The rampant growth of direct action, as seen in recent anti-road and animal rights protests, is not a random phenomenon; it indicates that many people, confronted by a government that doesn't listen, have given up on the usual democratic channels. For anyone who believes in radical left-of-centre politics, it is vital that this void is filled by a new type of grassroots democracy that harnesses the power of information and communications technologies to create a new political culture.
In case 16 years of Tory, non-reactive government have blurred your memory, we are supposed to live in a representative democracy. But despite rapid developments in technology, from e-mail to video-conferencing, individuals still have to lobby their political representatives by traditional methods: writing a letter, signing a petition, phoning their office, arranging an appointment, or turning up at the House of Commons Central Lobby. Of course, if you get really dissatisfied you can always vote against them every couple of years. A few enlightened MPs and councillors have discovered e-mail, but there is hardly an electronic revolution going on in Government.
It is certainly not the most dynamic system for ensuring that our political representatives act as an effective vehicle for their electorate's views. New technology affords the possibility of cutting out this middle person and directly inputting our views into national, regional, and local electronic parliaments. But there are shortcomings of this approach. Who has time to get involved in every detail of every decision? That sounds like goodbye to the pub, football, socialising ... even surfing the Net. This version of direct democracy would be a version of hell, where Brookside would be replaced by the intricacies of your local council's rubbish disposal plans.
A more effective approach would be to use new technologies to provide a much greater degree of interactive consultation between political representatives and their electorate. The Internet provides one of the most obvious and immediate ways forward. Each MP or local councillor should have a World Wide Web page detailing the latest developments in Parliament and the local area as well as the representative's position on these issues. Voters could e-mail their views directly to their political representative or paste them up in newsgroups, ensuring truly interactive debate among hundreds of local voters. People could also regularly grade the performance of their representative by responding to online questionnaires.
These pages should also be hyperlinked to an independent section, produced, for example, by the BBC, which could detail political representatives' voting records, speeches in Parliament, and so on. Other local media in electronic form could also be accessible, ensuring that there were more partisan reports on your local MP or councillor. Local councils, in conjunction with the private sector, could co-ordinate the establishment of local area Web sites. Amsterdam's Digital City (see Wired 1.01) is an excellent model, putting commerce, universities, libraries, politicians, and public services online.
The Internet, however, provides but one method for improving access. Among the most important avenues would be locally based television networks. These could be provided by local cable television companies who are currently linking up thousands of homes to optical fibre networks. Digital terrestrial transmission, which will allow many more channels to be beamed into homes, will also make local television a reality. It is vital that the ITC seizes this opportunity and is empowered to encourage the development of local media, rather than simply ensuring the largest cash flow to the Treasury. More flexible media regulations will also be vital to ensure that local newspapers, radio stations, and television companies can team up to provide accessible and high-quality multimedia content to the home.
Top-rate local television could revolutionise the functioning of local democracy if interactive broadcasting is combined with a range of other feedback mechanisms. MPs and local councils could be empowered to develop community and neighbourhood plans with their electorate every year. Local television programmes could feature discussions of the community plan within the context of issues of particular concern to people at that time.
But electronic politics should not stop at improved consultation between representatives and the electorate. Direct digital democracy has a role to play in the running of neighbourhoods. For example, it could be used to ensure that tenants become involved in how their estate is managed and what new services they require. It would relocate intelligence on how the public service is run from the producer to the consumer. This process of democratisation would be a massive cultural shift for deferential, hierarchical UK. The immediacy of the new communication tools would alter the rights and responsibilities of the much discredited politician as well as the apathetic or disillusioned citizen.
But interactivism on the superhighway could mean one élitist political practice is replaced by another unless a new government takes seriously the vision of universal access. Political representatives could also become lobby fodder as sophisticated commercial interests manipulate interactivism to get their message across. The bulwark of ordinary electronic citizens currently does not exist - 100,000 Internet activists do not represent a base for a revolution in politics.
But if we assume that in the long term every British home will be wired, we must undergo nothing short of a revolution in the way we educate people, in both the use of technology and their role in a democracy. From an early age, children need access to two-way, multimedia communication and should be able to understand its full creative potential. Online citizenship will need to be a required section of the national curriculum. Electronic village halls, utilising the existing infrastructure of libraries, could make the technology and the training to use it available to the local community. Schools, GPs' surgeries, Citizens Advice Bureaux, and colleges could also be wired up. A universal service fund - supported by key industry players - may also be necessary to support low-cost services to disadvantaged groups.
The challenge for politicians as we approach this new era is to ensure that the conditions are created for the genuine development of informed, electronic citizens. Otherwise, the new right will drag us towards wired authoritarianism, which manipulates the people through the occasional populist electronic plebiscite and accentuates the divide between the information-rich and the information-poor.
Graham Allen (Nottingham North) is the shadow minister for media, broadcasting, and the information superhighway.