Labour has a historic opportunity to renew our party and to engage our supporters. Before May 1997, thousands joined our party as we headed back to power. Since May 2010, Labour has won thousands of new recruits – this time in anger at the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition. Our challenge is to harness this new energy in ways that are positive, learning lessons from the past.
Nobody wants a return to the Labour party of the early 1980s – inward-looking, divided and refusing any ‘compromise with the electorate’. However, it is time to move on from a ‘top-down’ approach to party renewal.
Lesson one – value our members
Too often members feel that the national party only wants them for their money and their shoe leather. Of course, fundraising and campaigning are crucial to our success but they are not the only ingredients. Most people join a party because they are passionate about politics, yet the opportunities for party members to have input into policy are limited. The National Policy Forum process needs to be reinvigorated so that members have a real say at all levels of the party.
Local party cultures vary enormously – we need to learn from the best. Are we tapping into the rich range of skills and experience in our existing membership? Are we making every effort to truly welcome new members once they join?
Since 2007 in Liverpool West Derby we have made a conscious effort to engage as many members as possible in our campaigning with weekly emails and personal contact from the West Derby action team. As a result, campaign activity among members – old and new – has been reenergised. This has worked for campaigning: we are now seeking to extend it to other areas of work.
Lesson two – reach out to our supporters
Membership is vital but, while recruiting new members must be a high priority, even at our 1997 peak the membership was around 400,000, a fraction of the millions who vote for us.
New and imaginative ways need to be found to engage with our supporters. Many are trade union political levy payers. Let’s encourage levy payers to become full members but let’s recognise that many will choose not to. These trade unionists deserve a say. Their workplace experience will be crucial as we develop a policy programme for the next general election.
Several Labour MPs organised primaries to give local Labour supporters a direct say in the party leadership election. The government has promised public funding for primaries in parliamentary selections. I am not in favour of ‘open’ primaries where Tories could vote in Labour selections, but how about trying primaries amongst registered Labour supporters – party members, trade union levy payers and other local Labour voters?
Of course, reaching out to our supporters is not just about selections, it is about being truly rooted in local communities. When we knock on doors in West Derby our first question is not about voting intention but what issues people want to raise with us. This is an important cultural change for the party – it is the right thing to do but it also recognises the real public scepticism that exists about politics today (though, of course, we do go on to ask about voting intentions!)
Lesson three – an outward-looking party
People do not have the same loyalties to political parties that they had in the past. We need to learn fast from the positive example of local MPs and parties that bucked the trend at the recent general election, people like Karen Buck in Westminster North and Gisela Stuart in Birmingham Edgbaston. Both were Labour gains in 1997 where a coalition of support for Labour was sustained. Of course, many factors shape election results – other excellent MPs lost in May despite their hard work in their local areas.
The culture of party politics tends to put a premium on length of service. It is, of course, quite right that we show respect to those who have served Labour for decades but we also need to reach out to find new blood. In Liverpool, we regained the city council in May of this year. The party has made a deliberate effort to bring in new people. In West Derby we made four gains: two of the new councillors were not even party members when I was selected in 2007. One of them, Jacqui Nasuh, set up a domestic violence charity, Chrysalis. When I first met her three years ago I saw someone rooted in her community whose values were very much Labour values but who had never thought of joining the party. She joined and is now doing an excellent job as the Labour councillor for Knotty Ash.
Being ‘outward-looking’ also means accepting that party politics is not everybody’s cup of tea. Yes, we should seek to recruit new members. Yes, we should engage our supporters more actively in our work. We also need to work with others without seeking to co-opt them – residents’ and tenants’ groups, faith organisations, and the wider voluntary sector. A healthy and active civil society is vital for the future of progressive politics. Many of those involved will, of course, be sympathetic to Labour but others will hold different views. Our outward-looking approach needs to respect these differences. Pluralism within the party needs to be matched by pluralism in the wider community.
Lesson four – renewal needs to be ongoing
Party renewal is not a one-off event. The party needs to constantly assess what is and is not working. In my old CLP, Enfield Southgate, we undertook some radical reforms of the local party in 1999 with the aim of engaging a larger number of members. Some of the reforms worked and others did not. We reviewed the changes – keeping some but reversing others. Nationally we need to do the same thing.
The National Policy Forum was designed to encourage a shift from resolution-based policymaking to one based on more discussion and deliberation. Many perceive the forum as part of the ‘top-down’ party culture of the past two decades. The challenge now is to reform policymaking so that members do have more of an input but without turning back the clock to the confrontations of the past, which served nobody’s interests – other than our political opponents’.
Different people get involved in party politics for different reasons and our culture and organisation need to respect this. Some people prefer to go to regular meetings where they discuss issues. Others prefer canvassing or campaigning for progressive causes. The party should be big enough (in both senses of that phrase) to involve all these groups. And, yes, some have neither the time nor the inclination to be activists but show their support via regular donations. Their involvement is just as important as anyone else’s.
Labour’s renewal cannot simply be imposed from party HQ or the parliamentary party. It will come in communities up and down the country – learning from and engaging with (but not co-opting) citizens’ movements. What works in one part of the country may not work in another – let’s be relaxed about different ways of doing things and then learn from each other. There is no ‘one size fits all’ route to renewing our party.
In Labour’s past, party renewal has been tied up with factional politics – be it the Bennites in the 1970s pushing for reforms like mandatory reselection or modernisers in the 1990s pushing for one member one vote. In 2010, perhaps all wings of our party can come together to achieve renewal.