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Voter ID and Community Politics – Labour needs both

July 7, 2012 2:06 pm

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Anyone who has spent any time on the doorstep in the last six months will be aware of two facts:

  • Identifying our supporters and reminding them to vote makes a big difference to the outcome of elections.
  • There is an increasing mood of alienation from the political process and politicians – a growth in proud abstention and “none of the above” reactions.

It is intellectually dishonest, to treat either of these facts as supporting a blinkered approach to Labour Party campaigning – to posit a choice between Voter ID and Community Politics.

Proponents of Voter ID could argue that the collapse of political engagement makes the process of identification and Get Out the Vote sufficient for victory as “natural” turnout declines. Supporters of Community Politics could argue that the larger challenge of depoliticisation and alienation means that we should drop the mobilising approach in favour of building warm, organic relationships with communities.

Both would be profoundly wrong.

Successful campaigning parties recognise that we need both mobilisation and relationship-building approaches at the heart of our work. I recently acted as agent in a local election campaign where we achieved a 30% swing against the Lib Dems. We began work months beforehand and rang and visited hundreds of electors using a voter ID script but inviting and noting comments on local issues. At the same time we delivered newsletters with a strong emphasis on listening to local people, inviting their views on local issues and priorities and reporting back to them on what their fellow citizens were saying and the policies we were developing to meet their concerns. Through the short campaign we continued to combine these two approaches, working both to identify and mobilise our supporters and potential supporters and to continue the wider dialogue. We refused to choose between two stereotyped options and the results showed that this worked.

There is nothing new in this. I learned from campaigning in Oxford in the seventies and early eighties that contact with the electors threw up casework and issues which needed to be followed up and that the more canvassing you did, the closer your knowledge of people’s concerns would be. Andrew Smith and his team have obviously developed this further in the last thirty years and their 2010 result clearly demonstrates the continued effectiveness of building a virtuous cycle of voter ID, issues campaigning and relationship building. It is that sort of fusion we need to be developing.

One of the lessons of any political campaign is that we need to make room for many types of talent. Enthusiasts for community organising often speak disparagingly of voter ID and its mechanistic scripts and praise real conversations with the voters. We are a small party and we cannot afford to shrink to an even smaller core of dedicated community activists with the time and confidence to engage in free-form relationship building. The great strength of the party’s traditional organisational model culminating in today’s voter ID and GOTV techniques is that the activities are wonderfully accessible to volunteers. Anyone, with a couple of minutes’ briefing and some encouragement, can get stuck in – and they can make a difference whether they then turn up once a week, once a month or for a short burst around election times. Many members enjoy switching off and becoming data collectors. They like to say “I’m just helping out but I’ll ask the candidate to get back to you with an answer” – and there’s no reason why they should not do this providing there is that follow-up. We cannot build a campaigning party on the basis of requiring a higher level of regular commitment from every party worker – we can’t all be community activists.

Whatever its defects, voter ID is about building and maintaining a database owned by the party as a whole. Some supporters of community politics seem to see a future in which the party withers away while particular Labour politicians develop personal relationships with community groups and acquire followings of individual supporters. I believe that we need to do this work collectively as a party. I am glad that our registered supporters scheme ended up being a party scheme not one concerned with recognising individual fan clubs – and I am proud that my branch (with just 23 members) has been signing up registered supporters at every stage of its recent campaigning and should have a hundred by the summer.

We know that ideological conflicts can damage our party. The dangers posed by the arguments between Progress and its opponents are, however, minor compared with the threat posed by doctrinaire attempts to force the party to choose between two vital and complementary organisational approaches.

It’s time to focus on synergy not false divisions.

Related posts:

  1. Co-operative public services: of the community, by the community and for the community
  2. Confessions of a floating voter
  3. Miliband to unveil biggest voter registration drive for a generation
  4. What we need are Non-Voter ID days
  5. Miliband to unveil biggest voter registration drive for a generation
  • hypermobilecat

    we are firmly opposed to the condem government,it was just one of us when thatcher was in and john major,nothings changed.We resisted the polltax,tories still trotting out sameold. Watched an old Harry Enfield comedy when tories in last time,it showed tory boy having a go at jobless people,same sort of thing,except not picking on sick and disabled. They are liars and conniving ,hate it  the way they work with the discredited  rags to write hate filled propaganda taxpayers versus any one  on benefits,disabled and sick clever conmen conning the honest taxpayer out of thousands of pounds . people turning against one another.

