In the future, said British politics’ very own Lawnmower Man, David ‘Dave’ Cameron this week, political battles will be fought in cyberspace. As he strapped on his virtual reality goggles to launch the Conservative’s new down-with-the-kids ‘Sort-It’ website, he declared the ‘internet revolution’ is ushering in ‘a whole new age of political communication and engagement’ where ‘the old answers will not work’.

Now, to run the terrible, if unlikely, risk of sounding less cool than Cameron, we’d like to ask if the ‘old’ ways of political communication and engagement have really had their day. You know, the quaint, unfashionable stuff like going out and talking to people. Obviously, neither Cameron nor Blair like meeting the public face to face in uncontrolled situations because there are too many variables and too many chances they’ll be made to look like idiots. But it’s a problem of their own making.

Blair’s public appearances, for instance, are so carefully and notoriously choreographed they make ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ look like a rugby match. He invariably appears before audiences of Labour Party sycophants so he doesn’t get heckled by rogue members of the public. However, the scorn a large section of the public has for Blair would surely dissipate if he would only stop being such an overweening shit. Problem solved. (Our consultancy rates are very reasonable.)

Similarly, Cameron came to the conclusion at an early age that honesty and openness are not his friends. Take a look, for example, at this excruciating access-all-areas film of him made by two independent filmmakers during his bid for the Tory leadership last year. Everything’s tickety-boo until Cameron is questioned about his Christianity whereupon the filmmakers are given the bum’s rush, leaving the impression that Cameron is either embarrassed about his belief in God, sees it as an electoral liability or both. Being honest and open would have served him better. It’s what God would have wanted, Dave.

But we are where we are. Internet initiatives like Dave’s pally Webcameron videos and Labour’s ‘Big Conversation’ and ‘Let’s Talk’ online talking shop gimmicks give the impression of a two way dialogue without all the tedious and potentially messy business of actually having to go out and get close to the scary Great Unwashed. It’s like when email was introduced into office environments and everybody stopped talking to each other and using the telephone.

Having the debates online allow them to be controlled. Dissent and difficult questions can be filtered out, friendly comments and questions can be planted so Dave and Tony are never caught on the hop. Cameron’s new answers start to look very much like the ‘old answers’ just with nice spangly Internet knobs on. The whole situation gives off the overwhelming stink of a fix and so is it any wonder that people look elsewhere for their political engagement, to single issue organisations like Oxfam or Amnesty International and unmediated mediums like blogging.

(Which is a bit of a shame when you take a look at the Tories’ new ‘Sort-It’ website. It is, as much as it pains us to say it, once you get past the trying too hard to be hip stylings, quite good. The idea of an ‘inner tosser’ - an oily Shatneresque alter-ego that goads you into spending too much and getting into debt - is a catchy one and is executed in a genuinely funny way in the accompanying video. It’s also another indicator of how downright fucked up British politics is right now. Aren’t the Tories supposed to be the spend, spend, spend free-marketeers? They were the ones who de-regulated credit in the early 70s making it easier and cheaper to borrow money. Now it’s Labour who are telling us to spend like we’ve got six months to live, their economic miracle almost entirely funded by a tsunami of consumer debt - one trillion pounds and counting. When the lost weekend of low interest rates comes to an end a lot of people, not least the Government, are going to be in the shit. With that in mind, by telling us to spend less, the ‘Sort-It’ campaign comes across as a ruse to shaft the economy. The real tosser in this scenario, the Tories seem to be saying, is Gordon Brown).

But anyway. The major parties, not being able to see a bandwagon without tearing after it like John Prescott trying to catch the sweet trolley in a restaurant, and seeing blogging’s mass appeal, co-opted the medium for their own ends. Needless to say their blogs, painfully on-message with every dissenting comment taken out and shot, lack the spontaneity, wit, anarchy (in its truest sense) and sheer fun of real world blogs. Indeed, according to Tony Blair’s chief policy adviser, such qualities amongst blogs and bloggers threaten our very democracy.

‘What is the big breakthrough, in terms of politics, on the web in the last few years?’ Matthew Taylor asked the e-Democracy conference last week ‘It’s basically blogs which are, generally speaking, hostile and, generally speaking, basically see their job as every day exposing how venal, stupid, mendacious politicians are.’ Depicting political bloggers as a cross between vermin rooting through politicians’ bins and overbearing mother-in-laws -’The internet has immense potential but we face a real problem if the main way in which that potential expresses itself is through allowing citizens to participate in a shrill discourse of demands,’ he said as if he had legions of bloggers screeching at him all day - Taylor laid the blame for the current state of British politics firmly on their shoulders. Clearly a dangerous bunch, then. Al Qaeda must be spitting - going to all that bother of flying jets into building when they could have brought western democracy to its knees from home in their pyjamas.

‘Arguably we have a more impoverished relationship between politicians and citizens than we have ever had,’ said Taylor, not mentioning dodgy dossiers, Alastair Campbell or 655,000 dead Iraqis. ‘We have a citizenry which can be caricatured as being increasingly unwilling to be governed but not yet capable of self-government,’ he added, forgetting to add that the reason the poor ickle public is incapable of self-government is because this government is extremely reluctant to let us try. DNA databases, ID cards and a thousand other creepy ideas are indicative of a government looking, if anything, for a tighter grip on the population. Let’s not forget this is the Prime Minister’s senior policy adviser we’re talking about here. Him lecturing bloggers is like Darth Vader, with his Death Star and massive armada of starships, warning the Ewoks, with their pointy sticks, that they’ll have someone’s eye out in a minute if they don’t watch what they’re doing.

You have to wonder what’s got him so spooked. Is it just a case of childish envy that a vibrant and swinging party is going on and him and his boss aren’t invited? That they threw their own Internet party and nobody cool or interesting came? Or is it the abject terror of a Labour control freak meeting something that cannot be controlled?

‘I want people to have more power,’ said the unelected Taylor, forgetting just who the bosses are supposed to be, ‘but I want them to have more power in the context of a more mature discourse about the responsibilities of government and the responsibilities of citizens.’ We can have a debate but on the Government’s terms, in other words. Online, anytime, just don’t whine. Now go and tidy your room and if you’re good maybe later you can have a sweetie. We need to grow up, be ‘mature’ and embrace our ‘responsibilities’. No doubt we’ll be told just what those responsibilities are at a later date.

Really though, Taylor should be congratulated for his honesty, fatheaded as it is. In a moment of clarity he’s admitted what the rest of them - both Labour and Tory - with their newly-fangled webcams and Big Conversations won’t - that political parties will listen to you as long as you ask your question in a way they want to hear. That is, deferential and uncontroversial. Taylor spoke of the end of deference as a good thing and then complained that politicians don’t see enough of it. Like abolishing slavery and then telling the nearest black person to shine your shoes.

It’s such a bizarrely patronising and distorted picture (’nasty bloggers are the reason people hate politicians, the public are children, tell me something I want to hear’) that John Prescott, for all his street fighting, grunting bunk-ups with secretaries and ‘ee, am right daft, me’ uselessness, is a sharp slap of reality and suddenly seems quite endearing.

(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)