Information Technology becomes a UK Election Issue

With an election on the horizon both the Conservatives and Labour are increasingly triangulating on issues they believe will win them votes. This is business-as-usual, but what is remarkable this time round is that Information Technology is heading for centre stage in the game.

Never before has ICT been considered political, but after a long string of Government projects most observers would characterise as failed or failing, absurdly late, and obscenely expensive it has earnt it's place.

It's political - a measure of both a Government's competence and it's financial acumen - both key issues in an election.

Consider the NHS, where the ICT project at the core of the Government's 'transformation' programme is in big trouble. In normal times this would be bad, in the middle of the worst recession in modern times it's disastrous!

As both main parties begin laying our their ICT policies in public deep and traditional political fault lines are being exposed. You could characterise them as centralised state control (Labour) versus individual freedom and self-determination (Conservatives).

Labour (New)

The Labour Party, in wealthier times, found in ICT the perfect outlet in which to indulge its natural proclivities. Doing enormous deals with a handful of specially favoured vendors, Labour set out on it's 'transformational' path. Grandiose projects to 'look after' the people and protect them against 'threats' from criminals and even from themselves.

They created ID cards, the Passport Office Database, the Department of Work and Pensions Database, the National Children's Database, the NHS database, the DNA database, the CRB child-protection database, the number plate recognition database, the mobile phone call database... well, you get the point! Information of every kind about UK citizens is being collected with an insatiable appetite.

Labour's 'transformational government' feels no qualms in admitting that, through ICT, they are seeking "a deep truth about the citizen based on their behaviour, experience, beliefs, needs or desires".

Depending on your political persuasion, this is either a monumental achievement for the good of the people or a increasingly sinister folly.

Conservatives

The even-handed approach would be nice, but when the Conservatives were last in power, we were struggling with the idea of networking Windows 95 computers (don't try this at home!) and only a few weird (and shunned) geeks were babbling about "vast global virtual networks". We cannot talk of 'what it was like under the Conservatives', we can only speak of what Labour has done and speculate on what the Opposition would do, or say they will do, if they obtain power.

The Conservatives have only recently found their voice on public ICT. Unfortunately that voice is not yet clearly heard or sufficiently understood.

Open Source Software

The Conservative Party are genuinely interested in Free, Open Source Software. To begin with their motivation was simply looking for huge savings where the incumbent Government was spending many billions on proprietary software - most of it with Microsoft with whom the inner circles of the Labour Party are well known to have an 'understanding'.* It is likely that a lot of money can be saved by moving the Public Sector to Open Source software and away from proprietary solutions. George Osborne was the first major politician to state this unequivocally in public.

Unfortunately most voters have never heard of 'Open Source' software, and since elections need to be fought on populist issues this insight is as yet useless to them. It may be a secret weapon, but it is not in itself a message!

Scrap the NHS Database!

To get their message across, reasonably enough they have focused on the giant centralised NHS database project because a lot of people have heard about it, and because people care about the NHS.

About this database the Conservatives have said three things:

• It costs too much
• They will scrap it if elected
• Personal data, such as health records, should belong to individuals, not to the state

Nice clear ideas!

Unfortunately not clearly relayed in the media at present. Here it appears as 'Tories want their pals at Google to have our data!' In tabloid land now Labour = Microsoft, Tory = Google, as bad as each other... blah blah blah. Hopeless.

The Conservatives are running into precisely the same issue run into by Open Source advocates - the old way of doing things with a big proprietary vendor is easy to understand, even when it looks like a dystopian nightmare straight out of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'. The new way of doing things, with open standards, open source and open data are hard to communicate, and prone to being misunderstood.

The Conservatives have fresh ICT ideas that chime with their small governance low public sector cost philosophy and at first glance should work. They show fewer tendencies to court the massive proprietarist and neo-proprietarist vendors, all to the good but Opposition and Government are two different things. In any case they have a communication mountain to climb to get their points across, and who knows how these new ideas will go down with the post-20s part of the electorate!

In conclusion

• ICT will for the first time play and important role in a General Election
• The issues will be cost, individual freedom, and state control
• Political parties will divide along traditional lines but will anyone get what they are on about...

* No one knows the actual spend figures as they are considered 'confidential'.