Stop helping the Tories

The Labour and Lib Dem MPs who managed to beat the Tory candidates funded by Lord Ashcroft at the last election all have my admiration. In a more just world, every report of the 2005 election campaign should start by explaining how the Tories tried and failed to buy the election. They came close to succeeding, as well. Even with the loans (which might still end up smashing our party to pieces), we were still heavily outspent and won some desperately close elections. One of our organisers, for example, was responsible for two key marginals and managed to hold one by 254 votes, and the other by 79. If instead of being outspent by £5 million or so, the Tories had been able to spend twice as much as us, we might even have lost our overall majority.

I mention this now because those Tories haven't gone away, and some of them have a new project, which is to bring Fox News to Britain and create a new home for the conservative movement. Now political internet telly initially sounded just a bit comical to me, and nothing much to worry about, but while the people behind it might be fully paid up members of the Forces of Evil, they aren't stupid. They're currently testing out things like attack adverts and other techniques pioneered by the Republican Party. In the mid 90s, New Labour used campaigning techniques from America to help take the Tories to pieces, and internet campaigning may well offer similar possibilities in the next couple of years to set the news agenda and launch well funded and co-ordinated attacks and smears against our government.

There is nothing subtle about this - their first two adverts were against state funding of political parties (which would stop them taking money off people like Michael Ashcroft), and for lower taxes, and the latest one is an attack on Ken Livingstone (who is a popular left-winger who uses his elected office to be on the side of the majority against the rich, and who the Tories consequently hate with an abiding passion).

Of course there is the pretence that 18 Doughty Street is 'independent of all political parties', on the grounds that sometimes they'll attack Cameron for not being right wing enough. The pretence of independence is at least marginally important because the credibility would be reduced if everyone on the programme were as right-wing as its funders and staff. Less credibility would make it harder to try out new techniques for bringing right-wing Republicanism over here and reduce the effectiveness of attacks on the Labour Party.

And yet just about every day, there is a steady parade of Labour activists desperate to go and hang out at the home of the conservative movement. By definition, anyone watching 'Blogger TV' is not going to be persuaded by their clever arguments, which means that all they are doing is helping the Tories. Comrades, you are not using the Tories' weapons against them, they are using you just as surely as if you were going along to your local Conservative association to help at a fundraiser. Ignore their ethical and social seduction and think about why you're being invited.

It is traditional at this point to moan about the state of the Left and say that we should be setting up our own internet telly. I think that would be a mistake. Projects like 18 Doughty Street are aimed at a small number of people and there is no way that we would be able to get access to the kind of funding that the Tories are lavishing on it (it's like how setting up 'Air America' was not in fact the way to beat 'Fox News'). The weakness in their approach, as the Tories found in 2005, is that what rich people want is not in fact what most people want. Their ideas were so unpopular that they had to pay people to deliver their leaflets, and as a result the strategy is based on Newt Gingrich's mantra of 'go negative early' and 'never apologise, never explain', winning with an ideologically committed minority and then implementing an extremist agenda.

We need to use new technology not to appeal to insiders and find more vicious ways of attacking our opponents, but to do the opposite - to boost turnout and give people positive reasons about how government and socialist politics is a force for good and needs their support, and to disrupt the efforts of the Tories.

Specifically, useful actions for lefties (widely defined to include anyone who doesn't think that increasing the influence of rich people in deciding who wins elections) are to stop lending credibility to Tory TV by appearing on it or watching it, and instead to listen to and act on the ideas of the people who know what they are talking about, like Tim Ireland at Bloggerheads and Unity at Ministry of Truth.