Why the Labour Party still needs fundamental change at its roots

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

It ain’t pretty, but there’s an important contribution to the discussion of how Labour needs to open up to new voices, outliers and new techniques on the Guardian website tonight.

Gregory Galluzzo, President Obama’s one-time grassroots organiser, has criticised the party for being too shut off to new candidates and techniques; for losing touch with its own base; and for neglecting community campaigning over process politics.

“It is a very small group of people that controls the city council and they get voted in because they are Labour, not because of their policies. You just need 3,000 votes to control politics in Manchester.”

“The reason Barack had so many volunteers [during the presidential election] was that he knew these people around the country who had worked with him. People forget that when Barack was a US senator he was running against his own party.

“But Barack could never have been elected in Great Britain. He would have had to suck up to the Labour party for 30 years before they gave someone like him a chance.”

In conversation last night, I heard the same idea in the comment of one Labour activist who said that new members in the party, upon first joining, are told how many leaflets to deliver and where, rather than asked what or how they would like to contribute.

I agree that the party is too closed and resistant to change, even – especially – at its grassroots, and that our processes need to be changed wholesale if we are to become more flexible and open; and be based more on campaigning in the community than our own internal processes – because local issues are what matter, not party process.

In March, 2009, still fresh from my own Obama experience and pleasantly surprised at how open and welcoming the campaign had been, even to a foreigner with no previous experience of grassroots politics, let alone in the US, I wrote for Progress:

“At the most tangible level, in our local communities and at constituency meetings, our diligence and desire for a permanent process of renewal have been diminished by our habitual acquiescence to a clique of implicitly trusted yae-sayers.

“In these localities where Labour policies truly find delivery, our organisation can be a barrier to participation rather than a gateway to it. Experience or incumbency count over innovation. Loyalty to the individual is more important than loyalty to the group’s aims. Votes are familiar-faced formalities. Orthodoxies go largely unchallenged except for the pedants screaming to impose arcane and archaic party rules.

“The result is that new voices are crowded out by the same hands that built a commanding but controlling party structure in the 1990s. Members and delegates leave meetings feeling more frustrated than empowered and our movement for constant progress can feel stagnant even to those directly involved.

“…If we are to end the anachronistic torpor at the heart of our movement, we must take a risk on renewal at our grassroots. That means being bold enough to make a candid reassessment of the quality of our people’s organisational skills, and changing them where required. It means reengaging young people in our CLPs by allowing them a greater stake in their constituencies and a bigger say in how they’re run.”

Over to the authority on this stuff, Edgbaston Labour’s Caroline Badly…