Come to Clacton! Sun, sea, sand and the future of politics British political parties must engage with voters online, writes Douglas Carswell Past performance, as every investor knows, is no guarantee of future success. For 90 years HMV was a leading music seller in Britain. Among its 320 stores was the largest record shop in the world, in Oxford Street, London. Then, this year, the company went bust. A history of being big and successful is precisely that - a history. It is no guarantee of subsequent prosperity. The same is true for political parties. For a century, British politics has been dominated by two parties. The Conservatives held office for much of the 20th century, and a fair bit of the one before that. Labour won three of the past four general elections with large majorities. But Britain's political duopoly is in crisis. Their combined market share of support among voters - almost 90 per cent in 1970 - is, according to the latest polls, now a little more than 50 per cent. It is plausible than no single party will ever win more than 40 per cent of the vote again. This is an existential challenge to the existing order in Westminster. Like HMV, the main parties are discovering that other organisations are increasingly able to do the thing that we thought we existed to do - but better, faster and cheaper. Either we must quickly adapt to this new world, or we will soon die. Political insurgents - from George Galloway in Bradford to Ukip in the recent local elections - are on the march. How can we respond? We need to rebuild our membership. Little more than a decade ago, the two main parties had a combined membership of more than half a million people. Today, it is less than half of that. Once mainly funded by the activities of thousands of volunteers and trade unionists, both parties have become increasingly dependent on state subsidies and large corporate donors. No wonder, as the Tories have recently shown, there is tension between party leaders and party members. No wonder ordinary voters feel detached from politics. As a newly adopted parliamentary candidate, I received some sage advice from my predecessor, Sir Julian Ridsdale. An MP for 38 years, he gave me his top tip: "Go to the places where the people gather." He might have had in mind the morning markets or bring-and-buy sales. But "the places where the people gather" today are on Twitter and Facebook, too. Applying Sir Julian's advice in the age of the internet means parties and their candidates need to be online. Not a "look-at-me" boast site, but proper engagement. This demands a new style. Once online, politicians soon discover that you cannot replicate online what you are used to doing offline. Instead of recycling "lines to take" fed to you by party HQ, you need to be able to say what you think. During the recent Eastleigh by-election, a number of Tory MPs sent identical, scripted tweets attacking an opponent in an attempt to get people to focus on Liberal Democrat inconsistency. It failed. Tory inauthenticity became the story. If we are going to rebuild trust with voters - and pump up our membership - party bosses need to lighten up and recognise that having authentic messages is far more important than uniformity. Some of the pundit class and politicos dismiss this kind of relationship-building as pointless. But online activity is increasingly what generates offline activity. Those who say that social media and the internet atomise society, isolating us from one another, could not have it more wrong. Social media brings us together. The internet means it has never been easier to build mass membership organisations. I am already trying this in my constituency of Clacton, on the Essex coast. At a recent meet-up evening in Holland-on-Sea village hall, 120 local residents got together for an evening of fish and chips - and fun. Almost every person came because they heard about the event either through email, Twitter, Facebook or TalkCarswell.com - my personal site. Most were not party members. But guess what? More than 30 joined up. Indeed, over the past two years, such events have helped increase my local association membership by 59 per cent. That's a real start. "But," you ask, "isn't what you are doing really a form of community organisation, Tory-style? Aren't you doing the kind of communal activism that the left has always dreamt of? Since when was it leftwing to mobilise the little platoons? The internet is a collective endeavour, without any central directing authority. It makes possible political parties that are collective networks, shaped organically from below, with no top-down control. Isn't that pretty much what the Conservative party exists to achieve in other fields? To help make this work, parties will need to redefine what being a member means. Too often, being a member of the Conservative party means being expected to pay your subscriptions every year in return for invitations to spend even more money on costly black-tie dinners. Ditching the old model, we need a new system of registered supporters, and £1-a-year iMembers, too. As is the norm in the US, registered supporters should be able to choose local and parliamentary candidates in primary contests. Westminster is full of puffed-up grandees ready to complain that those pesky voters are just not interested in politics any more. That would be a bit like the management of HMV complaining that folk are not interested in music any more. They are - but just not the way that we are selling it. The writer is Conservative MP for Clacton