The first lesson learnt from the ‘Small Labour Groups’ workshop at the Third Place First conference workshop was that, while Ed Miliband may be leader of the Labour party, within local communities it’s often the small group of hard-working councillors (sometime lone councillors) who are seen as the face of Labour in the Tory and Lib Dem heartlands and yet they are not given adequate resources to fulfil their roles.
This point is not always recognised by the party leadership.
The workshop acknowledged the critical role small Labour groups play in ensuring the party is a truly national party and how they ensure our values and voice is heard in council chambers across the country.
Hard-working Labour councillors gave first hand examples of best practice:
• Building a strong partnership with the local party, small Labour groups need support from local members.
• Maintaining a high profile.
• Using the local media.
• Regular newsletters, surgeries and surveys.
• Setting the local political agenda.
• Picking the right issue to attack the controlling group.
• Using the call-in process to scrutinise the executive.
• Being pragmatic. Today’s defeated Labour motion can become tomorrow’s council policy.
• How to be both the representative of your ward and voice of Labour across the constituency and district.
• Create regional networks of Labour groups.
• How building a strong base in the community can lead to further electoral success. For example, my own group in Rushmoor has grown from five to 11 in two years.
Councillors present at the workshop felt their effort and achievements were not recognised by the party leadership. All too often the party focused on Labour Manchester and other Labour local government strongholds rather than the success of our hard-working and dedicated councillors on non-Labour councils.
The workshop also discussed if small Labour groups should accept senior roles on the council such as mayor or chair which would result in a members being apolitical for perhaps two years. The workshop felt this decision should be made in partnership with the local party.
We strongly endorsed the view that there are ‘No no-go areas’ for the party with every ward and seat being contested, and that ‘paper candidates’ should be made history and in the future seats fought with ‘pioneer candidates’.
We agreed a strong local government base is vital if Labour wants to win the next general election. Labour must have a presence at every level of government whether parish, town, district, borough, city or county.
As joint chair of the workshop I believe councillors such as Howard Linsley (Liss parish council), Keith White (Dacorum borough council) and Jude Robinson (Cornwall council) and their colleagues are true heroes of our party as they are a voice for Labour in the council chamber and stand up for our values as Labour champions in their local communities.
We all agreed hard-working small Labour opposition groups can and do make a difference.
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Keith Dibble is leader of Rushmoor Labour group
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Read also: Harriet Harman MP‘s speech to Third Place First and Caroline Flint MP‘s opening address
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Photo: Aldershot Labour
Feel lucky if you’ve got hard working local councillors.
The two in my ward are useless, working with the Tories to deliver completely unnecessary and unwanted TORY policy on us and worse (if it could be) they are deliberately lying to residents to do it.
Asking why is ignored and because of the ‘closed shop’ mentality even going to the CLP ‘leader’ (I used the word extremely loosely) is futile because one of the failing and lying ward councillors is his sister.
The ‘leader’, his sister or her colleague even sent an email, sent to them alone, to the TORIES so that the Tory they are working with could take up their arguments for them but because the ‘leader’ is who he is and probably seen as “a true hero”, of the kind that Mr Dibble describes, the failing there very clearly is in the ward will also be ignored.
Having worked very hard to get this so called safe and, in turn, “not worth bothering with” Tory seat won at the last local elections I can almost guarantee (unless protest votes for the coalition remain) that the ward will be lost again and to be brutally honest with these two clowns representing Labour it’s nothing more than the party deserves*.
* That’s party not the residents of the community they supposedly represent!