Imagine for a moment a young man. Let’s call him Joseph. Joseph is never likely to trouble the Nobel Prize Committee, but he’s hard-working, friendly, and law-abiding. He was brought up in a series of care homes, and, in the summer of 2007, aged sixteen, after leaving school, found a job at the local Sainsbury’s. He lives alone in a small bedsit, keeps himself to himself, is a solid and unremarkable worker. He is never promoted. Five years later, at the age of twenty-two, he is made redundant, and is unable to find himself a new job. Would even the most ardent Conservative seriously claim that he should be unable to claim housing benefit?
I don’t believe that David Cameron is a radical right-winger. I think it’s worse than that: I think David Cameron would make Joseph homeless not out of hostility but indifference. David Cameron would never have someone like Joseph round for supper, country, kitchen or otherwise, and he certainly didn’t meet anyone like Joseph at Eton or Oxford. There’s a reason why this government has put the boot into the disabled and driven more women out of work than any other since the 1950s. If you don’t represent people who aren’t like you, if you don’t meet people who aren’t like you, guess what? You end up as the singularly unimpressive leader of a government that only represents people like you.
So Labour’s southern discomfort isn’t just an electoral problem – although seeing as the south has more seats and more voters than any other part of Britain, it’s a pretty big electoral problem – it’s a moral one. The next government won’t be able to deliver social democracy for everyone in Britain if it doesn’t, in some shape or form, represent everyone in Britain. It’s not just that Labour won’t win if it doesn’t win in both Harlow and Halifax, it’s that if it doesn’t understand the problems and challenges of ordinary people in both Harlow and Halifax, Labour won’t understand what to do if it does win.
That double whammy of electoral and moral imperative is what makes Progress’ Third Place First campaign so important. At the inaugural Third Place First conference, we heard from activists and organisers from across Labour’s undiscovered country. These varied from party workers in Exeter and Oxford who had stemmed the Tory tide, to pioneers like Keith Dibble, founder of the original Third Place First campaign, and successful council candidates like Victoria Groulef, leader of the Wycombe Labour group, and Jude Robinson, Cornwall’s only Labour councillor.
Brian Clough – the greatest football manager England has ever produced – once said that the most important moment in Derby County’s first title-winning campaign came not in the league, but in the Texaco Cup. Winning that now-forgotten and never-particularly highly-regarded tournament, he said, proved to his players that they could win bigger things. The hardest battle for Labour in its forgotten fields is not a parliamentary election or a local election or a European election, but just winning at all. Going from one councillor to five is an easier battle than going from one to nothing at all. From the clever use of a family printer to the importance of parish council elections, Third Place First sent its delegates back home with plenty of ideas about how to go from ‘nowt’ to ‘summat’.
Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb