from one of the Ed Balls spoof Twitter accounts today.

There are reasons, of course, why people or things tend to trend on Twitter. In my experience, never having read an official study on this, this tends to be when people die, or are reported to die. Or else, something a bit defamatory-worthy has occurred, and people are ‘intrigued’. Or else, something very minor has happened on BBC Question Time, BBC Any Questions, BBC Any Answers, Britain’s Got Talent, or the X Factor. It is nonetheless interesting watching the phenomenon of people jumping on bandwagons, and a sense of collective excitement, such as when Barack Obama was re-elected. Or else, there is a sense of genuine shock at sudden news, such as death of Baroness Thatcher.

There can be a temptation for all of us to read too much into things we observe in the social media. Hundreds of photoshopped images about George Osborne or Iain Duncan-Smith do not cause a change in direction of travel over the economy or universal credit. Why then do people devote so much time to doing them, as well as posting pictures of cute kittens? Why do people also put in so much time and emotional into having passionate debates on Twitter with well-known journalists? There is an element of narcissism which pervades all our society, where we often do things not for the benefit for anyone apart from ourselves. However, this culture is also pervasive in the politicians who seek us democratically. Many people as they become older become jaded about what politics actually achieves, and, whilst they find the topics themselves actually quite interesting, find the actual political process quite rank and stifling.

Today was “Ed Balls Day”. Ed Balls, it is reputed, accidentally tweeted his own name, leading to thousands of people re-tweeting it. It has become a viral meme, and the subject of an affectionate joke. What does this do for Ed Balls’ popularity? Not much, of course, in that most people have either heard of him as someone who helped to wreck the economy under Gordon Brown, or a brilliant Keynesian economist who trained at Oxford and Harvard, or somewhere in between. Have people used seeing the Ed Balls tweet to seek to discover what the Labour economic policy is or isn’t? No. Granted, there are going to be people who have re-tweeted Ed Balls’ name not because they love him, but because they loathe him.

All of this feeds into the apparent paranoia of politicians who feel that politics has become irrelevant. Seeking out the reasons for the millions of people not bothering to vote has become almost obsessional. Already, the post mortems have begun about why the section 75 NHS regulations vote was lost in the House of Lords. Various theories abound ranging from the relative success of the sales patter of Baroness Williams and Lord Clement-Jones, the fact that elderly Labour peers could not find suitable accommodation in London that night, or an insufficient number of Crossbench peers were unconvinced to vote against the Regulations. And so it could go on, but the issue remains why do people not bother voting. I have also noticed a trend where people find not only politicians boring, but the generally tribalist partisan nature of debate. The legislative process, like the judicial one, is adversarial, and is therefore based on competition not collaboration. The end result is that people end up being hostile to each other, exaggerating their differences, but not drawing attention to the similarities. This, of course, leads to a very distorted manner of taking policy further. For example, the Labour Party have amplified policy differences in procurement to the point of arguing that the privatisation rollercoaster has accelerated, but it is of course Labour which introduced NHS Foundation Trusts (which some believe are the ultimate ‘units’ for a privatised secondary care system) and the previous procurement regulations in the form of the Public Contracts Regulations 2006. Supposedly, the Conservatives are ‘building on’ the legacy of New Labour in “free schools”, and much to the embarrassment of Labour, Baroness Thatcher is reputed to have said that her greatest legacy was Tony Blair or New Labour. The Conservatives have attacked the attack on the Bedroom Tax (or “Spare Room Subsidy”) by arguing that Labour introduced something similar for the private sector, and now this idea is being extended to social housing, despite being a socially divisive policy and incapable of generating much revenue.

So the idea of Ed Balls ‘trending’ is of course neither here nor there, and utterly irrelevant to the political discourse today. It doesn’t make Ed Balls any more popular, and doesn’t get round the popular anti-Keynesian attack of ‘How can the solution to borrowing be yet more borrowing?” That meme, while not viral, has been very successful in conveying a popular idea held by some that a Keynesian solution to an economy recovery is to pour fuel on the fire, or to have the ‘hair of the dog’ while suffering from a hangover due to the night before. However, it is incredibly hard to think of a punchy meme in reply to that line of attack which has been successful in the USA today. Another popular meme is, “Why would you hand the keys of the car back to the people who crashed it in the first place?” A reasonable answer to this would be to identify who actually crashed the car – was it the bankers/banks or the State, and were the problems due to the crash per se or due to ‘lack of regulation’ in the lead up to the crash? Nonetheless, both memes focus the mind on the more negative aspects of Labour’s tenure in government, and the public seem to be generally unpersuadable on the economy. The Labour Party, likewise, feel that they are still the party of the NHS, despite the well documented problems in Mid Staffs, though there is a genuine debate about the extent of morbidity and mortality even after two voluminous reports.

