Barack Obama has been fond of cutting through false choices, whether between national security and “our ideals,” or between “sound science and moral values.” In launching our book, The Change We Need: What Britain Can Learn from Obama’s Victory, Nick Anstead and I have come across three of our own.
First, we were told – for example by those commenting on our Comment is Free article – that updating the Labour party’s technological sophistication is a distraction from the more important tasks of crafting a vision of the good society and campaigning on those ideas. In more sophisticated terms, Anthony Painter has outlined that it was “personalised, movement campaigning,” and not technology, that was the critical factor in the election.
False choice. We agree that a vision and a movement are necessary conditions of success, without them a party is merely a hollowed out vehicle for its leadership. But that is not to exclude the importance of using technology to help achieve those aims and then to facilitate them. As Obama’s campaigning mastermind, Paul Tewes, put it, “message and organisation won the election. Technology served it.” Campaign groups like Compass have used the Internet to effectively solicit new policy ideas and then used online votes to sift them. Some are bound to be unworkable, but a good debate and the illuminating power of further evidence, helps separate the wheat from the chaff. Similarly, chapters in our book by Yair Ghitza and Todd Rogers, Matthew McGregor, and Jennifer Stromer-Galley outline how cutting edge software makes the existing tasks of get-out-the-vote, fundraising, and campaigning more efficient and effective. To focus exclusively on technology would be myopic, but to exclude it entirely from the conversation (not that I think Parker is suggesting that) is plain daft. We can, and must, do both.
Second, we heard grassroots blogger, Luke Akehurst, outline that the party faces a choice between new faces and the hard work of old hands:
“[A]s an organiser I know I’d rather have ten experienced activists prepared to canvass for ten hours each than 100 newbies only prepared to do an hour each.”
False choice. Campaigning is a positive sum game. The fresh faced volunteer that I bring along, does not exclude a veteran of 30 years from knocking on doors too. If anything it makes them more important, ensuring that new enthusiastic volunteers are used effectively. In the 2005 election, American consultants were shocked to learn that local British organisers devoted such little time to training new recruits. During the American election, Obama decentralised decision-making to the local level but under a strict hierarchy of supervision at a ratio of 10 to 1. So, in Akehurst’s scenario, the 100 new volunteers would be assigned, ten each, to every old hand. Sure, hours knocking on doors in week one is reduced from 10 hours to, say, eight as the novices are brought up to speed. But having been thanked and shown what to do, the fresh blood come back in future weeks and before long, there are 110 old hands.
Finally, we have been told that we need a “trot infestation strategy” to prevent the chaos of the 1980s. The party must apparently choose between a command and control structure or risk “having your local party taken over by revolutionaries.”
False choice. As Ben Brandzel and Sunder Katwala have forcefully argued, there is a huge pool of politically and civically active progressives who, though they may not join the Labour party, would still like to campaign with us on (the many) issues where we can find common cause. According to Brandzel, “Mass movements open to anyone who can log on or get together when they have a spare moment will always be pulled towards the common sense centre.”
Indeed, what we are seeing is a paradigm shift where the party can either cling onto a closed structure where barriers to participation are high and influence over policy making is labyrinth, or undertake what we call a “cultural glasnost” aided by the democratising influence of the Internet and play catch up with many other areas of society. As Nick Anstead is fond of pointing out, “do we really want a book shop [Amazon.com] to be more deliberative than a political party?”
The truth is that this debate is not about old versus new Labour. There has been a paradigm shift in society’s expectations of its own autonomy, and this is about survival. The fatalists will mutter that the party is in terminal decline anyway so why waste the candle. The fantasists won’t see a problem worth fixing. But the realists on right or left will see that Labour’s structures and culture are at odds with changes taking place in society, and that it must reform. The empirical fact is that Obama won the American election by ploughing through these false choices. The ideas we suggest in The Change We Need are a start to the debate on how Labour can do the same.