Politics

The Jared O'Mara story isn't about the internet—it's about how we decide who should be in politics

The internet's long memory hasn't helped O'Mara. But these weren't distant teenage blunders—and their import isn't limited to the digital sphere

October 25, 2017
article header image


As the Jared O'Mara saga enters its third day, led by further stories on political gossip blog Guido Fawkes, there’s one question on everyone’s lips (well, at least one question): how did it get to this point?

The truth is, political vetting is often quite successful: it is relatively usual to Google candidates and sift through their Tweets, although parties have certainly slacked in the past. Yet the resources required for proper vetting on a short turnaround are enormous. As one Canadian Liberal strategist explained after a political expose there in 2015, the issue is that parties often lack the man power to properly vet: “They expect people to voluntarily disclose problems.”

This was almost certainly the case in June. New candidates were selected not on a local level, but via Labour’s National Executive Committee and its regional boards. Some have pointed out that local activists had concerns that weren’t heard; certainly, there are women on Twitter to whom the latest allegations seem to come as no shock.

Former leader’s office staffer Matt Zarb-Cousin tweeted saying, “Amazed that Labour went to the trouble of buying software to scan the social media accounts of all its members to find a reason to throw people out but it still can’t get its head around properly vetting candidates.”

It is true that with the election moving so quickly—the selection process took all of five days—vetting was not as thorough as it might have been, and there are certainly questions to be asked about how local activists’ concerns could have been heard.

As Stephen Bush writes, “The party's shortlisting committee, from right to left, was united in believing the only battles that mattered were those in seats where the incumbent MP was standing down … if one side or another was pushing someone strongly, no-one was that inclined to press the point.”

Yet this isn’t just a party issue. It is, of course, up to Labour to vet its candidates as well as possible, and up to them to decide whether they ought to withdraw the whip when revelations such as these come to light.

But those who suggest O’Mara’s comments are symptomatic of a wider rot on the party’s left miss the point. Neither homophobia or misogyny (or xenophobia, or racism) are the preserve of a specific political orientation. Labour has now suspended O’Mara, but all factions, and indeed all parties, will need to learn from this.

A quick browse through my own digital footprint on the ironically-named “deseat.me”—personally, I’d have preferred “deselec.ta”—found plenty of profiles I’d forgotten creating as a teenager (did I really once have a Deviantart account?)

Writing in the New Statesman, Marie le Conte points out that many of us will also have things in our internet history that we are ashamed of, even if it’s just particularly strident Guardian comments with which we no longer agree. It is this sort of thing which SNP MP Mhairi Black fell afoul of, with her relatively innocuous teenage tweets about vodka and maths.

Le Conte goes on to suggest that the next generation may well be savvier, and that the circulation of so many online comments—not to mention nude photos—means the public will eventually be forced to revise their opinion about politicians’ embarrassing pasts.

But this case should not principally be about doing politics in the digital age, and Labour should not limit their soul-searching to technological questions. True, these posts constitute a neatly searchable record that might otherwise not have been uncovered in such detail.

Yet O’Mara was no teenager when the comments were posted. The posts are crass for their time.

I can assure you that, as someone who was a teenage girl going to concerts in 2004, jokes about “sexy little slags” going home to be “fingered” by a guitarist are particularly creepy apparently coming from a man in his 20s.

Nor were the comments attributed to O’Mara impossible to find: although some of them were published under pseudonyms, many appear under his name.

While le Conte is right to bring up the internet’s long memory, and it is doubtless the case that parties will need to become better at vetting candidates’ digital footprints—even if it means shelling out for specialist support of the kind used by big businesses—it’s not the format which is the problem here, especially if allegations of offensive remarks in March this year are to be believed.

If these turn out to be true, the existential question in this case is not about digital culture, but about what sort of rumours we take seriously.

In this regard, the story is as much about press management as it is the internet. This morning, my colleague Steve Bloomfield questioned whether a tabloid-trained press secretary like Alastair Campbell wouldn’t have dragged O’Mara into a quiet room on day one and demanded to know every detail before Guido could post it.

The optics of two women MPs turning to the media to call for O’Mara’s suspension were not particularly good, and it may be that, if nothing else, HQ want to employ a seasoned muck-raker in short order.

For the rest of us, this is a good opportunity to reflect on who we want our politicians to be. As Bush also writes, “If the allegations against O'Mara are true, it won't be the first, tenth or even 100th time that one faction in one party or another has turned a blind eye to bad behaviour towards women because the suspect is ‘one of us’.”

When statements such as these come to light, we rightly ask, “what happened?” Once the facts are established, our next question must always be: who knew? And, finally: what will we do about it?