    • treborc

      Do not all the Tories are doing is adding to what labour did, I have just had my ESA medical in which I did scrap though and boy did I scrap, the old PCA I had 88 points for my disability this time 15 points.

      But you know Thatcher gave us DLA which changed nearly everyone life, Labour wanted it scarped  which would have dumped me back into poverty, perhaps we disabled were not supposed to have child credits.

      The Tories are just doing what labour started but adding a bit more to it.

    • Alan Giles

      But then we have Liam Byrne: spot the difference

  • http://twitter.com/TomMillerUK Tom Miller

    This is so true.

  • https://mikestallard.virtualgallery.com/ Mike Stallard

    Europe.
    The “cut backs”
    Paying off the deficit.
    Paying off the debt.
    Armed forces reorganisation.
    Expenses scandal.
    Civil Service Reform.
    Immigration.
    Libor Scandal.

    Please would some kind person actually spell out the difference between the two parties without personal abuse and being horrid? You see we, the doorstep owners feel that what we say doesn’t matter much because it has all been decided anyway.

    • Redshift

      I’ve tried to be fair….

      Europe – Tories vary from obsessive hatred to bizarre weasle-worded statements supporting the status quo. Labour think other things are more important. 

      Cuts – Tories cut as much as they think they can get away with. Labour refuse to cut as much as they think they can get away with.
      Deficit – Tories think cutting spending will have little/no effect on growth and therefore cutting hard and fast will close the deficit and recovery won’t be prevented. Labour think cutting spending hard and fast will have a profound effect on growth (and jobs, and job security, etc) by inherently harming consumer spending/demand, therefore actually not resulting in the same deficit reductions the Tories think they will. Labour have so far been vindicated on this point. 

      Debt – Obviously linked to deficit, but is more tied to historical debt, especially the bank bailout. Tories use the numerical figures of record debt to legitimise spending cuts. Labour point out that debt:gdp ratio was lower in 2008 than in 1997 – and therefore (other than the bank bailout itself) it wasn’t spending that led to higher debt, it was the global crisisArmed Forces Reorganisation – The Tories are making large cuts in this area. Labour are saying these go too far and that they haven’t properly considered the force’s current commitments, etc in their decision. Expenses scandal – both parties didn’t come well off this and both had very bad offenders. Overall, the Tories had the worst record overall and some very embarrassing cases such as expensive duck houses and moats charged to the taxpayer – although if anything Labour were punished more at the polls, probably because they were in government. Civil Service Reform – The Tories would probably outright privatise it if they could get away with it but since they can’t are going as far as they can. Labour approach this with caution – in government did some, much to the annoyance of many members and affiliates. Immigration – Tories in principle want it down to a bare necessity  and claimed they were going to massively reduce it – instead it has gone up, probably because their cuts meant cutting border control. Labour think it is a good thing in principle but think it needs regulating – in office they brought in an Australian-style points system.  Libor scandal – The Tories are trying to do as little as they can get away with (IMO because they are over 50% funding by city financiers), Labour are calling for a full public inquiry into the scandal and want more regulation over banking. 

      • https://mikestallard.virtualgallery.com/ Mike Stallard

        And indeed you have been very fair!
        Allow me to remind you that Mr Brown never allowed the debt to go over a trillion pounds.
        He also was actually spending a lot less, in total, than the current Chancellor.
        OK you are right on some of the details.
        I still maintain the overall picture is one of Buggins turn. And that is why people are so unenthusiastic about the political parties.
        You (the activists) can work as hard as you like. Every evening, on our TVs the same people turn out mouthing the same rubbish and the same, yes, half truths and avoiding the “gaffes”. They are all, you can see, friends behind the scenes.
        And on subjects which really concern us – immigration, taxation, rising prices, house sales, and I am going to add the EU – there is a pretty broad consensus with details hotly disputed. They don’t seem to understand how we feel.
        Wherever I go I hear people moaning about immigrants. They honestly do not care much about that red headed woman who listened to other people on the phone.

        • http://twitter.com/mistyblulabour dave stone

          “They don’t seem to understand how we feel.”

          Then there may be an opportunity for parties that do “seem to understand how we feel”. Yet at the last general election, with a range of candidates from the extremes to the banal, the same old faces/parties, mainly, were re-elected.

          Perhaps people are little more sophisticated than you seem to allow – i.e. difficult problems, no easy solutions.

