On Saturday night, I half-watched Wargames again. I am betraying my weakness for 80s teen American films here – I hadn’t seen it for years (Film 4 are also doing an 80s season at the moment – it’s like being back at school! Look out for Local Hero in particular.)

Wargames when I first saw it was a seriously geeky film about a geeky boy doing geeky things and saving the world from nuclear destruction and I wasn’t really that interested in it (I am not a very sophisticated film watcher – my favourite film of all time remains the Sound of Music.) However, last night, I realised the political point of the film.  As the military and the boy are fighting to regain control of WOPR, the machine learns that there is no winner in nuclear war and therefore the only way to win is not to play.

So far, so obvious (and indeed spelled out on the screen). Today I’ve been catching up on a few bits and pieces of non-headline news including coverage of the Tories’ death tax posters and related blogs.  Which have brought me to the firm conclusion that the only way to win this election is not to play by the rules set by the other side.

I have said before that this is going to be probably the dirtiest election ever fought. I have also said that I want to win it because we have the right ideas, not just because we’re not Gordon Brown. And I have said before that I don’t like politicians setting up straw-men in order to lie about their opponents.

So here is the thing. If politicians want to start to repair the terrible damage that they have done to our politics (and I mean politicians of all parties. Conservatives in the 90s with sleaze; early Blair for promising the moon on a stick, and late Blair for lying about our national security; Brown for nearly bankrupting us and finally many many lesser-known politicians for their expenses), they need to radically change the way they behave. They need to show that they are better than the public’s view of them. Continuing this endless cycle of ‘you are secretly thinking this’, ‘you actually want to eat babies’, ‘you want everyone to wear a Mao suit and hand over everything to the state from birth’ is turning more and more people off. Unless it changes, fewer and fewer people will vote and our politics will be ever more damaged by it.

WOPR learned. Politicians need to: negative campaigning turns people off. They need a reason to vote for you, not just against the rest. If for no other reason than that one day, you’re ‘the rest’ instead.

Great fun interviewing David yesterday – though I’ve never been to Birmingham and turned straight round to come home before… The article will be in April’s edition of Company magazine which will be on sale in mid-March.

One of the things we talked about was how politicians are using new media. I came across this website today (thanks to the Coffee House) which is just great.  At the moment the first interview that starts playing is Zac Goldsmith’s but that will change as more candidates upload their videos.

Along with Derek Wyatt’s iPhone app, this got me thinking… Can technology ever win an election? Should it? Is it only politics geeks who go reading political websites, and watching political videos, and searching out political information? How do most people decide who to vote for? Is face to face engagement with either the prospective MP or their hard-working canvassers and leaflet deliverers the most effective way to reach out to people, or are tv, radio, newspaper and internet interviews and spots enough?

The WinkBall website is clearly based on the premise that face to face is better than just leaflets. But it is still after all only on a computer screen, and there’s no knowing how interactive it really is.

I think the real genius of blogs, websites, forums, Facebook and so on is not that it is ON A COMPUTER so you can do it from home, but that you can answer back. Politics used to be all about the politicians telling you what they thought and then you would vote for them and then you might, if you were lucky, see that they delivered what they said. But the way people use the internet means that politicians are much more accountable than they used to be and it looks terrible if they ignore questions or issues that people raise.

That’s why the transparency agenda is so important. Instead of waiting until it’s dragged out, piece by piece, under Freedom of Information or because it’s leaked, the Conservatives’ plans to publish government contracts, data and other information is, as I’ve said before, probably the most radical thing they will do if they are elected to government. It will completely change the relationship between politicians and voters – which, as things stand, can only be a good thing.

So my conclusion, such as it is, is this. These sorts of applications are important because they offer a different and sometimes eye-catching way to communicate. But they are most important because they break down the barriers between politicians and voters in the same way that meeting in person does. It’s not the fact that you can see the person that makes the difference – it’s the fact that you can talk back. In our ever-less reverential society, this is what makes us all accountable to each other.

As an aside, I heard a terrible story about a very well-known Labour MP this week – apparently she does all her surgeries in her local council offices… from behind the bullet-proof glass that the cashiers sit behind. Why she thinks this is in any way appropriate is beyond me – it’s nearly as bad as Harriet Harman’s flak jacket on a constituency tour...

Dave has already written about the British Social Attitudes report but I wanted to pick up on something in the Radio 4 coverage of it.

There’s all the interesting stuff about people becoming more conservative over the last 20 years, and more socially liberal.  There’s the changing attitudes to homosexuality and to inequality, and the increasing rejection of simplistic tax and spend.

