"We got Rage Against the Machine to #1, we can get the Lib Dems into office!"
The Facebook Group which campaigned to get Killing in the Name to number one had 750,000 members; the record sold 500,000 copies (I'm not sure if that was in that one week or over that slightly longer period).
I know Facebook Groups are an easy target, but I this one has to win some special award for a special mix of stupidity, naivety and arrogance.
I would bet that of those 500,000 - note merely 2/3 of those who joined the group - a significant number will either be too young to vote, not registered, or, on Election Day, too preoccupied or CBA to vote.
Another set will be already loyal (or loyal-ish) to the LibDems, and, therefore, any campaign to persuade them to vote Lib-Dem because of the RATM effect is wasted.
Another set will have strong reasons to vote for one of the other parties standing, be it a loyalty (ish) to that party, a personal connection with their local Parliamentary candidate, or a calculation of which 'least worst' party is best poised to defeat the most worst (in their opinion).
Some of them will be in Northern Ireland and thus divorced from the British electoral system.
Amongst that 500k, or 750k, will be an incalculable number who actually believe in voting for a candidate or party on the basis of the policies either laid out in the manifesto or espoused over the previous Parliament and longer.
I read that there are 46 million people registered to vote. Even allowing for duplicates and, again, removing Northern Ireland, it still means that the RATM/Facebook people are less than 2% of the electorate.
As a campaigning tactic, it's unbelievably stupid. Not just because the numbers don't compute; not just because it's political illiteracy to base one's vote on the notion of being part of a crowd (I recall John Cole on eve-of-poll 1992 commenting that many people vote like they back horses - wanting to be aligned with the favourite/predicted winner), but because it betrays an insular ignorance of the world around them.
I have this notion in my head of students believing that just because their mates, their mates' mates and even their mates' mates' mates all think the same, then it stands to reason that everybody does. Point out to them that people's attitudes change as they get older and they're likely to think about people over say 30 or 40 as irrelevant and marginal.
The median age of the UK adult population is 48. That means that nearly half of UK electorate is over 50; it's a given that turnout is much higher amongst older people than amongst the young. And of course, most people over the age of, what, don't actually give a shit what's number one, especially if a mere 500,000 sales (at 39p!) can make a Christmas number one!
Perhaps I am missing the point and this group is set up in an ironic post-modern way. But I don't think I am and I don't think it was.
Perhaps some young person, studenty type will come back wailing about how difficult it is to find out about politics, or how much it interferes with their substance abuse to get out and engage with other people, to find out what matters to them. To which I shrug, because it isn't difficult. It wasn't difficult before the internet; it ought to be even easier with it, providing you know how to use it (oh, but but but, my parents are, like, way too old, yeah, and school was, like, crap, so, like, how I'm supposed to, like, use the internet if no one shows me, like, yeah, man, cool)
For generations, young people have begged to be taken seriously. Yes, this is the way to go about it. Hmm.
