The campaigners who cried wolf
Do you remember that story about the boy who cried wolf? He kept doing it when there wasn’t anything attacking him and then when a wolf did come along the villagers assumed he was exaggerating and didn’t come to help. There’s a lesson in that story which many ‘campaigners’ could definitely learn from.
I love campaigning – both my day job and my role in the Labour group revolve around it – but the problem is that campaigning for the sake of it undermines the effectiveness of people who are genuinely fighting for a good cause. There have been some incredible campaigns in recent years – just think of Joanna Lumley fighting for the rights of Gurkhas to remain in the UK or Cancer Research’s recent campaign to bring in plain packaging for cigarettes. Both were campaigns which were based on genuine problems and which raised public awareness, resulting (at least in the first instance) in political change.
The problem in a digital world is that campaigning (or at least the tools of it) is all too easy to access, and a new phenomenon of ‘false campaigns’ is developing. Organisations like 38 Degrees have massive contacts databases, and many people trust them when they say that something is a genuine problem. Recently they promoted a petition which urged people to help ‘save’ Kentish Town City Farm, which is based in Gospel Oak. The petition claimed that the farm was:
being pushed towards market led corporate events … We must act now before our wonderful Farm is lost forever.
My ward colleague Theo Blackwell has explained here how the petition got its facts wrong, but the damage was quickly done. Nearly 8000 people signed it and local councillors were left dealing with confused, concerned and angry residents who had trusted 38 Degrees. A few weeks (and many rebuttals and explanations) later, the dust had settled and you’d have thought that was an end to it. Local people realised they’d been misled and the Farm continued to operate as usual.
But from a campaigners’ point of view, it’s what came next which was interesting. Several residents were angry at being misled by 38 Degrees and vowed never to sign their petitions again. This means that next time the organisation wants to campaign for a genuine cause, it’s going to be a little bit harder for it to secure the support of those Camdenites who no longer trust it. The campaigners have cried wolf.
From a political point of view, petitions such as this one which are based on a false premise are extremely irritating. For MPs, they can lead to hundreds of identikit emails based on poor research, each of which (since they come from genuinely concerned constituents) deserves a thorough reply. Organisations which develop these kinds of tools have a responsibility to make sure that they do not mislead the people they are asking to sign up to them, and to make sure that they have a factually accurate basis for their campaign. Otherwise they run the risk of politicians losing interest and ignoring such emails, and when a genuine campaign does come along, it will be a lot harder for the voices of those campaigners to be heard.
And so we come to Chloe Smith’s Lobbying Bill, which is badly drafted in all sorts of ways. The aspect which concerns me the most is its (apparent) intention to curtail the ability of charities to campaign (the National Council for Voluntary Organisations has some excellent analysis of the problems for charities here). As I’ve already mentioned, I am a strong supporter of well run campaigns and we can all cite examples from recent years of voluntary and charitable organisations which have driven positive political change. If the Bill is not amended then our ability to speak up about injustice will be severely limited. However, there is a risk. As I’ve set out above, in recent years politicians have begun to be bombarded with emails organised by groups such as 38 Degrees, and not all of these online petitions are based on fact. It will be all too tempting, when the Bill comes before the House, for MPs to opt for the ‘receive fewer emails’ option and vote in favour of what the Government is proposing.
MPs must follow Labour’s lead and fight any attempt to stop charities and voluntary groups campaigning for those who have no voice. But campaigners must act responsibly and use the tools at their disposal to speak up against injustice, not create problems where none exist. Come on 38 Degrees (and others), stop crying wolf.
Maeve McCormack 