But what I found really interesting was that we are not more liberal in every social area. For example, while we are increasingly not bothered by homosexuality, we are less and less likely to support the legalisation of cannabis.

Alison Park, who directed the research, pointed out in passing that she thought people actually listened to and engaged in rational debates, and then made up their own minds based on evidence rather than prejudice or social pressure.

This has huge implications for all of us involved in politics. For years, it’s all been about reducing things to one sentence soundbites. But as I continuously argue, politics is complicated. There are valid arguments on both – or all – sides. I don’t want to be patted on the head and told not to worry about it, that politicians will take care of it all. That’s not accountable nor is it good for democracy – it means a political class that is ever more separate from the people they are supposed to represent.

We can see what that results in from this same survey – people think it’s less and less worthwhile to vote, and they are less and less involved in political decisions in the widest sense.

So what I want to see in the coming election campaign is not simplistic one-liners. I think politicians have a duty to acknowledge that it’s complicated; that there are things we disagree about, and that what we need is a coherent policy structure to make the changes we need.

‘This is not Ted Kennedy’s seat. This is the people’s seat.” And with those two sentences, Scott Brown started to overhaul Martha Coakley.

I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of the Massachusetts race which ended so spectacularly this week. But looking at recent UK and US elections and campaigns, something has become increasingly clear: if you’re asking people to vote for you, then you campaign for change and you make that change sound radical.

Of course hopefully then you actually deliver on what you promise.

Oliver Letwin summed up the underlying thinking behind Conservative pledges  at the Conservative Intelligence conference yesterday: decentralisation, accountability and transparency. I would argue that he needed to acknowledge that the first priority is also saving money but to be fair to him he did say that all their policies are designed to cost no more in the short-term, and less in the long-term.

The Economist this week has a great article about why the rise of the size of the state is unpopular. It’s not so much about the cost, but more about the reach that the state has into our lives.  This will be hard to reverse – it’s all very well saying you want the government to do less, but think about all those people who want ’something to be done’ about their pet issue.

But reversed it must be. I have long-argued that the Conservatives want to win power in order to give it away. I’m not sure how seriously anyone takes that as a proposition. Certainly if I talk to people about the Tories’ approach to, for example, the environment or ‘big business’ or any of the other areas where there has been a significant shift in emphasis, they generally assume it’s all about political positioning and that all will return to business as usual if they are elected to government.

What I think is not widely understood is this: that the people who are writing policy in the party are deadly serious about Oliver’s three principles. They are deadly serious in what they say. Yes of course some of it is finely calibrated for political effect – they are politicians after all. But they know that the only way to achieve the fundamental change needed in how our poor battered society, economy and politics operates is to deliver on what they promise.

So they mean what they say. And they must do their utmost to deliver it.

I do find it depressing to continually read headlines basically hinting that Tories don’t care about the environment. It’s simply not true. It is getting boring to regularly write on here why, even if you don’t believe climate change scientists (and – let’s be fair – many of their recent antics have undermined their authority), many of the ways in which we can act against climate change are also beneficial in financial terms.

Given our current economic malaise, though, we do have an amazing opportunity at the moment. It’s not the answer to all our problems, and it won’t cut our emissions by anything like enough, but as they say in the ads, every little helps.

There are two key points here – firstly that the Tories are thinking in very serious terms about how to encourage green growth.  And secondly, that being energy efficient and thereby reducing your carbon footprint has the fantastic side-effect of reducing your bills.

None of this is rocket science. Being a bit greener does not mean living in a cave. New technologies are only expensive to install at the moment because they are not used widely enough to make them more efficient both in operational and in installation terms (ie the more people use them, the better they are and the easier it is to use them – a classic virtuous circle). Reducing your energy consumption will (generally) reduce your energy bills.

So I do wish people would return to the previously much-vaunted “Politics of And“. In this area in particular, it’s there, it’s sensible, and it works.

Look at this initiative from former Governor Jon Hunstman (R-OH – yes, a Republican governor of Ohio). It’s a fantastic, multi-stranded initiative: by encouraging state employees to compress their work into a four day week (so instead of working 9 til 5, they work 8 til 6 and have Fridays off), by carpooling, and by tripchaining (ie making one trip with several stops, rather than going backwards and forwards from home several times a day), the programme has cut a million miles of travel and saved over 50, 000 US gallons of petrol. 

But another key benefit is that state workers are reporting higher levels of job satisfaction, better family relationships, fewer sick days and greater availibility of state services (partly because the state offices are open at times when people can actually get to them).

This dual purpose is what the “Politics of And” is all about. Quality of life, environmentalism, reducings costs… It’s what we can and should do here.