Parry Mitchell has been described as Labour's "e-lord". Appointed a
working peer in May, he has played a key role in building the
party's IT campaigning tools. He talks to Paul Mason about his
vision for e-politics and e-government
Labour working peer Parry Mitchell is a new boy in the Lords.
When he joined, in May, he found that his "office" was a breezy
lobby full of ancient benches and oak tables. With laptop at the
ready, he asked if he could connect: an usher pointed to a
three-pin electrical socket. Eventually he resorted to an illicit
mobile phone covered by a discreetly placed copy of the Financial
Times keeps his laptop linked to the world outside Westminster.
Mitchell is chairman of IT leasing company Syscap. Behind the
scenes he has played a key role in putting together the IT at the
heart of Labour's formidable campaign machinery. When he arrived at
Labour HQ, he says, there was, "a four-year-old Mac in one corner,
an Amstrad in another and the whole thing was disjointed".
"We put together a structure which got some excellent people
working for the party and technically got some good tie-ups with
business partners. And I think the Labour Party has been able to
develop a very exciting and interesting product which I hope will
come into its own in the next election."
Can the party's campaign really be described as a product? "It
is a product," he insists. "In the first conversation I had with
the general-secretary, I said that a political party is in the
information business. That took him back a bit. I said you take in
information and you send it out. If you can do it better than the
other guy, that's going to help."
The most famous bit of Labour's IT set-up is the Excalibur
"rebuttal" system that keeps MPs armed with facts about their
political opponents. But Mitchell thinks there are far more
interesting developments ahead.
"Most parties have voter identification but we're going to be
very sophisticated. Just look at the elections in the US to see how
targeted everything is. We are seeing parties use computers to get
to voters and address the issues that are important too. The coming
election is going to be interesting, but the one after that - 2005
or 2006 - I expect could be won or lost on the Internet.
"By then we are going to have people in the age group 35 and
under, who are used to using the Internet. They are going to be
hugely unexcited about getting some scrappy bit of A5 literature to
do with issues that don't even concern them.
"Political parties are going to identify people and say 'You
live in this postal area, this is your postal code, we know quite a
bit about you. We're going to direct our policies to you. So if
you're in your mid-30s, we're going to talk about schools. But if
you're over 60, we're not going to talk about schools."
Isn't the electorate involved in an unequal bargain since its
access to public life through the Internet is very basic, but
politicians' access to information about them is very
sophisticated?
"The second issue is really important," says Mitchell. " I think
Labour - and I suspect all other parties - will want to direct
personalised messages to people. Instead of giving a blanket policy
statement, they will want it to become personalised. Technology
enables that to happen."
Speaking before the recount debacle in the US presidential
elections, Mitchell said future UK elections would be even more
Internet-oriented than the 2000 US ballot.
"It's going to be much more targeted, people are going to have
messages coming up on their screens. And I would like to feel that
the voters will be able to question their MP or the candidates on
issues and be able to get replies to those questions. The days of
knocking on people's doors are going to change. Nobody's ever in:
you're always knocking when Coronation Street's on or the kids want
their supper, so people don't usually want to get involved in a
political dialogue. That's all going to change."
Mitchell had just returned from a fact-finding visit during the
US election and cites the turn-outs in UK elections as pressing
reasons use the Internet to revitalise democracy.
"People don't vote despite their good intentions. It's a bad
weather day; they get home, the kids are screaming; the husband's
late; they're late; the trains have broken down. So at the end of
the day, it's 8pm, you've got an hour left and you think, 'what
difference does one vote make?' If you could sit there and vote
with your mobile phone, set-top box, TV or computer and it was
secure, why shouldn't you. Communities are changing. I think lots
of people, especially young people, don't know where their local
school is to vote."
With the opportunities of e-politics there also come threats to
the status quo: will people start to demand electoral parity and go
for referendums? Will parties use the Web to get around limitations
on party political spending? And what about the legal restrictions
on the content of political campaigns: surely the Web is going to
blow all that wide open?
"You could spend £1 trillion on party political broadcasts now,"
says Mitchell. "There are no restrictions at all. What's restricted
is how much you can spend as a candidate in your constituency. But
you're absolutely right, it's blown apart. Because if you've got
the e-mail addresses of everybody in the constituency, you can send
them e-mail ad nauseam for nothing. Whereas before you had the
printing bill, now you can get a beautiful PDF file that you can
zap across to people, they can print it out if they want to, and it
doesn't cost a penny."
Mitchell cites the success of the Greens in getting their "niche
message" across as proof that the Internet is a leveller in
politics rather than a factor that accentuates power inequalities.
"I think the Internet for a political party is a bit like the
Internet for small businesses. It actually removes some of the
inhibitions, it enables the economies of scale that only big
companies used to have."
But in its ability to allow parties to target the electorate,
won't the Internet do the same as customer segmentation tools in
business - and allow a bottom layer to be discarded as irrelevant?
