Membership is what Labour is all about – and yet our party is shrinking. We may have experienced a spike in new registrations since the last election, but the long-term trend is clear: people no longer feel that Labour is where they belong.

People haven’t stopped needing that sense of belonging. They simply don’t see us as providing what we all want from membership, whatever the group in question: a sense that together we are powerful, and that collectively, we have something to be proud of.

The best kind of membership can’t be achieved by bureaucracy or rule-following, but comes about through our relationships. It isn’t recorded in a register, or defined in a Facebook group, and at its best it’s hard to explain and quantify.

Above all, this kind of membership doesn’t give up on you easily – and nor do you give up on it. You may feel uncertain from time to time about just how much you’re valued as a son, a daughter, or a friend, but these ties are hard to break.

So why have so many people given up on Labour?

It’s often said that when people outside politics look at us (or any of the alternatives), they’re faced with the question: what does this party stand for? You might well have been asked it on the doorstep.

But when people consider the question in their own heads, it takes a different form. Am I Labour? Am I Conservative? Am I Green? People think about their political identity as they do about their nationality or their religion, and we can learn a lot from these spheres.

I’m not religious. But if I wanted to become a Muslim tomorrow, I could do it in a couple of minutes with an observant friend. Recite the shahada sincerely three times and start living as a Muslim. Simple as that. It’s even easier to begin being a Christian. You just believe.

And we need people to believe in Labour. We need them to go into their communities and act on our behalf. We need still more of them to go to the polling station on election day, stand in the booth and tick our box, thinking: of course I vote Labour – that’s who I am.

At the moment, we want people to believe in our policies – and so we should; without them we are nothing. But this won’t make people believe in us. Our starting point must be, as Maurice Glasman said in a speech earlier this month, not Lenin’s ‘what’s to be done’, but Marvin Gaye’s ‘what’s going on’?

We need to bring together people’s stories about how life is, and show that we get it by telling them back. Too often the party is seduced by the desire to be academically accurate; not to leave any conceivable scenario out but make sure we ‘cover all bases’ in case we are later asked to justify ourselves. But this will never break through the fog of 24-hour news, tweets and status updates, and strike a chord with voters.

Ed Miliband’s greatest speech as leader came at the Fabian conference in 2011. He talked, not about tax credits, but about people’s long hours at work. Not about the political economy, but about the depressing landscape outside our front doors:

‘We turned a blind eye to the impact of out-of-town retail developments and post office branch closures on our high streets. We knew all about the benefits of a flexible and mobile labour force, but we didn’t think enough about its impact on weakening social bonds and squeezing time with our families.

‘So people began to see a government which looked remote from what they cared about. They could see a government doing things they either agreed with or disagreed with, but not a political movement that spoke to their values.’

These are the words which will win us the next election. They show we know what’s going on. They show we know what we did wrong. They show we can speak plain English.

We could spend all our time worrying about how our statistics and over-arching analysis will be dissected in a think tank report, or we could say things that describe the personal experience of mothers, fathers, teachers, ready meal makers, accountants, train guards… and ourselves.

In doing so, we shouldn’t fear the media. People in the media are a bit like ordinary people. They react impulsively to the way our spokespeople deliver their messages; the hints they give about who they are and what they really think. If something doesn’t impress the media, it won’t impress anyone, even if we had a direct feed from Victoria Street to their living room.

Nor should we fear our fellow members. Labour spends too much time micro-managing doorstep visits – or any interaction with the public. We should give more autonomy to our campaigners: they are, after all, the conviction politicians in our communities. If they feel and sound shackled, they’re both less likely to turn up, and less likely to persuade.

Nor, finally, should we fear leadership. Many Labour members, with good intentions, become wary over rhetoric that they actually find compelling and attractive. We act this way to make space for the outsider, and those efforts should never change.

But we mustn’t confuse this with giving equal weight to the crucial and the petty; to the inspiring and the meaningless. So much of the increasingly scarce time available to Labour members is spent patiently hearing out arguments that are irrelevant to the business for which they were called together.

We should do more to support those in management roles in their attempts to ‘keep it short and sweet’. Intervening to truncate a rant might annoy a long-standing member for a few minutes, but it could also keep the two newcomers in the room for long enough to consider returning.

Being Labour isn’t a complicated decision for many of us. We’re here because we believe we can do – and quite simply are – more together than as individuals. We care for others before ourselves. We rate love above gratification.

But if being Labour is going to be an attractive prospect for anyone else, we must be good witnesses to the stuff of life. We must show that our concerns are everyone’s concerns; that instead of living in a parallel universe, we too feel the pain of redundancy; the struggle of missing our kids’ every bedtime; the emptiness of a rammed shopping mall.

If Labour wants to attract new members and be a healthy, fighting force in our communities, we must speak in words they understand. We must be the place where leaders thrive and the best ideas rise to the top. And we must learn to trust our own people; letting them talk freely with those we represent, ‘So they can see / What’s going on’.

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Patrick Macfarlane writes the Blue Labour column on Progress and edits BlueLabour.org

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Photo: Yuma Hori