Labour – don’t forget the core vote

By Paul Afshar / @PaulAfshar

I’m not one to agree with Eric Pickles usually. I grew up in Bradford and remember the cuts the Tories made to childhood services under his watch. That said, there is one thing where we share agreement – and that’s on the role of social media in politics.

The Tory Party Chair suggested that ‘Cameron’s lot’, as he probably sees them – the urbanite, young cosmopolitan Tories – were in danger of neglecting traditional grass roots campaigning methods in favour of using social media like Facebook and Twitter.

There’s nothing better than knocking on doors and talking to people face to face to get through to your core vote, the argument goes. In fact, too much focus on Twittering and not enough on talking can turn some people off.

It’s hard to disagree.

Clearly online campaigning has an important role to play. I’m pretty certain LabourList has energised and got through to activists on the left in a way which we could only dream of doing by any other means. Facebook is a great tool for organising, as I rapidly found out when campaigning locally. And, if anything, the Obama campaign taught us that we don’t need big corporate money to fund political campaigns when we can mobilise hundreds of thousands of people online to contribute to getting someone elected.

It’s worthwhile, however, remembering that Labour’s core vote – the young, the working families and some older constituents, particularly from BME communities – aren’t as easy to reach with new media. In short, we too are in danger of focussing a lot of campaigning time online, rather than on the street.

Research by the regulator Ofcom suggests younger people and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds are less likely to ‘participate as citizens online’ than other, higher socio-economic groups. In fact, only 13% of the general population claim to have ‘actively participated as citizens online’ – which includes getting in contact with an elected representative or joining a campaigning organisation. This figure drops for those on low incomes.

Older people (those aged 65 +) are around half as likely to have been online than the general population. Again, this figure drops for those aged 75 and over.

Ensuring we reach these groups is absolutely key, and we can’t only rely on a Facebook Group to do this.

The key question for activists is how we use social media as an organising tool to support and complement more ‘traditional’ methods of campaigning. And how do we ensure our core vote is not turned off, as Eric Pickles alleged for the Tories, by focussing more new media at the expense of canvassing.

We all know it’s more tempting to Tweet rather than hand out a leaflet on a rainy day – but we as activists on the left need to recognise the value of both.