I've lost count of the number of times I've heard a politician bemoan the apathy of the electorate, and its lack of engagement in the political process.

Political opponents accuse each other of being out of touch, campaigners resort to direct action in desperate attempts to grab the media agenda for an instant, and all those in between - those who don't see themselves as 'involved' on one side or another - simply write the whole exercise of democracy off as a useless waste of time.

"No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in."

In the midst of a high-tech communications revolution, with 24 hour political coverage, the electorate are becoming ever more isolated from those in power. Does anyone actually know if "The Big Conversation" is still going on? Was it ever?

In fact, there are thousands of conversations going on every day about politics - the trouble is, it is a rare event for a politician to be engaged with them. These conversations happen in pubs, clubs, homes, businesses and - online.

Back in the late 90s, Downing Street set up a collection of online discussion forums - a bold move, and one whose consequences they were ill-equipped to handle. At the time a piece of tax legislation affecting the IT and Engineering small business community was in the process of implementation and those affected (being fairly Internet-savvy) descended en mass on what was perceived as a direct channel to the very pinnacle of power to air their concerns.

The Downing Street forum moderators' reaction to the hundreds of messages posted in the 'Tax' forum on the subject was to create an entirely separate 'IR35' forum, and impose a strict policy that any IR35-related messages were disallowed in the Tax forum itself. The anti-IR35 lobby were effectively neutered, being unable to make any points about the proposed new tax rules in the Tax forum.

At no point did any politician or other representative of the Government engage in the highly focused discussion with this strongly motivated constituency. yet here was an opportunity for the Government to engage directly with a section of the population about a piece of legislation that was - at the time - supposedly still in the consultation phase.

While I can only speculate as to the reasons behind the absence of engagement on the part of the Government, the course of events demonstrate clearly that there is a mechanism by which direct discourse with an interested electorate can take place.

"If you build it, they will come."

The Hansard Society post mortem into the subsequent UK Online CitizenSpace experiment makes the following telling point:

"For most users, it held out the promise of interaction with Government, but proved to be a one-way street leading nowhere."

An ideal government would provide funding for a central online discussion system through which any member of the electorate could raise any matter for discussion. If a subject attracted particular interest, the creation of a separate area to focus upon it would be warranted - one of the benefits of holding such debates online is that there are no constraints on the number of 'rooms' a building can have. There is no reason why individual participants could not create and host their own forums within the system on topics they were particularly interested in discussing.

Crucially, an ideal government will desire to participate directly in the online discussion - and it is at this last hurdle that the Downing Street forums fell. Equally crucially, the overall moderatorial control of such a system needs to be in the hands of an independent, non-Governmental agency.

Right now, there exists at http://www.consultations.gov.uk an index of all Government consultations currently underway - however, there is no mechanism for discussion online or for the submission of responses.

To the skeptical, it might appear that actual meaningful engagement with the public is the last thing that's wanted.

Finally, it should be remembered that there is nothing to stop the politicians themselves going out and becoming members of the online communities that already exist and engaging with the e-enabled electorate in their own space. In all probability, they could even create accounts in their own names - after all, who would believe that the person discussing the finer points of tax credits was in reality that Gordon Brown? To paraphrase that old adage:

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a politician."
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Simon Banton

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For more information about the consultation, see: What do you want from Government IT? - Shout99, October 2004 .

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The Editor