Jennifer Mein on the plan to bring Lancashire back to Labour
‘This is the beginning!’ beamed David Cameron. It is 2006 in Chorley, Lancashire, and the Tory leader, fresh from a bracing helicopter flight across the country, was addressing Lancastrian Conservative activists the morning after the night before. They had just taken control of Chorley borough council and they were making no bones about it: this was a very big deal.
More Conservative successes followed in the next few years, taking control of Lancashire county council in a landslide result in 2009 and culminating in victories in key Lancashire parliamentary seats in the 2010 general election.
Lancashire Labour party was reeling. Across the county, with one or two notable exceptions, Lancashire Labour’s campaigning culture was in need of urgent revitalisation. Operation Red Rose was put in place to do just that and to bring Lancashire back to Labour, starting with the county council elections this May.
Operation Red Rose began with a very early selection process, getting candidates in place by the end of January 2012, a full 15 months before the election. A fundamental part of the process was the stipulation that all candidates sign a contract detailing a minimum level of activity targets they would be required to meet if selected. A key element of the contract is that all candidates must have a set number of conversations with the public every month. This saw Lancastrian Labour activists speak to over 140,000 members of the public between February and October 2012 compared to just 17,000 in the whole of 2008, the comparative year in the election cycle. This has helped in defining the issues which matter most to the public and those around which we can campaign.
Community campaigning – enabling and supporting local communities to campaign for the changes they want to see – is becoming an important part of Operation Red Rose. A combination of fantastic support from our comrades in the trade union movement, in particular the CWU and Unite, working with Movement for Change and the inimitable Arnie Graf, has seen some real innovation and successes, with the public getting involved in local campaigns and manifesto development.
The political support of the Lancashire Labour group, the county party, the district councils, the Lancashire members of the parliamentary party, the trade unions and the Labour party nationally has been pivotal in establishing a streamlined, centralised campaign with clear message development, demographic targeting, copywriting, fundraising and media communications. Working together we are making a real difference.
The first tangible evidence of the change Operation Red Rose has brought about is the recent police and crime commissioner elections. In a very low turnout election the effort to get out the vote using the data we had collected over the year enabled Labour’s candidate to win, albeit narrowly. That narrow majority can only be attributed to the hard work of all our Lancastrian activists speaking to Labour supporters on the doorstep and persuading them to vote in an election to a post in which most of them did not even believe.
Taking back control of Lancashire county council is a massive task, needing 26 gains across the county. If we can do that, it will send a message straight to the heart of Downing Street: ’This is the beginning of the end, Mr Cameron’.
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Jennifer Mein is leader of Lancashire council Labour group
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When the closed shop that is South Ribble CLP was campaigning on my street they walked passed my door without even knocking.
I’ve complained about the ward councillors lying to residents about a none existent residents association being in place, when it isn’t and the Labour ward councillors working with the TORIES, which includes sending internal member to member emails to them, to do it.
That doesn’t sit nicely with South Ribble CLP because one of the ward councillors is the sister of the glorious leader at Lancashire County and the other councillor is the wife of the CLP secretary.
Nobody at Labour either at HQ or Region is remotely interested because grasping the closed shop nettle is to hard and this particular part of Labour’s culture in need of urgent revitalisation is a boat not worth rocking because of the deluded belief that what the CLP says is gospel.
This same CLP tells new members they will pick things, especially how they do things, as ‘we’ go along and when members from other parties decide to jump ship are see them as not worth bothering with because their leaving is just a passing fad.
I have absolutely no doubt that Lancashire will be won but like the the first tangible evidence of the change Operation Red Rose brought showed in the recent police and crime commissioner elections, were South Ribble wasn’t won, in this particular area thanks mostly to the closed shop Labour will continue to deliberately fail.