          • https://mikestallard.virtualgallery.com/ Mike Stallard

            No, it is worse than that. We are left in the dark. 
            There is no discussion, for instance, of the actual state of the banks, no discussion about the acquis communautaire or the reports from the European parliament, no revelations about the scandal of the family courts, no investigation of what actually happens if you allow free schools (as in Sweden) and no reporting from countries which have a simple tax system.Just a lot of mouthing off. We cannot be sophisticated if we are not presented with the true facts. Just a rump of sentimental old people vote and young activists. Most people don’t bother any more really, do they.

          • http://twitter.com/mistyblulabour dave stone

            It’s up to “most people” whether they bother to do what you would like them to do. And if they don’t then it must be because they can’t be that bothered about your “subjects which really concern us.”

            In other words, you’re left isolated with nothing more than a personal grouse.

  • Politique

    Voter ID in its current form should be scrapped. A knock on every door is the only way of cementing votes. Voter ID should also be taken out of the control of the MPs office

    • Redshift

      This is a stupid comment on two accounts:-

      a) Voter ID isn’t controlled by the MPs office. Generally speaking it is the CLP secretary who is the lead administrator, they may or may not be in cahoots with the MPs office and besides – most CLPs have multiple administrators. Don’t mistake your own local party’s internal bickering as a systematic problem when it is probably more likely down to someone opposing the wrong motion or shagging the wrong person 20 years ago. b) Knocking every door is only ever a good strategy if your local party does campaign hard on the doorstep all year round and can therefore get around every door comfortably. If you don’t, you need to be more selective. Even then (and most parties don’t do that much work) there would always come a point where you’d want to narrow it down because it is better to speak to the right person 3 or 4 times than it is trying to win around the person with a portrait of Margaret Thatcher in their porch over by speaking to them twice. 

      • treborc

        Great if your MP is voted in each term, not much good to you if you never get in, you need to look further then just your own voters

      • treborc

        Great if your MP is voted in each term, not much good to you if you never get in, you need to look further then just your own voters

      • Politique

        This is a silly reply on more than two accounts. Representatives cannot select their voters, the electors select them. Many administrators are in tune, in cahoot with the CLP hierarchy and only selective adminstrators are chosen to oversee and coordinate Voter ID.  (MP Paranoia). I am more than happy to see an audit of who in the Labour Party has access to Voter ID and their relationship and standing. Date protection Laws do not allow multi administrators of addresses, phone numbers. If you are saying that you know the Labour Party are operating outside of Data Protection Laws than you have a duty to report this to the Information Commissioner, who has the power to investigate. With regards to point B, you are rather behind the times, Ed Miliband has already suggested following the Bradford by election result that voter ID is deeply flawed and every door should be knocked on.

        I think these two stupid replies, replying to your reponse to an accusation of stupid comments has put your argument to bed.

        Please give me evidence. Do you wish to open up a can of worms Red shift.

        The Voter ID is potentially a good system, however I will say again in its current form it is deeply flawed.

        Come on Red shift. you must do better than that. Your language in your reply suggests impropriety at the heart of local constituency offices.

        Please explain further

        • Cath Sherrington

          In my constituency when a branch wants new voter I’d sheets we email our elected CLP IT officer who sends us whatever sheets the branch have requested. We have been doing this for a number of years.
          You are quite right that every door must be knocked but this should be on going, as it is in our area. I say this for 2 reasons:
          1. To talk to people about their concerns and to collect voter ID
          2. So that people can’t say that they only see us at election times
          During the short campaign we should concentrate on those voters we’ve identified as labour and make sure they vote for us.
          I really don’t understand your paranoia. My MP and AM have nothing to do with our data.

          • Politique

            Thank you Cath and Peter for a genuine account of their experiences in their local CLP. It is very assuring that not all CLPs are the same. If a CLP secretary  who is responsible  for distributing Voter ID works in the office of the MP and refuses to give out Voter ID to interested parties, how do CLP adhere to Data Protection Laws. Voter ID are not allowed to be distributed to Labour Party Members if requested but are given to “standard users”. What is a standard user and who decides.

            It appears that during the recent Police Commissioners hustings they had access to lists whereby committed Labour are not.

            Could somebody explain this please?

          • Peter Barnard

            I’m not sure whether we are talking the same thing here, Politique, but I’ll give you my experience as a CLP ex-secretary, but still logged into Contact Creator as the CLP administrator for Contact Creator.