Won't it accelerate social exclusion instead of promoting
inclusion?
"Yes," admits Mitchell. "You see it at the moment in these US
elections. You can see the candidates spending all their time in
the key states, because they are going to be the ones on which this
election rests. In each of those states, there are key people - and
they are going to swing it one way or another. And if you can
contact and isolate those people, that's where you'll be targeting.
Politicians, like everybody else, are going to concentrate their
efforts where they're going to get the most reward."
Education
Despite the danger of deepening the political and social divide,
Mitchell is convinced that Labour is on the right track in
emphasising education as the sphere where the Internet can have a
lasting social impact. He cites a school in the Midlands he visited
where, despite extreme social deprivation and drugs in the area,
they hadn't had a single laptop stolen even though children were
taking them home in their bags to do homework every night. Not only
the children but also parents and teachers had bought into the
Internet-working ethos.
"The first thing I'd really say is, if I could criticise my own
Government, one laptop per five children in primary schools is not
enough. There's only one target: one laptop per child, renewed
every three years. Everybody has to have one."
Mitchell's big project is the Knowledge Network - a knowledge
management scheme across Whitehall departments that had just
undergone a soft launch when we spoke. They had 32,000 hits on day
one and 150,000 in week one. "I'm feeling pretty excited about
that," he says.
He is excited about the potential of e-government in general.
"We need to get rid of the situation that you have to fill in the
same information over and over, whether you are licensing your car
or getting your birth certificate or signing on for whatever it
happens to be - it's madness - absolute nonsense. The solution is a
citizens' portal where all this information about you is stored,
and it just helps you through it.
"Blair's goal is that, by 2005, all government services must be
online. They've got 31% already in that position and they want to
get 70% by 2002. Needless to say the last 30% is going to be the
tough one."
Mitchell believes that UK society will be remarkably unresistant
to e-transformation. When I ask him to identify obstacles to the
e-economy he has to think hard, but then I mention Westminster.
"Oh, this place. That's my number one tirade in life: I want to
have a wireless network in this place. Two megabit feeds, portable
computers. I suspect that I've got a job on my hands. But why not?
Why shouldn't this be a centre of technological excellence? Just
because it's old doesn't mean it can't be transformed."
Mitchell thinks rolling out e-government across Whitehall faces
"a huge cultural problem". He adds, "It's also a huge problem in my
own company where we're introducing e-business. It depends on your
attitude in life. Some people feel threatened by these things; the
way to overcome the threat is, of course, to educate people and to
actually say to them, 'I think this is going to make your life a
lot easier and actually it's fun and exciting'."
In Tony Blair's launch of the UK Online strategy he promised
that Britain would not repeat "40 years of relative economic
decline" due to slow technological investment. Is UK business up to
that challenge? Mitchell thinks so.
"I think there's a cultural problem, especially in SMEs. I think
there's a lot of people out there that if there was a red button in
front of them, and they could push it and the Internet disappeared
from their lives, they would be very happy to do that. And I think
there are also a lot of people out there that hear a lot about it,
think they should be a part of it, but don't know how.
"If you're to do anything on the Internet, there has to be
absolute commitment from the person at the top; and involvement.
And you cannot delegate it to somebody down there, one of the IT
nerds. It's not going to happen. E-business - and e-government -
actually means huge restructuring and re-engineering of the way you
do things. And that fundamentally affects the company.
"An awful lot of senior executives in the UKare not familiar
with the Internet. I often find that when I'm sending e-mails to
people, to senior people, you just know that the e-mail arrives,
the secretary prints it, takes it in; the big man looks at it, he
takes it back to his secretary, who then sends the e-mail. Men in
particular over a certain age just do not know how to use it."
<>On the Internet buzz
Asked what excites him most about the Internet, Mitchell says,
"I've been in the IT business since 1967 and for most of the time
when I talked to my friends about it they'd all fall asleep in
three seconds flat. Today everybody wants to talk about it.
"We're talking about the election experiments of the government
of Manitoba. If we actually wanted to, we could go on to our
computers today and take a look at the Web site and see what's
happening there. How would you be able to do that before? You would
have to go to the Canadian High Commission and probably get
something that is two years out of date."
Mitchell on the e-envoy
Asked what the main priorities of the new e-envoy should be
Mitchell says: "I don't think I can answer that question. I get
quite confused by the differences of the responsibilities.
Certainly I would say working very closely on the Whitehall
Knowledge Network: I think that is a key component of it. I don't
know who's going to get that job. I was very disappointed that,
after the job was announced, it took nearly a year before Alex
Allan was appointed.
"I think a lot of people who could well do the job might not be
attracted to it because it's still quite vaguely defined. There is
talk going around that they may incorporate the e-envoy and the
e-minister together - and, to be very honest about it, I think it
should be centralised as much as possible, not be fragmented. There
are some good people going for the job and I wish them well. It's a
really tough job."