It’s great to be here at the Guardian Activate Summit.

And it’s a great pleasure to share a platform, for the first time, with the two Toms [Thomas Gensemer and Tom Watson], because you’ve both worked hard to challenge and change the way that politicians use technology.

The Obama campaign used the internet in an exceptional way to mobilize voters. Here in the UK Tom has been a persistent advocate for free data in government. And I will come back to that in a moment.

But first, I want to talk about the role of technology in democracy. My argument is simple: the internet is rapidly transforming our politics.

It empowers citizens, it raises expectations about public service, and it shines a spotlight on the dark recesses of political life.

The scandal over MPs expenses is just one part of the story. Underlying that exposure is a much bigger shift towards a new kind of politics. To quote from John Keane’s new book, The Life and Death of Democracy, we are living in a ‘monitory democracy’.

Politicians are carefully monitored by citizens 24/7. It’s driven by ‘media saturation’, rapid communications and 24 hour news coverage.

As Professor Keane puts it: ‘By putting politicians, parties and elected governments permanently on their toes, they complicate their lives, question their authority and force them to change their agendas – and sometimes smother them in disgrace.’

Nothing remains secret for long and, in future, perhaps nothing will be secret. Of course, pressure groups and watchdogs are hardly new. There were the Abolitionists in the nineteenth century and Suffragettes in the early twentieth.

The difference today is one of scale, pace and permeation. Thanks to the internet, it’s easier than ever to get involved in politics. But the question is, are politicians responding in a way that connects with people?

TOWARDS A GOVERNMENT OF DIGITAL NATIVES

We’ve come a long way since the early dot.com boom. Back then, the government hastily slapped an ‘e’ in front of everything and perhaps considered the job done. We had an e-envoy, an e-unit and an e-minister. That all sounded great. But the UK has been too slow to embrace the possibilities of what technology can actually deliver.

This is not – and should not be – a party political issue. It is much more of a generational issue. When it comes to using technology better inside government or between citizen and state, it’s not about whether you come from the left or the right. It’s really about whether you ‘get it’ or you don’t.

For the political establishment, this is a ‘make or break’ moment. For all politicians, the question now is, do they understand how technology is changing people’s expectations? Do they know how to meet demands for openness, accountability and transparency?

The next generation of voters was ‘born digital’. To paraphrase Mark Prensky, can we have a government of ‘digital natives’ too?

CONSERVATIVES AND ONLINE CAMPAIGNING

So, today, I’ll tell you what Conservatives are doing to make a government of ‘digital natives’ more likely.

First, ‘mobilising democracy’.

The next British general election is likely to be something of a technological breakthrough for democracy.

I can tell you that we’re already discovering how social media can bypass traditional broadcasters.

We’re speaking directly to individual voters. David Cameron led the way with Webcameron.

We’re now using direct e-mailing. The Conservative Party sends weekly e-mails direct to supporters’ inboxes.

Our party chairman, the urbane Eric Pickles, narrowcasts direct for the Conservatives’ ‘war room’ with his regular video blog. I’d recommend it. It’s the perfect blend of old-style on new media!

During the European and local elections, we asked Facebook users to ‘donate’ their status. This enabled our new Facebook app automatically to spread campaign messages both to activists and their wider friend network.

As some of our political leaders have found out, YouTube is not for everyone. But with our online campaign we are making a good start.

As a result, the Conservative Party has more Facebook friends than Labour and the Liberal Democrats put together.

But we need to go beyond using the internet simply to deliver a political message. We need to mobilise people – getting them interested and proactive.

We need to improve voter turn-out and we want to reduce the chance of extremists gaining representation.

As part of our discussion today, I’d like to hear your views about we can make that happen.

ENDING THE INFORMATION IMBALANCE

That’s just the campaign side. Much more important is what we plan to do in government.

As I said earlier, technology is transforming our politics. We are entering what we call the post-bureaucratic age.

Thanks to the internet, people have access to a world of information and choice at their fingertips.

We do not need the omnipotent ‘man in Whitehall’ to make decisions for us by telling us what we want and how we’ll get it.

He may not know it yet, but new technologies will make the Man in Whitehall redundant.

Today I can realistically make a commitment to give people more power over their lives: the power to scrutinise politicians, the power to choose their public services, and the power to make the right choices for themselves and their families.

In the digital age, we can empower individuals by ending the information imbalance between citizen and state. We can improve access to government data. And we can stop the expansion of the centralised, authoritarian database state.

We’ve already announced some of the steps Conservatives will take to put information in people’s hands.