The Tories need a strong message to rally a digital army like Corbyn’s
The local elections have shown how far behind in the social media stakes the Conservative Party really is
Theresa May was right to see Jeremy Corbyn as a bad leader of a shambolic party, but wrong to believe that this meant she would not face much of a fight. Her enemy, as it turns out, is not Labour but a network of nimble and effective campaign groups; people who are often united by little more than a dislike of Conservatives – and now, in the digital age, have ways of doing something about it.
The first proper glimpse of this came just after the London Bridge attack last year. Political parties agreed to suspend campaigning as a mark of respect, but Tory HQ noticed that they were still under fairly strong attack from other groups. An aide was dispatched to take a note of them, and returned with a list of names. There was the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, Unionstogether, various groups campaigning against NHS cuts, Momentum and many others. They were using social media to put out videos, adverts and messages of a higher quality than the Labour Party was managing – and doing so on a national level, almost undetected.
Their successes, when they come, are extraordinary. Last year the Tories successfully planted a story in the press saying that their campaign video attacking Corbyn was the mostwatched in British political history. This was fake news. That honour went to a video entitled “So you’re thinking of voting Conservative? Vote NHS” by a group called NHS Roadshow: it has been seen more than 10 million times. It shows doctors and nurses talking in simple, powerful terms about the case for voting for anyone but the Conservative Party.
A senior Tory strategist told me that this video was so compelling it made even him think twice about voting Conservative. The party had been wrong to assume that such groups had to be remote-controlled by a mastermind in Labour HQ. They seemed to come out of nowhere, as did their funding. It’s a new game, and one the Tories still don’t know how to play.
The local elections have seen this played out once more. The People’s Assembly was back, organising protest marches. A group called School Cuts has been sending out leaflets about Tory parsimony. It has a clever website where you can type in your postcode to find out how much your local school will suffer from Philip Hammond’s Budget. There’s no “vote Labour” message, but there doesn’t need to be. It’s effective, professional and persuasive. All are fruits of the digital era, which is making political start-ups easier – bringing us Trump in America, Macron in France and a new anti-tory alliance in Britain.
To their credit, the Conservatives are beginning to panic. A few months ago, there was an angry meeting of Tory donors who demanded to know why the party was being outmanoeuvred by groups that didn’t exist until a few years ago. What were their donations being spent on? If social media is the new battlefield, why is there no Tory army?
What makes it worse for the Tories is that, until fairly recently, the Right seemed to rule the digital world. Websites such as Conservativehome and Guido Fawkes were envied by the Left, which had no equivalent. But the rise of social media led to the era of digital socialism, dismissed as “clicktivism” until the campaigns ended up mobilising enough people to join Labour and elect Corbyn. Over the past 10 years, Labour Party membership has trebled while Tory membership has halved. The Tories don’t release figures on the average member’s age, but emails sent from the party now end with a plea for it to be remembered in your will.
The speed of change is extraordinary. The Tories had a decent digital operation in 2015 because David Cameron spent three years preparing for it. At the last election, the party’s digital chief was given a day’s notice. The two short years between the elections had seen a near-transformation of digital campaigning techniques; two years in which the Tory party had been asleep. The analogy often used by veterans of last year’s Conservative campaign is that they were fighting the Second World War on horseback.
But the Tories are wrong to think this can be solved by spending more on a digital guru. If they hired Mark Zuckerberg to run the next campaign, they’d get nowhere because of the underlying problem: lack of a message, and a messenger. The Scottish Tories had a good digital war last year, because they had Ruth Davidson. The UK Tories seem to have forgotten what they stand for, which is perhaps why last year’s manifesto was such an uninspiring mixture of cliches and bad ideas stolen from the Labour Party.
Those of us on the Right hate to admit it but the new generation of Corbynistas – and the other groups now fighting alongside them – are being inspired by a positive agenda. Borrowing the tactics demonstrated by the SNP, they like to campaign and organise, speak in local events and project a sense of community, even of a crusade. They talk about a fairer society, properly-financed public services, the tackling of rampant inequalities and rapacious capitalism.
You can – and I do – say that this is all delusional nonsense. That the data shows inequality near a 30-year low, school standards rising and NHS spending at an all-time high. But this is a negative message, attacking the other side: where is the cause to which Tories rally? Lower taxes? Off the agenda for the foreseeable future. A better chance of owning a house? There’s no Tory plan here to speak of. One might admire Theresa May’s stamina in the Brexit negotiations, but even those who work in her party struggle to articulate what she stands for. “Getting the job done” is a noble endeavour, but not an inspiring one.
As Tories count their losses in today’s local election results, they might well grumble about how they can – like Labour – treble their membership or inspire someone other than the Countryside Alliance to campaign alongside them. They could discuss who they should hire and how much he’d cost, what data to collect, what tricks to perform on which platforms. But Corbyn did not sit in a room and draw up a plan to create digital armies: if anything, it was the other way around. A strong campaign needs a genuine agenda and inspiring leadership. And there’s no algorithm for that.