John Lloyd's recent analysis in the Financial Times of the new found reliance on the media of British political parties is acute (In an online world, the party is over, Financial Times , 5 August). He describes UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown as someone who "having climbed the ladder of the Labour movement, had to kick it away" by allying liberal progressive politics to pro-market economics and to patriotism. He argues that:
The inevitable price of that triumph was to jettison the rhetoric and practices of what had been called “this great movement of ours”. Having done so, and with the whole community and its media deciding that he is the problem, the prime minister stands naked in the winds of political change. In common with almost every political leader in the western world, Mr Brown is judged first by the media, for it is they, not the parties, that have been elevated by the politicians themselves into the arbiters of performance. Performance means both the perceived effectiveness of policy and the ability to act the prime minister on television... The pillar on which they had relied in bad times, constructed both of the political party and mass movement, is hollowing out. So is all traditional political activism, even at the level of voting.
One might add that as well as the party and mass movement old Labour also relied on big ideas such as nationalisation and the welfare state. The abandonment of such big ideas lead the media to a focus on cynicism (over skepticism), mis-trust (over social power), personality (over ideas), performance (over vision), and stunts (over mass movements).
Lloyd rightly notes that politicians must have audiences. However, he confuses the rise of a new medium (the digital network) with the continuing absence of substantial messages with which these audiences might engage. David Miliband may out-blog Gordon Brown (though the FT's story on Downing Street TV indicates Brown may out-video him), but this will only reveal more quickly the shallowness of Miliband's ideas.
It is worth revisiting a pertinent piece Lloyd may have commissioned when he was editor of FT magazine, in which Trevor Butterworth noted that blogging "renders the word even more evanescent than journalism", concluding that "blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence" (Time for the last post, FT magazine, 17 February 2006). Miliband's tenure a Prime Minister may well fizzle out even more quickly than Brown's.
A version of this post was published as a letter in the Financial Times, August 8 2008, under the title Solzhenitsyn could have been speaking of the blog. Also published in my Facebook notes.
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