Tweeting it real? The UK’s social media general election

Jim Murphy, the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, stood at a bar counter late on Thursday night, buying a round of drinks for his staff after the second of two television debates with fellow political leaders in Scotland, at the University of Aberdeen.

Murphy was in good form: the debate had gone well, opening up a new line of attack against the Scottish National Party over the ambitions of its leader, Nicola Sturgeon, for Scotland to have full command of its taxation and spending.

The debate, which was being held in the run-up to the UK general election, had been recorded an hour or so before it was transmitted, largely because of the BBC’s worries about the habit of the Ukip MEP David Coburn of making outrageous statements.

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The joy of Essex: Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, took part in a documentary with the reality TV star Joey Essex rather than meet supporters in Grimsby for a fish supper. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty

"I came off the stage and asked how it had gone on Twitter, " Murphy says. "Then I realised that it 'hadn't happened yet', because it hadn't gone out on air."

In this a significant truth lies, as the social medium becomes the message: eight in 10 of all adults in the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland, are now regularly online. Nearly everybody aged between 16 and 34 uses the internet – just 2 per cent do not – and the number of over-65s going online has risen by more than a quarter since 2012, going from 33 per cent to 42 per cent. Six in every 10 adults now have smartphones, complete with cameras – a 20 per cent rise in three years – and the number of pensioners with one has doubled.

Of all adults who are online in the UK, two-thirds use social media. Most have Facebook accounts, and three in 10 use Twitter – fewer than you might imagine, given the focus put on tweets.

Torrents of tweets

Political parties have sought to command the social-media landscape, issuing torrents of tweets, messages and videos that they hope others will take up and amplify. After each TV debate so far, in the belief that the first version of history is truth, each has tried to drive its message that its leader was the one who won the encounter.

So after the Aberdeen debate Scottish Labour trumpeted Murphy’s success and the Scottish National Party trumpeted Sturgeon’s; the other parties filled up the place positions. For now the effect on voters is debatable, but such messages often appeal to the partisan, leaving sensible, middle-ground opinion cold.

The effect on politicians of social-media ubiquity can be gauged even this early in the campaign, however: the normally cautious are becoming positively timid.

Politicians’ every move can be recorded and broadcast in ways unimaginable even in the general election of five years ago – the one dubbed, prematurely as it turned out, the UK’s first social-media election. The public space is now a more threatening place for political leaders – a confrontation once witnessed by a few can become available to countless others within minutes – and parties are desperate to stay in control of the delivery of their message.

Contact between party leaders and the public – at least if their political allegiance is unclear – is discouraged, lest the day’s carefully structured campaigning be thrown off course.

There was never a rose-tinted past where debate reached into all levels of UK society, even if nostalgists pined this week for the days of rambunctious town-hall meetings. In the past, however, there were unofficial agreements between parties, and even with the media, about the structure of campaigns: health would be debated one day and crime the next, for example. The structure was formulaic, perhaps, beginning with a round of early-morning press conferences in London. It gave too much control to the media, sometimes. Perhaps it bored the public.

Old formula

The formula began to break down five years ago. Morning conferences were scaled back, replaced by “media opportunities” scattered across the UK. Sometimes they stayed under strict party control. Often they did not.

Today questioning has been limited even further. Parties invite to their events only the media organisations that they deem friendly, and pack press conferences, when they hold them, with party supporters.

The deadening hand may in part explain why Election 2015 – a long campaign that ends on May 7th, at the end of a long parliament – has yet to kick into life, even if the choices politicians are offering are real, for once.

Campaigns’ obsession with control is nothing new. Every party has tried to keep its rule firm, although the greater risks attached to freer-wheeling behaviour have given the upper hand to parties with more authoritarian instincts.

There are countless examples. Last September, in the final days of the Scottish independence-referendum campaign, dozens of Labour MPs from England travelled north to help the party's No campaign in Glasgow. They were greeted by a Yes campaigner on a rickshaw, who followed them down the street, blaring out Darth Vader's imperial march, from Star Wars, on his PA system. "Bow down, people of Glasgow!" he yelled, filming all the while. "Bow down to your imperial masters! Be grateful! They've travelled all this way! Don't worry, they'll put it on expenses! Bow down!" It went on for ages. The Labour MPs looked awkward, but it made for amusing viewing on YouTube.

Then there is the memory of Gillian Duffy, in 2010, when Gordon Brown, who was Labour prime minister at the time, got back in his car and called Duffy, who had heckled him, a bigot, forgetting that he was still carrying a Sky News microphone on his belt.

Faced with such challenges, politicians in Election 2015 have become ultracareful. David Cameron began his campaign with a bustling rally in the Wiltshire town of Chippenham. Or it looked like a bustling rally to most of the cameras. A photograph taken from the back of the group showed the meagre reality: the British prime minister stood on a podium in a huge hangar with a few dozen supporters gathered around him at one end of the empty space. The same thing happened on Tuesday when he was in Cornwall – which, like Wiltshire, is a prime target for the Conservatives, who hope to prise control of key seats from the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg's party, with which the Tories have been in coalition for the past five years.

Labour's drive for control is, if anything, even more acute. Ed Miliband, its leader, this week visited the Gurdwara Sahib in Leamington Spa, in Warwickshire – the largest Sikh temple outside India.

No television cameras were allowed, although Sky News found ways around the ban. Newspapers were not told – an increasingly common tactic as parties try to ensure that questions are controlled or, preferably, avoided.

Gaffes

Even the Ukip leader,

Nigel Farage

, fighting hard against headwinds to win in the Kent constituency of South Thanet – as well as against a series of party gaffes that have damaged its standing – has found the new faith of discipline.

In Kent his movements are subject to near-Orwellian secrecy; the press are barred from any meetings, and burly minders rebuff attempts to ask questions.

Farage, who has been an MEP for South East England since 1999, was supposed to have shared a fish supper this week with carefully screened supporters at a pub in the northern English fishing port of Grimsby – one of the party’s strong targets for the election – leaving the press outside.

But the crowd, having been told for an hour and a half that he was on his way, was stood up. Instead Farage chose to spend the time on a trawler with Joey Essex, from the reality TV programme The Only Way Is Essex.

The encounter with Essex, who has never voted but who is filming a programme about his journey into the heart of democracy for ITV that will air before May 7th, is unlikely to have produced much light. It is, however, for now at least, an appropriate image of Election 2015: a campaign that is more distant from the people than ever, even if adopts the illusion of proximity.