Out of the blue comes cause for optimism

Politicians love to think they can relate to and empathise with any section of society. As a result, many try hard to master the lingua franca of whichever group they are attempting to woo or placate. However, whenever politicians try to engage with “a community” by “speaking their language” they come across as being painfully patronising.

Technology is one area where the major parties have a chance of differentiating themselves, yet to do that, they are going to have to understand exactly what they are on about.

When you hear Gordon Brown talking about how we need to secure our 21st century position in cyberspace, just as we had to secure the seas in the 19th century and the air in the 20th, do you really think he gets it? To me, the internet doesn’t really have that much in common with either the sea or the air ­ – although it obviously does to Brown’s speech writer.

I wasn’t much more reassured when, a few weeks ago, Brown told the assembled media at the unveiling of the government’s grand Cyber Security Strategy that he was setting up a new unit at GCHQ “so that we can, uh, look at what we can do”. Those cyber terrorists must be quaking in their boots.

Ever since New Labour was swept to power, and after every General Election since, there have been bold claims made about how technology will reshape the country. The Transformational Government initiative was the biggie, of course. This is the project that was going to redefine how public services are delivered and cement Labour’s credentials as the tech-savvy party. Except it has all gone a bit flat now, hasn’t it?

And the huge cock-up that saw the long-fought-for National Hi-Tech Crime Unit subsumed into the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) did the government no favours at all in its efforts to portray itself as the party of technology.

It is a truism of modern politics that any party in power too long gets lazy, forgets why it is there, creates muddled policies and eventually alienates all b ut its hard-core supporters. But what’s also true is that politics hates a vacuum, so when the government proves incapable of coming up with any coherent policies, the Opposition can usually be relied on to fill the void with alternatives that at least sound plausible.

Reeling from yet another technology-related setback when it backed down on the issuing of compulsory ID cards to citizens, the government now finds the Tories are coming up with, shock horror, some semi-coherent tech-related plans.

David Cameron’s speech at Imperial University a few weeks ago bristled with Web 2.0 concepts, many centred on increasing government transparency by, for example, publishing performance reviews on the web. The party is hoping to use a “wisdom of the crowds” approach to find out what information citizens think they need to better hold politicians and other public servants to account.

“This information will be published proactively and regularly –­ and in a standardised format so that it can be mashed up and interacted with,” he said.

I’m sorry. Was that a politician talking about mash-ups in a semi-convincing way? We’re through the looking glass here, people.

A recent paper by Tory think tank the Centre for Policy Studies holds more clues to future policy. It recommended that citizens should be able to opt-out of centralised data storage systems if they wished. For example, they could elect to use services such as Google Health to store health records and communicate with their GPs, removing the need for an NHS database.

OK, so parties in opposition are different beasts from those that eventually claw their way to power, but there’s at least some cause for hope that a future Conservative government will be able to harness the web in a better way than the current incumbents.