Labour and T'interweb

Much is made of how important t'interweb is in modern politics. It is certainly an important force, but is not - and never will be - the be all and end all of political campaigning. Yet everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. Not least the Labour Party.

In fact, our incumbent governing party seems to have developed some sort of schizophrenia when it comes to the internet. There is no shortage of websites with leading Labour politicians contributing to them. You have LabourList, still stumbling around trying to find a voice and an identity away from Derek Draper. Then there is GoFourth, an enterprise created by the least likely source in the world, ever: John "Chunks" Prescott. For those with a stomach for even more, there is the egregiously slimy James Purnell's Open Left. And there's always Ed Miliband's frankly pathetic LabourSpace.

So, what to make of this plethora of interweb offerings from the party destined to lose the next election? Well, to me it simply shows that the Labour party has lost their way. Go look at some of the articles on those sites. They tend to consist of activists spouting second-rate social democracy, spurious claims that not all is lost, and - most depressingly - a desperate plea from government ministers for new ideas. The Labour offerings on the internet come across as the squawks of a redundant government pleading for someone or something to come along and save them. 

And what is also missing from the Labour internet offerings is an understanding that - if they did find something on the internet to save them - the party leadership would listen. See, I don't think that Gordon Brown is aware of the internet, except when his aides bring down fire on his head because of their internet ideas. He's Gordon Brown. And he knows best. There's nothing that the interweb could teach him that would make a blind bit of difference to the way he acts and what he chooses to do. LabourList et al are irrelevant; not just to the people in this country, but to their own leadership. 

I think that a lot of these Labour projects will peter out when Labour loses the next General Election, and the real work of reconstructing the Labour movement begins. These websites are simply distractions for those who contribute to them. They are talking shops for impotent Labourites, who are watching their government drive into the sea and can do nothing about it. They are magnificently irrelevant; a footnote in the history of Labour electoral suicide under Gordon Brown.