Talk to a Labour activist who was involved in the 2010 general eection and the feeling, from my experience, is generally the same: Labour in that election won the ‘ground war’. We managed to stop a Conservative majority, we tell ourselves, by traipsing more streets and knocking on more doors, getting out the vote more effectively than our opponents. It was a truly David and Goliath spectacle; the big-money Lord Ashcroft funding a huge Conservative campaign against a Labour party browbeaten but not down. We had just seen the largest postwar economic crisis, we had been in power for 13 years, the press had turned against us and our polling was dreadful. But we continued knocking on doors and talking to voters.
Just how much of that is true is debatable. Perhaps there are a number of reasons the Conservatives did not win a majority. There was not a yearning for a Tory government among the population. They saw a Tory party that hadn’t changed enough. Or perhaps there was too much change: hence the number of constituencies where the Tories came within a thousand or so votes of unseating the Labour MP only to be thwarted by UKIP gaining a couple of thousand of votes. There was, of course, Cleggmania and the TV debates, Scotland and Wales and the north. These have all been dissected before and much more comprehensively.
But maybe there is something in the old David and Goliath anecdotal tale. Last week, ConHome published the details of a Central Office briefing to Tory MPs on the upcoming electoral strategy. It treads familiar Cameroon paths, the targeting of under-35s and BME communities in urban areas in the north-west and the Midlands. There is something more interesting in this briefing, however, and that is the announcement of a new recruitment drive of campaign activists. From April, Conservative HQ will begin recruiting 80 new graduates as campaign managers, offering them intensive training to get them in place by 2013. This is a very large expansion of campaign staffers.
What does this tell us about Conservative strategy? It tells us, perhaps, that they have identified that people on the ground make a huge difference, that they accept Labour’s diagnosis that we won the ground war in a David and Goliath type battle, that it was idealistic campaigners that managed to stem the tide of a big-money campaign. But it might not. It might tell us that hefty Conservative finances are being used to ensure that a war on the ground can start being fought in 2013, building a two-and-a-half-year message in urban areas in the Midlands and the north-west that the Tories are the party for those under-35 young professionals and BME communities, ensuring that the Cameroon gospel converts a new generation of Tories.
How should we respond to this? Between 1997 and 2010 our vote among Pakistani communities fell by from 81 per cent to 60 per cent, although we may be tempted to put this down to the ‘Iraq Factor’ (supported by the fact that 25 per cent of Pakistanis went on to vote for the Liberal Democrats in 2010, the only major party to vote against Iraq). But more concerning is our vote collapse in the Indian communities. Tory strategy will be to target the Hindu and Sikh communities as a suburbanising class of votes that has become more affluent. Our vote among the Indian communities fell from 78 per cent in 1997 to 62 per cent in 2010, and they mainly went to the Conservatives – 24 per cent of the Indian community in 2010. If the Conservatives are successful in converting these electors, we will find swaths of the Midlands and north-west potentially turning blue.
We must therefore keep on appealing to these groups’ sense of community. We must be working with our community leaders and organisations such as Movement For Change to build a genuine community-led party. But we must maintain economic sensibility as well, not to be seen to be punishing these groups for daring to become more successful and affluent. More importantly, we need to keep on putting on those walking shoes and knocking on doors. What we cannot afford to be, in two senses of the word, is a faceless, well-moneyed machine. Community organising is the theme everyone is chasing, and it just so happens we have a 112-year headstart on everyone else.
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Curtis McLellan is the international officer for Labour Students and former club co-chair of Manchester Labour Students, and tweets @cjmclellan
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Image: Adrian Teal
In Ipswich it looks like Gummer will have a new campaign manager in the next few weeks. So on top of the 80 Campaign managers to be in place by 2013 they are also putting new Campaign Managers into seats they need to hold in 2015, this Summer.
Not sure how local Conservative associations will feel as ‘outsiders’ turn up and may feel it is Cameron trying to control more from central office. But what is certain we will not have the doorsteps to ourselves over the next 3 years
But Laobur assumed it had the vast amjority of Black or asian votes, depsite Iraq or whatever,Yes the tories de toxified the nasty party idea, but to Quote Trevor Philips It was “Institutionally raicst”of Us in Labour to assume that black adn asian people vote labour, Irecall in all of thelast 4 elections we’ve guessed that BME voters vote laobur and apart form aleaflet targetting them ,we didn’t bother to knock on BMEovteers doors as we assuemd they’d vote labour anyway.