The Tories in the UK are in trouble. Given the unpopularity of the present administration, it seems absurd that the main opposition party should be struggling in this way. Perhaps it is because they are seen as reactionary and out of touch. However, they are starting to realise that many people who voted for Tony Blair in the euphoria of 1997 are disillusioned with New Labour, recognising that it isn’t the bed of roses they thought it was – unless you count the manure and thorns.
In an attempt to garner support from those disaffected voters who might be persuaded to vote conservative, the Tory leadership are looking at a software tool used during the run up to the USA presidential elections last year.
On the face of it, this seems innocuous enough. In the USA, the Republicans used the software tool to identify potential voters in order to target them and encourage them to vote. Desperate to achieve a significant hit at the next election, the Tories are trying it out. Sounds reasonable? However read down the page and it starts to get scary:
The programme takes detailed information from Experian, a company that uses the 2001 census, consumer credit activity, council tax information, magazine subscriptions, supermarket loyalty cards, favourite television programmes and catalogues to define the 23 million households in Britain under 11 categories. Everything about them from their favourite yoghurt brand to their preferred newspaper is fed into the computer.
This is added to information gathered by local party activists and canvassers, and marked against an individual’s voting history. The party soon builds up a picture of the kind of person who might vote Conservative.
Worried? You should be.
emphasis mine
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