Has the Labour Party become so good at networking that we have forgotten how to organise? Networking is a process based on reaching out to people beyond the Labour movement. The networker’s methods are primarily media and hospitality driven and are based on ‘winning friends and influencing people’. Organising is a form of mobilisation within the Labour movement and is often talked of in terms of the party’s grassroots. The organiser’s methods are embedded in the creation of structures and are aimed at empowering people to help themselves.
When Neil Kinnock took the reins in 1983, the organiser was ascendant in both the Labour Party and the Labour movement. The birth of the networker at just the point when the public delivered their crushing verdict on the block vote and empire-building factionalism made the party ripe for reform.
What happened was a reassertion of the networkers in the Labour movement. Peter Mandelson, Philip Gould, Alistair Campbell and their co-networkers cultivated contacts outside the traditional constituency of the Labour Party. Their way of making Labour electable again was to connect Labour to a new constituency. That connection was always going to be looser and less loyal, and this new constituency would always be in it for what they could get out of it.
The traditional constituency of the Labour Party was the backbone of the Labour movement. The movement was built on the organising tendency. It was organised to be firmer, more loyal and proud of its history and traditions. The trade unions were the embodiment of this constituency. However, as Philip Gould’s Unfinished Revolution says, it ‘had advantages, but there was a high price to pay. Discipline was gained, but flexibility and the influence of ordinary party members was weakened. The capacity to modernise and adapt was to be the ultimate casualty.’
The revolution caused by the ascendancy of the networkers brought us two election landslides, but the last election, in particular, saw turnout at its lowest ever. The networkers’ shaping of Britain’s political culture seems to have left the organisers behind. But do we still need them? And do we still have them?
It is important to understand that this is not about politics but about a kind of political methodology. It is almost the nuts and bolts of politics and not about politics itself. The military establishment is clearly the most organised rightwing movement in Britain. Remember the soldiers sent to Cumbria to organise a way out of the foot and mouth crisis? Likewise, the international anti-globalisation movement is one based on networking, mainly through information and communication technology.
Now that the party has been reformed, we have secured the unenthusiastic trust of that section of the British electorate that wins British general elections. The target constituency of the networker, namely ‘middle England’, is reluctantly behind the party, but what is often referred to as ‘the heartlands’ seem to have been taken for granted.
When we consider turnout, the party’s poor membership figures seem to underpin a campaign that was run at national level by the networking tendency. The organisers were left out in the country with less people than ever, who were less enthusiastic than ever about door knocking, leafleting and standing out in the rain.
Likewise, the direction of the campaign, especially in the last few weeks, seemed to be based on a conscious decision to trade turnout for seats. Private polling seemed to indicate that Labour could hold every seat they won in 1997 if they appealed to one nation Tories and concentrated the full-time organisers in marginals seats. The result was a huge number of seats on a tiny number of votes. It is difficult to assess but there may have been the opportunity to run a campaign based on boosting turnout, and thus the popular vote, at the expense of the size of the majority.
We have heard a lot since the election about Labour’s mandate and a lot about how the low turnout should concern everyone involved in politics. Can we blame the networkers for simply playing the game to the agreed rules? Or was it the organisers who had their day by boosting the vote in marginal seats?
The trade union movement, which has undergone its fair share of networker-inspired reform, has recently turned back to organising to underpin its modernisation and revitalise apathetic workplaces. The TUC runs an Organising Academy in conjunction with participating unions because organising skills have been identified as crucial and in need of renewal. The Academy seeks to mesh networking and organising in order to recruit new members but also to keep them by organising them.
If you work as a press officer, or any other kind of networker and you ever meet one of the graduates of the Organising Academy, you will see them as a different breed. They are driven individuals with a deep loyalty to the Labour movement and to the power of collectivism. They are not afraid to get their hands dirty and their skills are in empowering others and getting jobs done. They are prepared to do anything to recruit members but they focus on creating structures to keep members engaged and empower them to help themselves. They are the people that networkers need to complement their work.
This renaissance in the value of the organiser seems overdue in the party at large. I chaired a session at Progress’ Next Left conference in July about strengthening the Labour-union link where there was an overwhelming unity of opinion. Party members supported the aims of the policy forum process but felt let down by what it had delivered. The reasons, they all agreed, were that party members do not have the organisation to feed into the process in the same way that government and the unions do.
If we do not effectively organise these people, especially the younger ones who have little time for history or tradition, we risk losing them to the two best organised political movements around at the moment: the Liberal Democrats and those groups on the left operating outside of the Labour Party. This might be a mirror of the loss of members to the SDP and Militant before the networkers were able to assert themselves.
The Lib Dems seem to have the balance between networking and organising just right. Charles Kennedy’s tours of regional airports was a way of connecting to people through the regional media and supporting local campaigns. But if their networking seems to be in tune with their organisation, their organisation’s understanding of networking is frightening.
I spent much of the last election in my constituency of Southwark and Bermondsey. The local Lib Dem MP, Simon Hughes, has a group of activists whose organisation would put most safe Labour seats to shame. After umpteen glossy Focus leaflets, I received an addressed note from Simon Hughes, printed on coloured letter paper, in handwriting font and ‘signed’ by Simon ‘himself’. It urged Labour voters to come over to the Lib Dems because they could deliver on local transport schemes and on a campaign concerning the local hospital. Their organisation connected directly to me in a way that Labour’s national networker-led election campaign struggled to.
That is not to say that organisers did not operate in Labour seats. They helped to retain those won for the first time in 1997. But the organisers’ retention of seats was not supported by our national networker-led campaign.
Immediately after the election, we heard a lot about ‘delivery’. The problem now is turning that message on ‘delivery’ into what at least seems credible as ‘delivery’. Charles Clarke, the Labour Party Chair, seems to have been invested in as one of the people who can ‘deliver’ this ‘delivery’. An organiser who was involved at the very beginning of the networker revolution, he is surely the right man for the job. But what a job. He told the last issue of Progress that ‘the frustration about the need to deliver was largely because we didn’t explain strongly enough in the first parliament how the process of change took place’. We feared that our networked coalition with business and ‘middle England’ would be jeopardised if they found out about the redistribution of Labour’s first term and we lacked the organisation to tell them face to face.
‘Reconnecting’ can no longer be done by the networkers alone, just as reconnecting in the late eighties and early nineties could not be done by the organisers. These things can only be achieved by a full circle revolution whereby the party allows the organisers to reassert their skills. The revolution begun in 1983 is, indeed, unfinished.
The unions are reinvesting in organising and it is paying dividends. Their challenge is to continue the development of their networking and bring unions to new people. Labour needs unions and their organising tendency more than ever, because in the kingdom of the networker, the organiser is king.