A New Digital Era

Sebastian Payne writes:

Remember Cameron’s hug a husky speech? Or his lecture on ‘the need recast politics for the digital age?’ Well, good job you do because the Tory party has been trying to purge their online history, according to Computer Weekly. As Mark Ballard explains, someone at CCHQ has used a robots.txt file to block Google (and other search engines) from indexing the files:

‘…the Conservative Party has removed the archive from its public facing website, erasing records of speeches and press releases going back to the year 2000 and up until it was elected in May 2010.

‘It also struck the record of their past speeches off internet engines including Google, which had been a role model for Cameron and Osborne’s “open source politics”.

‘And it erased the official record of their speeches from the Internet Archive, the public record of the net – with an effect as alarming as sending Men in Black to strip history books from a public library and burn them in the car park.’

What’s going on? The official line from Conservative HQ is that they are revamping their website for a new digital era:

‘We’re making sure our website keeps the Conservative Party at the forefront of political campaigning. These changes allow people to quickly and easily access the most important information we provide – how we are clearing up Labour’s economic mess, taking the difficult decisions and standing up for hardworking people.’

I’m not quite sure why you need to purge the past to create a digital future. It’s a rather strange thing to do, especially since hosting and bandwidth are so cheap. The Spectator has recently digitised over one million pages dating back to 1828, so I can safely say it isn’t due to cost concerns.

It appears that the Tories are removing the barnacles from the boat ahead of the next election; in this case, the barnacles being the u-turns and duff policy announcements prior to Lynton Crosby’s recruitment as chief strategist. But, however much CCHQ would like 2013 to be 1984, they forgot the first rule of the internet: what goes online, stays online.