through the media filter and the facility to take questions from the public is a neat feature. His almost daily uploads are designed to help people build up an idea of the family man and the motivations behind his policies (to be announced, of course). The Labour Party www.labour.org.uk was a late entry into the foray with its tie up with YouTube, LabourVision, but is making some headway. RSS feeds from these sites and updates now mean people who want these videos delivered into their inbox can have them instantly. No messy leaflets, tramping the streets, no stamps, no letters and no barking dogs and entry-controlled doors. This is the new politics in action.

Perhaps the biggest phenomenon is not new ways to deliver messages but new ways to organize politically. University campuses across Britain and the US have long been using social media sites like Facebook and MySpace pages to leverage campaigns for student union elections – but so are mainstream politicians. Pursuing a social media option is not just a simple matter of uploading a flash website, sitting back, and watching your hit count grow, it must mean a genuine interaction and conversation with voters. Campaigns online no longer just have supporters they have ‘friends’, people who actively associate themselves with a political message, party, campaign or personality freely and deliberately.

But as the Conservatives for Hazel Blears page on Facebook illustrates social media campaigning can work in favour of you and against you. And can drive some superb mainstream media coverage too. It also demonstrates the increasingly asymmetrical power relationship in politics. One individual with a bit of knowledge can now have a disproportionate impact on public opinion, media coverage and perceptions. But equally, an organized campaign group can exert campaigning potential much greater than they could alone.

On Despatchblog.com, I’ve been encouraging people to get involved with political campaigns on Facebook.com for some time. By the time the UK goes to the polls for the next General Election tactics deployed on Facebook for the first time in the 3 May elections won’t be innovative, they’ll come as standard.

Politics is fast changing, are you keeping up?

Cross posted at Edelman DERT.

Thursday 03 May this year sees elections to the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and a vast swathe of English council seats - about 10,500 councillors standing in 312 local authorities - in what some commentators have dubbed “Super Duper Thursday”.

In headline terms, opinion polls point to Conservative gains from Labour in the South and Midlands; Liberal Democrat gains in the North of England, Scottish National Party gains in Scotland and a mixture of Conservative and other party gains from Labour in Wales. The true picture will be more complicated than this - the Lib Dems for example could make gains from Labour in the North and Scotland, but suffer losses to the Conservatives in the South East. Whilst the Conservatives could sweep to power across swathes of England but actually lose seats in Scotland.

Whatever the eventual arithmetic, it looks like Labour will have a very bad night and, in a ‘perfect storm’ scenario where voters turn to whichever party is best placed to hurt Labour in their locality, Tony Blair could leave office having suffered one of the worst mid-term drubbings for any governing party in decades.