Voter Connectivity
For this article I thought I might step away from cultural criticism and look at a recent tragedy.
The British Labour Party has been totally defeated by Brexit Party 2.0 (I refuse to call them Conservatives anymore — there is nothing about them that is really conservative. I may still call them Tories so I remember to loathe them). Utterly trounced. Thrashed. Perhaps not as badly as it could have been. But it’s still bad.
On Friday 13th December thousands of progressives, and likely a few centrists,woke up feeling like Jason Voorhees was trying to hack open their guts. Nausea was the feeling that I most remember on hearing the Exit Poll. Although sinking a fair quantity of beer at that time may have contributed to this.
Labour’s manifesto had been ambitious — proposals like free broadband (by a nationalisation of the Openreach service), a National Care Service and a Charter for the Arts featured. Left wingers, even if they weren’t Labour supporters or voters, could not help but have been inspired.
Many of these policies appear to have been popular. But just because something is popular does not ensure you trust the person giving it to you. I like the offer of a free lollipop. But if Jimmy Saville’s ghost were to phantasmally appear before me and make me the offer of a free lollipop, I might well decline.
And this for me, seems the crux of the problem. I am not going to get into the in depth reasons here for mistrust of Labour (the Twitter post-mortem is still raging as I morosely type this).
One way around the black abyss of disaster and ruin, is just to try and push for the progressive agenda set out by Labour even though they didn’t win, and say: screw the Brexit Party 2.0.
This is no easy proposition. But really…
Five years of this fucking shower? Can we really wait that long to change things?
My parents have just entered the smart phone era. One parent’s reaction was to completely shut off from it. The other manages to grasp many a thing about them. However they still ended up paying a whacking great bill over some mistakes with their phone contract earlier this year. The frustration made them nearly give up and go back to using an older, simpler model of phone. Digital literacy lessons should really be free if you are of a certain age. It’s not fair to have to play catch up.
Information technology can be a pain. The internet doesn’t solve everything. But in a modern world of submitting your kids’ homework online, shopping when you’re stuck in the house, or meeting people to complete a lonely life, it sure helps.
Let’s say you needed to submit an Open University essay online before a deadline, but found this impossible due to the sluggish speed of your existing internet, or not being able to pay for it anymore. In that case, you could pack up your laptop, go to a cafe with a hotspot and use their internet to submit. But if you lived in a town like Bolsover (where longstanding firebrand MP Dennis Skinner has lost his seat) you might be pretty stuck. Despite internet speeds being good and having 97.2% superfast and broadband cover in the town, there are according to Ipass hotspot finder…zero hotspots. You have to go West towards Chesterfield to find them.
A smug metropolitan person like me can hardly believe that. But it’s true. See the map, which indeed could be wrong or out of date…
Where can I get my iced frappe and sit and pretend I’m doing important work for a few hours, yah?
There could be a lot of reasons for this “coldspot”…low interest in setting up the networks, a lack of overall digital literacy and internet literate people, the kind of cafe culture that encourages hotspot usage…
The actual quality of internet in Bolsover does not appear a factor. The data traffic is probably considerably less than in other more urban places. But would having 5 or 6 popularly used hotspots in the centre, really slow everyone’s internet down? Unlikely. This is the problem with the consumer distribution of things that become public necessities.
A little walk around Bolsover using Googlemaps (that’s about as far as a Southern fairy like me has got to this historic Northern town) gives you some visual information on said place. On the main drag there are pubs and shops - all places you could have a hotspot for people to connect to with a phone or computer.
The digital divide is not just about people’s private access to broadband data. Public WiFi accessibility is a fallback for people when they are trying to navigate a World gone digital. People who might be living in poverty, or might not have the techno-cultural capital to figure things out.
But you may ask at this stage, “why are you harping on about internet access in one corner of the United Kingdom? Are you implying that having readily accessible hotspots, would have made a big difference to Labour’s prospects?”
Well no of course not. But as accelerationists have been saying for a while, technology, while itself neutral, can serve political purposes and spur social change through disrupting the capitalist economic system. Whilst the aims of the Labour Party are not explicitly to push capitalism to its limits, in order to hasten its destruction, accelerationist ideas have gained traction within the Labour Party as a way to provoke socio-democratic change.
Let’s imagine that Labour, perhaps following different policies and without the imminent panic of a general election, had thought about the issue of a digital divide one year ago. Under the leadership of dank meme lord Dennis Skinner —
Perhaps this is getting far fetched.
(The rest of the tone of this blog post will give the subject due serious and not fall into affectionate parody of an elder statesman of the House of Commons.)
Starting again, let’s imagine that in Bolsover, Chesterfield and North Derbyshire Momentum had set up something called Labour Acceleration. Labour Acceleration had done the following:
- Managed to get three local businesses to agree setting up a hotspot alongside their private business network at their premises. The hotspots were all called Labour Acceleration (1 to 3), with a specific titled login page, that detailed the business’ services, and a selection of info on other local businesses. The agreement would be useful for the business and a way of reinforcing Labour’s usefulness to the community.
- Meanwhile, free internet literacy classes were being run by a particularly digitally savvy activist at one of the supporting businesses every Wednesday night. The syllabuses included a section on how to fact-check Fake News and use a variety of useful apps that help with money saving — (for example Too Good to Go that cuts down on food waste) etc.
- At election time there was a push, and instructions by local activists to encourage supportive locals to change their router names to Vote Labour! One of the local taxi firms who had benefited from some of the advertising on Labour Acceleration decided to give older people in more rural parts of the area a lift to the polling station, as well as have Vote Labour! stickers on their fleet of vehicles.
Now, as plans go this is pretty small-time. But it shows how the introduction of technology can facilitate some political ends. It could be tweaked, or easily expanded. Moreover, it doesn’t really feature Labour offering something that’s taken as snake-oil by the local community. “Free broadband? That’ll never happen, no way pal.”
No one is demanding that people “vote Labour to get X” in this scenario. Anyone can use the hotspots set up.
These kind of projects by left wing activists would need a bit of reflection and assessment, and perhaps surveying to see how people’s attitudes were affected. It wouldn’t be terribly costly, but require planning and forethought. This is not some replacement for the big arguments around the election of 2019; Brexit and the media muck-raking over anti-semitism was sure to make winning incredibly difficult.
To make a manifesto that is so compelling, and then abandon it to the winds of political fortune makes it clear to a voting public that you’re trying to bargain with them. Trust is built and not haggled for. Trust is also lost when you fall short of your promises, as the recently elected Brexit Party 2.0 plans to “Get Brexit Done” will find out to their cost I very much hope.
Despite the earlier silliness, I would like to pay tribute to Dennis Skinner here, who was MP for 49 years. Whilst not always agreeing with him, his cutting jibes in Parliament were refreshing. It will be a much duller place without him.
