Every activist in the party should take real pride in the result on 5 May. Despite a ferocious rightwing populist attack supported by a multi-million pound advertising campaign, the Tories failed to make any progress in their share of the vote. Labour, despite losing seats and some excellent MPs, still held together the broad coalition of support that elected us first in 1997, and we achieved an historic victory.
This was a result won not simply in the media or on the billboards. It was ground out on the doorsteps and telephones, and in the thousands of leaflets delivered through letterboxes. Where the party had worked consistently for the previous four years, the effort showed in the results. Perhaps more than in 1997 and 2001 it was the members ‘wot won it’.
But here lies our problem. At each election, it is becoming more difficult to mobilise the team of members to fight the campaign. In 2005, while many constituencies reported a late surge of members coming out to help as the campaign got underway, it was still hard to get everything done. Modern politics requires more local contact, more engagement, more regular communication at a grassroots level – at the same time as we are finding it increasingly difficult to identify the people to do this work.
It’s a problem not simply of our own making. Party membership in the UK has fallen in the past decade or so, not just within Labour but among the Tories, too. Indeed, according to academics, party membership across most modern democracies has been in freefall since the 1980s. Declining numbers of members also reflects a wider challenge to politics. The tribal loyalties that bind voters to political parties are in decline. More and more people take no interest in politics at all, and those that do feel their politics with less passion. In 1964, only one in 20 people failed to identify themselves with any of the main UK political parties. Today it is more like one in six.
It is not all bad news, however. For one thing, when they are asked, people are still joining the party in considerable numbers. Labour gained 17,000 new members last year, more than at any point since the 2001 election. Of these, 12,500 joined in the first six months of this year.
What is less well known is that during the election, Labour also recruited 50,000 people – not as members but as supporters. The campaign saw the piloting of a new supporters’ network on the party’s website – labour.org.uk – where Labour voters could sign up to find out more about the election and the work of the Labour government. They weren’t all just armchair supporters, however. Through the relationships established in our email communications, the party raised over £100,000 from this network; we identified thousands of volunteers to help in our constituency campaigns; and we actually recruited a huge number of full members.
These supporters’ networks have also been established by many local constituencies and Labour MPs, building a coalition of Labour voters in seats across the country who want to show their support but don’t yet want to join.
These networks pose an interesting question for those of us interested in the health of our party. Is it that people have given up on politics, or are they just turned off by the way we organise our politics? Difficult though it may be for us still in the party, I think most people would agree that the organisation needs to change if we are to reach out to an electorate less engaged politically, and with less time to come along to meetings. Indeed, where local parties have become more outward-looking and interactive, they have really benefited in levels of support.
Our big task for the coming parliament is therefore to renew Labour to meet the challenges of today. In doing so, we must not abandon the principles and values that helped us to win in the first place. But we should look at how we can organise better to ensure those values endure. And central to our task must be to identify how we can continue to maintain the strong base of activists who are so crucial to our election victories, but at the same time extend our network to include the almost 10 million people who vote Labour.
The periods of great renewal in Labour’s history have usually only come following heavy electoral defeats. Our mission must be to renew ourselves now, in office, to ready ourselves for a busy parliament and, ultimately, a possible fourth election victory.