            (i) a CLP secretary should not be working in the same office as the MP. The MP’s office is paid for out of public funding, should only be used for constituency business and not for party political business. A CLP secretary, by definition, is “party political.”

            (ii) it is not necessary for the CLP secretary to be the Contact Creator administrator ; the administrator’s function may be assumed by (say) the CLP Campaign Co-ordinator and there are advantages in that being the case.

            (iii the Voter ID effort in a CLP has to be planned and the number of “standard users” (members who can actually create Voter ID sheets) should be commensurate with that planning. Basically, a standard user should be someone who is going to take a lead on, and manage,  Voter ID in a ward(s).

            (iv) a CLP secretary* who “refuses to give out Voter ID to interested parties” is not working in a properly-structured CLP. As I say, I made sure that we had plenty of standard users for Contact Creator in place, in good time, for the May 2011 elections (training took place in October, 2010).

            A guide to who can do what via Contact Creator is available via MembersNet. It’s no secret … and I never made a secret of it while I was CLP secretary/Contact Creator administrator.

            * I’m guessing here, Politique, but are you referring to membership lists here?

          • Politique

            Thank you Peter. No I am referring to Voter ID. Playing devils advocate, if the CLP secretary works in the office of the MP and the CLP Campaign Coordinator also works in the office of an MP and the CLP HQ is in the same building but not the  same office. Is this right. If the chairman and treasurer of the CLP also work or haved worked in the office of the MP as well as the chair of the LGC. Is that right.

            I would like to know how this would relate to membership lists, as it is grey area who can have access to those.

        • Peter Barnard

          It depends on the CLP, Politique, and how much (for want of a better word) incest there is surrounding the MP. We used to have a lot in my CLP, for sure, and the CLP was very much the poor relation.

          After we lost in 2010, it was an opportunity for the CLP to assert itself. In preparation for the all-out local government elections in 2011, I arranged Voter ID training for about ten members, so that wards were independent of “the centre” when it came to running off Voter ID sheets. These ten or so members were “standard users” ; I remained the sole administrator.

          Voter ID training was open to any member, ie all members were informed that it was available. It certainly wasn’t a secret. These ten or so members are still “standard user” and can still arrange Voter ID activities as and when they want.

          If you came to my CLP, I would certainly have no objection to you becoming a “standard user” and you could Voter ID to your heart’s content.

          Control outcomes, not people … unfortunately, not many politicians are aware of that approach.

        • Redshift

          Most CLPs in case you haven’t noticed – DON’T HAVE A LABOUR MP. How therefore, can it be the case that Voter ID is controlled by MPs offices? Data Protection Law insists on one person being responsible in each CLP, but multiple people are allowed admin level access – in fact this is becoming the norm. 

          If your MP or MP’s office is trying to control voter ID like this, you need to get in touch with your regional office and tell them specific examples of them preventing you from going campaigning by not giving you sheets. Like I said – just because this happens in your CLP – don’t assume this is the situation elsewhere. 

          Ed Miliband isn’t an organiser, he’s a politician. And besides, I didn’t say we should never knock every door. I said that firstly, unless you have the campaign capacity to actually do this in practice (which means all-year campaigning) then you will have to be more selective – which means skipping some houses and secondly, that even if you do have the capacity to knock every door, there would come a logical point in any election campaign, where you would narrow it down. In short, if you had a very hard working CLP out campaigning now, all voters would be a reasonable selection, but if that CLP has county council elections next year then it would be foolish if they got to March and they still hadn’t narrowed down their selection. 
          Bradford West was a by-election and I think it is easy for people to assume something went wrong with the short campaign but if they have been doing sod all work for years then you can’t turn up last minute against a formidable opponent and expect that everything will be rosy – it is too late in the day whatever selection you’re using. 

        • Redshift

          Most CLPs in case you haven’t noticed – DON’T HAVE A LABOUR MP. How therefore, can it be the case that Voter ID is controlled by MPs offices? Data Protection Law insists on one person being responsible in each CLP, but multiple people are allowed admin level access – in fact this is becoming the norm. 

          If your MP or MP’s office is trying to control voter ID like this, you need to get in touch with your regional office and tell them specific examples of them preventing you from going campaigning by not giving you sheets. Like I said – just because this happens in your CLP – don’t assume this is the situation elsewhere. 

