Paul Staines Has a Website

Sunny Hundal has a go at this rather floppy interview with Paul Staines. The interesting bit is right at the finish:

“I think the internet means you can raise funds online in a different way. Labour goes to the union barons to get big cash-flows; the Tories go to the City. But I think the internet means they can get thousands of small donations. I know a lot about people online – you can raise money. If you raise money, have a parallel organisation, you can have much more influence. And that’s where I see us going.”

Well, a more penetrating inquiry might have raised the point that Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign is not really news in 2013, or even, for advanced students, that Howard Dean’s 2003-2004 insurgency in the Democratic Party is a full ten years ago, and that MoveOn has been going for even longer than that, and that it is depressing that you can still come across as Future Boy! just by babbling some guff about online fundraising.

Further, you might well ask why Paul Staines would be the man to do it. One thing he has never done is run a membership organisation, which is what this is. Another thing he has never done is develop software or manage software developers, which is what such a project would require. And yet a third thing he doesn’t really do is the sort of commitment to professionalism and meticulous accounting such a project would need, both to make it work, and also to make it legal. The reporting requirements of the Electoral Commission are quite stringent, and given his profile on the interwebs, I would think he would be the subject of intense and detailed scrutiny – I mean, I know he would, because I’d do it myself.

I doubt the Tories will get very much money out of this. However, I do suspect that some sort of half-baked, Louise Mensch and Luke Bozier take on Twitter, effort might actually appear. Here’s why.

The United States has a small industry of political fundraising consultants whose business model works as follows; your mate the political strategy consultant gets hired by a no-name candidate, who’s been told by your mate the politician that they need the strategist, and recommends you to raise the wind. You accept, and bill the campaign for your expenses plus a percentage of the take. Sometimes, your overall share may be as much as two-thirds of the cash you bring in.

The palooka loses. But you and your mate the consultant and your other mates the media buyers and so on and so forth get paid. The donors are happy, because they got their tax write-off, and they showed the serious politicos that they were real support, people who come through for the shitty campaigns. And perhaps even the palooka ain’t so dumb after all. The classic way to get a winnable nomination is, of course, to take one for the team and demonstrate your loyalty. But it’s hard to tell that apart from just being a sucker.

The Tories are probably too cute for that; they do reptile politics, by analogy to the reptilian brain, well, and I can’t see them getting that desperate for cash. But what about UKIP, say? Plenty of glibertarian clicktivists and plenty of no-hopers, not poor but not Ashcroft-funded.