Meeting Tweeting

It’s a packed-out hall on a spring evening. Almost two hundred Labour members have gathered to hear the potential candidates for a safe Labour seat set put their case for selection. The members rustle folded leaflets the candidates have given them, drink from cardboard cups of cooling coffee, and listen as one of the candidates speaks.

“To win the next election,” she – let’s say it’s a she – says, “we need to connect. We need to connect with each other, with our members, with our local communities, and the wider public. And I believe that I am the candidate who knows best how to connect – with a a new high-performance Android smartphone, available exclusively to Orange customers in the UK and France from this summer!”

Don’t let a mobile phone ruin your selection meeting. Switch it off.

That was the decision taken last night, while the members of my neighbouring CLP Manchester Central were making the excellent decision to select Lucy Powell as their candidate for the upcoming by-election. Whether as a deliberate attempt to keep people from using social media, or simply a request to avoid interruptions caused by ringing phones – and I suspect, actually, it was both – every member present at the meeting was instructed to switch their phones off.

This left the rest of us no way of knowing what the candidates were saying, what they were being asked, how they were answering. None at all! “How will we know who is to represent the centre of this great city?” we howled with anguish, scritching fruitlessly at Tweetdeck like cats at a window. “Which of the candidates were born and/or bred in the constituency and which are from very slightly outside it? Are any of them the first in their families to go to university?” With sighs of relief we realised the candidate statements were already up on LabourList. But what about the Q & A? Would anyone remember to ask the candidates to name their favourite Labour policy of our thirteen years in government? What about asking them if they thought we needed a new kind of politics? Would anyone think to ask them if we should learn lessons from Bradford West? And what would the candidates answer? ‘The National Minimum Wage’ or ‘Iraq’? ‘New politics for a new era’ or ‘nah, old politics seems fine’? ‘Bradford West…unique situation…community politics and such’ or ‘yes, I’ve already purchased a cat costume’?

You see where I’m going with this. Large parts of selection meetings are predictable affairs to most members. And that’s just one argument against allowing members to broadcast what they’re hearing to the wider world – it’s not a public meeting, after all. The press aren’t invited. And if the candidates are being kept out of the main hall to avoid them gaining an advantage by listening to the speeches and Q & A sessions of those up before them – which they probably are – then shouldn’t we ensure they can’t pick up the same advantage by following the proceedings on Twitter from the next room?

The last point is fairly easy to deal with differently – in Bradford West, for example, all seven candidates were sequestered in a room, Twelve Angry Men style, and had their phones confiscated, while the rest of the CLP members didn’t appear to have been banned from using theirs. (Since there were almost three hundred of them there and they were sat in the hall for five hours plus, that would have been pretty hard to enforce.)

The real issue is not whether the candidates find out what’s going on in a meeting, but whether the public do. I’ve written here before about a certain amount of discomfort from some party members about contents of Labour party meetings being described online, and naturally there are some meetings (usually Labour Group) in which I willingly submit to a Twitter ban. I would argue, however, that selection meetings should not be one of these.

But what if a member presents a biased or inaccurate view of events? What if a hashtag gets hijacked by political opponents and they use it to mock us? And, fundamentally, is it any business of non-members to hear what candidates say when they’re speaking to members alone?

My answers respectively would be ‘so what?’, ‘so what?’, and ‘of course it is’. Following the #mcrcentral hashtag last night was a frustrating experience because it summed up the reasons some in the Labour Party are nervous of Twitter. A member in the room had elected to use his unexpectedly uncrowded platform to take the piss out of predictable statements by a candidate he had a prior grudge against. Paul Staines and Conservative Future got involved in the hashtag to try and undermine the result in advance. And there was hardly any information about what was actually happening.

Had all of the nearly-200 people in the room been allowed to update social media as the meeting progressed – and this being Manchester Central, a great number of them would have been – the competing voices would have balanced out any bias and had a shot at drowning out the blethering Tories. It’s a question of whether we trust our members to get the right message out: and when you think about it, that’s an astounding question. These are the people we trust to talk to voters on the doorstep, to defend the party to their friends – and to come back to us with feedback. If you overheard an activist calling Ed Balls a moron on the doorstep, or discussing a sensitive meeting in the pub within earshot of Lib Dems, you’d have a word. You wouldn’t start wondering whether it’s appropriate to let our members talk. Well, you might. But it’s no more or less realistic than pretending social media doesn’t exist.

And think of the benefits. With a wider audience able to hear what their next Labour MP had to say – and possibly to submit questions, through members in the room who would of course have the choice whether to ask them or not – candidates would no longer be trapped in the same old vacuum, bouncing the same old ideas and soundbites off one another, but taking part in a real conversation with real people. And what do we need our MPs to do if not that?