Top Tips for Team Labour’s online recovery

By Wes Streeting / @wesstreeting

I have to confess that when the tireless and fearless Chair of Young Labour, Richard Angell, asked me to write a piece for the Young Labour takeover of LabourList I spent a good few days agonising about how I was going to set out a sophisticated and erudite exposition of Labour’s fortunes and a vision for a fourth term Labour Government. But after a period of reflection and an evening cheering on my other red team to success against Villarreal in the Champions League quarter final (don’t get me wrong, I’m as flaky an Arsenal fan as every other football going politico) I decided to opt for a rant about the things that are currently driving me to despair about Labour and the blogosphere and some prescriptions for our online recovery. So here goes:

1. Lighten up, everyone

I don’t know about you, but when I read a blog, I don’t want some unknown Jo pontificating about the state of things as if they’re carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. That’s what the Young Fabians are for! Though, in fact, some of the worst culprits are Young Labour members. Lighten up everyone! There’s plenty of time for all that when we’re grown ups. I’m not exactly following my own rule here, but as students’ union welfare officers like to say: ‘do as I say, not as I do!’.

2. Stop banging on about ‘smeargate’

It was idiotic, childish and offensive – and also covered to death. There’s an old cliche about political conferences that by the third day everything has been said, but not everyone has said it. It seems every Labour blogger now wants a piece of the mega mea culpa, trying to find a form of words that say pretty much what Tom Harris MP and Alastair Campbell have already said more articulately. If I wanted to hear any more about it, I could easily switch on BBC News Channel to see Cameron’s smarmy sanctimony outside an NHS hospital he’s simultaneously having a pop at. It’s boring now, so move on.

3. Be proud of Labour’s achievements

You’d think from reading the comments on Labour List, not to mention the Compass website, that the last twelve years have been an absolute catastrophe. It’s almost as if Maggie had never left number 10! Get real people. We all moan and groan whenever some government minister gets up on a platform to monotonously rattle off Labour’s many achievements in power, but don’t for a moment take those achievements for granted. Whether we’re still angry about Iraq or top-up fees or wondering why 42 days detention was ever on the table, this country is a radically different place than it was in 1997 – and for the better.

To those who say that there’s no difference between a Labour and Tory government, I fear you’ll find out sooner rather than later. And it won’t be the main culprits of this mantra – the muesli eating liberal intelligentsia – who feel it the most, it will be the poorest and most marginalised in our society: the people by whom and for whom the Labour Party was created.

4. New Labour = New Baywatch. Time to Move On…

While there are some who think the last 12 years have been a catastrophe there are some who seem to think we just need more of the same. Now don’t get me wrong, for as any Trotskyist attack leaflet on NUS conference floor will tell you, I’m a child of the New Labour mould: the poor kid who stood up to a packed assembly in 1997 and asked a bunch of pre-pubescent teenagers to back me because I was tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime (and came a respectable second to the Monster Raving Loony Party).

New Labour had the right ideas in the nineties because it recognised the challenges of the day and applied JP’s traditional values in a modern setting. Today, too many acolytes of New Labour appear as dogmatic as the culture New Labour sought to sweep away. It’s a bit like New Baywatch – it was new for a while, but in the end prime time Saturday entertainment had moved on (and it wasn’t the same without the Hoff anyway). We need a new narrative if we’re to renew in government and meet the challenges ahead. Progress should ban parliamentary researchers who haven’t grasped this fact from posting articles with immediate effect.

5. Focus on the future

Forget 18 years of Tory government. We have. Without claiming to speak for the ‘Yoof’ of Britain, no one remembers what life was like under Thatcher or Major. I can, just about, but that’s because I’m pushing daisies in Young Labour terms. After 12 years of Labour government, the public don’t want to know how we’re different from the last Tory government; they want to know what difference Labour is making to their lives and why they should continue to support a Labour government. That means setting out a clear narrative and visionary policy agenda for the next decade – and to start delivering it now.

We know this year’s European and County Council elections will be tough and that the next General Election will the most difficult that Young Labour members have fought in our political lifetime. While some MP’s on our benches seem to think we could do with a period in opposition to recharge our batteries, we haven’t got time to worry about their self-indulgent misery inside the walls of the Palace of Westminster or to engage in an introspective debate about the process of our politics.

Now, more than ever, there are people who need a government that will give 100% of its energies to combating social and economic injustice to create the more equal society that we joined the Labour Party to build. We know that society will not be created by Cameron’s Conservatives, so let’s give our elders a kick up the backside and go door to door to secure the kind of fourth term Labour government that we want to see.

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