Many in all parties feel of course let down by the media, and it might appear that all parties feel equally let down. For example, most recently, some people feel that the coverage of the NHS reforms has been poor, and the media are hopeless at explaining how we have come to have just escaped a ‘triple dip’ recession when the economy was in fact recovering in May 2010. Whether you buy into the idea that ‘the economy is healing’, or this Government would like ‘to make work pay’, it is crystal clear that, whatever the nature of debate (whether it is Afghanistan or welfare), people have a markedly varying understanding of the issues – but have an equal say in the democratic process. Ed Miliband always spoke of ‘building a movement’ in the Labour Party, and by this it means that he would like to capture a sense of national pride and trust in the politics of Britain. He feels that ‘One Nation’ is the best way to do this, and the results from his detailed policy discussions are yet to emerge into the sunlight. When I used to ask my late father to cheer up, he used to say, “What do you expect me to do, Shibley? Dance?”  This is in a sense the main problem faced by Labour today, one of expectation management. The discussions of the ‘legacy’ of Baroness Thatcher were at times as finely focused on the purported successes of turning Britain around ‘from a basketcase’ to the social and economic distress (illustrated by the damage done to local communities), pursuant to the closure of coalmines in Easington. People are now muttering again, “I am to be honest very disillusioned with Labour, but this current Government are terrible”. Part of this disconnect with Labour is that people simply don’t trust them to do what they say on certain key issues, such as repealing the Bedroom Tax, or repealing the Health and Social Care Act (2012). And to be blunt, Labour’s “got previous” on this. As a result of the general election in 1997, Labour did not abolish the market in the NHS as they had promised. And yet, Labour does have a reasonably loyal ‘fan base’, and people who genuinely like Ed Miliband as a person. Miliband has always been mindful of being the guy who ‘promised too much but delivered too little’, but it will exasperate even his loyal followers if he turns out to be the guy who in fact ‘promised too little and delivered also very little.’ Ed Miliband can always play the ‘we don’t know how the economy will be in two years’ time’, and get his shadow cabinet to argue that making impossible promises would be reckless, but in the meantime Ed Miliband needs a steady trickle of bits of evidence suggesting that he is heading in the right ‘direction of travel’. For example, the idea of incentivising businesses to implement ‘the living wage’, in a socially inclusive policy which is not overtly ‘tax and spend’, is a useful one, and one which Miliband can legitimately campaign on.

It is hard for Labour members to tell why members of the public dislike them so much, but this is of course the challenge for Labour in the next two years. In the meantime, the challenge is to work out how many people who vote for Labour in the local council elections are doing so, not only because they are protesting against this government, but also find the offering of Labour feasible. These local elections are a timely reminder of how barmy UKIP actually might be, in promising more austere cuts than currently being offered, or what actually differentiates the Liberal Democrats from Labour in a meaningful way. The social media, it can be argued, is a great way for people to write on and discuss the issues that concern them. Without the social media, a meaningful discussion (away from the BBC) about the section 75 NHS regulations would have been impossible. However, as Baroness Williams provided in her speech last week, Twitter can easily be discredited through referring to the wealth of misinformation ‘out there’. From my own personal experience, I feel I can tell what the reaction will be from Labour members towards Baroness Williams, on issues pertaining to the NHS, before she has opened her mouth. Whilst the Ed Balls meme might be equally divorced from real debate, and, whilst it has become a popular past-time to criticise ‘armchair activists’, the role of technology in political movements cannot be ignored. Used responsibly, it can override some of the cynicism we all share, as long as a small minority of bloggers do not persuade themselves they are speaking on behalf of all of us. And possibly the “Ed Balls meme” reminds us of one very important thing relevant to all of us: we should be less obsessed about our image (but not in an irresponsible way), and should from time-to-time take ourselves less seriously.