          Ed Miliband isn’t an organiser, he’s a politician. And besides, I didn’t say we should never knock every door. I said that firstly, unless you have the campaign capacity to actually do this in practice (which means all-year campaigning) then you will have to be more selective – which means skipping some houses and secondly, that even if you do have the capacity to knock every door, there would come a logical point in any election campaign, where you would narrow it down. In short, if you had a very hard working CLP out campaigning now, all voters would be a reasonable selection, but if that CLP has county council elections next year then it would be foolish if they got to March and they still hadn’t narrowed down their selection. 
          Bradford West was a by-election and I think it is easy for people to assume something went wrong with the short campaign but if they have been doing sod all work for years then you can’t turn up last minute against a formidable opponent and expect that everything will be rosy – it is too late in the day whatever selection you’re using. 

  • ValerianII

    Labour’s problem is that it currently has no ideological
    vision, that’s what is damaging to its future success/survival. Who is going to
    be motivated to vote for, join or support a political party which appears to most
    voters to be little different to the government.

    Most in Labour seem unwilling or unable to challenge current
    economic orthodoxies or articulate a new vision for Britain in which voters can
    see themselves, happy to sit on debunked New Labour laurels (Ed Miliband
    went to Carlisle, NW England during the local elections to say how great PFI schemes
    are; the city’s hospital, opened by Tony Blair in 2000, was the first PFI
    hospital to be built and has gone bust twice in the intervening 12 years due to
    the crippling repayments. It’s currently being taken over by the NHS Trust in
    Northumberland.) and acquire the votes of “anti Tories” (some of whom turned to
    the Lib Dems under Blair and Brown) and those floating voters unhappy with the
    coalition.

    This is fine if Labour’s sole purpose is to win elections
    and manage the status quo, but it will continue to become more and more
    detached from the interests of the working people it seeks to represent.

    • Alan Giles

      I agree so much with what both you and “Moose” have written.

      I have found LL an intensly dispiriting place in recent weeks: frequent articles about “progress2 followed up with hectoring, peevish diatribes from that groups supporters (is it a group is it a “magazine – discuss – and it has been frequently).

      Quite the worst aspect of the Progress tendency has been the posters who wish to prove that they are tougher than the Tories, so they come on giving their ideas on how to make life tougher for benefit claimants, in doing so in very aggressive langauge – you get the impression at times that it is not so much the Coalition and it’s policies that the right-wing Labourite disapproves of, just the mere fact that trhey are not “in power” to ladle out the same medicine.

      Labour as a whole needs to decide what it really stands for, not striking a pose and trying to be all things to all voters.

      If they really want to persue a right-wing agenda perhaps they should find a party already satisfying their wishes on being tough on benefit claimants. Perhaps if not, they should try to find common ground with more traditional Labour  supporters, but I cannot see how the party, as it currently stands, so timorous that it can’t make up it’s mind, and therefofre appearing flaky, can hope to inspire confidence in floating voters and ex Labour voters.

      I am personally sick to death of being called a “trot” (sic) or an “extreme left-winger”, by people who seem to find it hard to put a senrence together coherently.

  • Moose

    It would be so much easier if Labour had not spent the last generation singing the other side’s anthem.

    If those still doing so could shut up for a moment it might become apparent why so many would be turned off by the mantra that the only route to prosperity is through competition and bribery and tearing up the rule book because the competition isn’t paying attention and making sure that the losers work so that the winner can count.

    It might once again dawn, after so long slavering at the other side of the hill, that for the overwhelming majority there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and that only a few thousand of the million human beings we name each year will ever come to be known of, let alone celebrated.

    If that small advance could be achieved it might then be possible for Labour governance to become known as the times when the citizen’s contribution is rewarded as service rather than exploited as work and that the economic purpose of a Labour government is not to create millionaires and celebrities but the sustain the inhabitability of this country for all its inhabitants all of the time under all circumstances without exception.

    I say ‘become known’ because under Tony and then Gordon we did indeed achieve much in advancing the cause of human survival in the British Isles. The trouble is that noone noticed. When you knock on the door you are just the same old same old, ‘hard working’, ‘work or die’ dirge.
     

  • Jjjk

    please show some imagination and stop using the same old picture

    so so boring

  • http://twitter.com/rob_marchant Rob Marchant

    Good piece, David. Whilst it’s an excellent idea to “re-humanise” dialogue between activists and electorate, stopping or cutting down voter i/d would be likely to severely harm our electoral effort. It’s something we’re pretty good at, and has historically given us an advantage over those less organised (i.e. the Tories, who tried to copy our voter i/d system in the early 2000s. That’s because it worked).

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