Bloggers – from across the political spectrum – should be rightly humbled by the fortunes of LPUK in Norwich. Just 36 votes. It seems that the readers of LPUK blogs, although there’s a lot of them, either don’t live in Norwich, stayed at home or worse – voted for the Tories.
See, the Tories seem to be able to have it both ways. You’ve got Dave “I’m not a libertarian” Cameron using their party’s libertarians as political whipping boys to demonstrate his own Blue Labour credentials, yet many people still seem to think that if you believe in economic and personal freedom that the Tories are a perfectly good home.
They’re no more a good home than the Lib Dems, and that’s a fact. I stay the Lib Dems because libertarianism is just another word for Liberal, and I do my bit trying to help keep this strand liberal thought alive in this party on a point of principle. It might seem like a stupid waste of everyone’s time but I wouldn’t really be a liberal if I didn’t insist on doing things my way.
These things are going to seem a lot more clear once the Tories take over. Parties in power are what they are. Parties not yet in power are whatever the voters and supporters hope they are (hello, Obama!) – something currently working in the Tories favour. But then, people who call themselves socialists vote Labour in preference to parties like the Socialist Worker’s Party out of pragmatism and realism. Compromise is an ugly, ugly thing.
So, back to the point – blogs alone, it seems, are not going to win elections for LPUK. They clearly should have attracted a good chunk of the 11 in 20 that didn’t want to vote for anyone, which seems to be the fundamental flaw in libertarian political movement (and the NOTA party, and the ‘put a real person in parliament’ campaign.) All these movements have, in common, the desire to attract people who are currently disengaged from mainstream politics.
They don’t vote though. They’re not going to vote, either. You need a personal connection with people to make them care enough to go out and vote for you, and blogs alone – at least so far – aren’t going to achieve that.
Leaflets don’t achieve that either. Let’s face it, political leaflets are unsolicited junk mail at the end of the day, treated accordingly and potentially with a lower than normal response rate. It’s a dismal, pitiful excuse for campaigning – why, in all seriousness, would anyone think that a sheet of paper shoved through a door is ever going to be enough to persuade someone to leave their home and cast a vote, especially for a party other than the Big Three? Affiliation with the Big Three is a seal of approval for a candidate, the value of which depends on the value people place in the parties themselves. The value of approval by an unknown party is worthless, so a single, simple leaflet is also worthless.
So what now? Now people who want to change politics need to start pushing campaigning to another level. Political movements – successful movements – cannot exist in a vacuum completely disconnected from people’s lives. The Labour movement got to people through the workplace, through trade union membership. Conservatives, traditionally speaking, got to people through churches and other society functions.
We still see some of this – politicians who want to get ahead need to get themselves into as many clubs, societies, committees and working groups as they can, to meet as many of the influential people as possible, although this seems mostly to serve to establish themselves as “pillars of the community,” so to speak. This might help boost their Political CV, but does it really replace that sort of relationship with a political movement seen in the early days of Trade Unionism? Of course not.
So where’s the social connection between political movement of the future and people going to come from? “The Internet” seems like the obvious answer, but that’s not a personal connection, it doesn’t reach those people who don’t think and breathe politics like we do. The internet is the means of organising the people who are going to do the ‘connecting’, but the bit in-between, that’s what’s missing.
What’s the answer?
