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An election is coming, hide your phone. The chances are it could soon become the receptacle for unsolicited texts, picture messages, videos, voicemails and emails from political parties. Of course, depending on where you live, your reaction to that might be a rueful laugh and the word “what, do you mean, soon?” But how the UK population experiences the next elections could change in a big way thanks to proposed amendments to data protection. These would give the government the ability to exempt political parties from prohibitions on unsolicited direct marketing — they cannot currently send electronic messages to individuals without specific consent.
The Conservative government insists that they have no plans to use the powers immediately and that they would, in any case, require a further parliamentary vote to trigger the “switching-off” of the ban on direct marketing. But Labour sees the changes as part of a bigger programme of measures designed to tilt the electoral playing field towards the Tories, from the recent introduction of a requirement to present ID in order to vote to changes to how constituency boundaries are drawn.
It’s true that changes to how UK constituency boundaries are made, though based on wholly reasonable assumptions that are very far from the highly unusual arrangements favoured in the US by both parties, were most recently shaped towards Conservative interests.
There may be no “right” answer to the question of whether constituencies should be divided according to their adult population, regardless of whether those adults are registered to vote or not, or whether constituency boundaries should be divided by the size of their electorates. Similarly there is no “right” answer about whether constituency boundaries should prize uniformity over avoiding splitting towns or villages in two. But the answers you pick will shape electoral outcomes at the margin.
However, electoral interests can change very quickly. The assumptions underpinning the UK’s new constituency boundaries would have boosted David Cameron’s electoral hopes in 2015. But, as the two parties’ electoral coalitions have been reconfigured by Brexit and changing patterns of voter behaviour, they may now benefit Keir Starmer instead. A similar dynamic may have occurred with VoterID. Jacob Rees-Mogg has described recent measures that require voters to bring ID to the polling station as an attempt by his own party to “gerrymander” elections that backfired, disenfranchising older Tory voters rather than younger Labour ones.
The lesson here is that you’re better off making the choices you think are right, rather than the ones you think will advantage you electorally. Widening the ways in which political parties can talk to voters, and removing some of the barriers to doing so, may help the Tory party more than Labour at the moment (though given both parties are flush with cash and Labour has more members, this is far from clear). But, more importantly, it is the right approach regardless.
In most democracies, it has never been easier for voters to “switch off” from current affairs than it is today. “Daisy”, the hard-hitting advert released by Lyndon B Johnson’s successful 1964 election campaign, which depicted a vote for Barry Goldwater as one that risked nuclear destruction, was seen by an estimated 50mn people. At the time of writing, Joe Biden’s latest advert about Donald Trump’s promises to repeal Obamacare has 3,649 views on YouTube, though millions more will end up watching it because American political parties can purchase advertising slots on TV and online.
In the UK, political parties are given slots for “party political broadcasts” — short adverts allocated to them based on their electoral strength. When the British media diet was confined to a handful of channels, a row over the claims made in Labour’s 1992 broadcast about NHS waiting lists, the so-called “war of Jennifer’s Ear”, dominated the campaign for a week. Now, however, I couldn’t tell you the contents of any of the party political broadcasts released in this parliament and I’m willing to bet most people in the UK couldn’t either.
I’m grateful for my streaming services whenever the country is gripped by a royal wedding or if I am trying to avoid finding out the result of an important football match. But it is surely unhealthy for the nation’s sense of political cohesion that I can, perfectly easily, watch as much television and listen to as much music as I want without ever having to have my day interrupted by a news bulletin or a message from a political party.
The logic of giving over the airwaves to party conventions in the US and party political broadcasts in the UK is that there is a social value to shared political debates. Just as you can’t opt out of jury service without a good excuse, you should be exposed to at least some arguments about politics and the direction of your country. Admittedly, that logic can be taken too far — the barrage of communications in the 2022 US elections, in which Americans received 15bn political messages via SMS, represents the other extreme. But giving political parties greater freedom to message voters during elections is the logical modernisation of the privileged position they enjoyed on the airwaves in the 20th century.
While the prospect of having my phone and inbox fill up with unsolicited messages from UK political parties does not fill me with joy, the government is asking the right questions here. Indeed they should go further — in an era when streamers are once again running adverts, there should surely be a space for at least some political communication too.
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