Impenetrable hierarchies and unknowable rules prevent the change we need

By Jessica Asato / @Jessica_Asato

There are fewer phrases that I cringe at more than when a Labour politician, referring to young people in the Party, says something along the lines of “well we know you are the future, and that’s why you’re special”. It’s not just that it’s a truism, but also because it takes the support of young members for granted. Younger members are given little encouragement or support in the Party and yet they are consistently relied upon to turn out at by-elections and rainy campaign sessions, often without thanks or favour. In truth, it is sad, not to say short-sighted, for the Party to treat young members solely as foot-soldiers rather than as ‘thought-soldiers’ too.

Many local parties think that young people are fresh legs to send up tower blocks, rather than fresh minds to think about how we campaign, who we target, what our message should be and how we should organise our party. If you are under 35 you can bet your bottom dollar that you will get brownie points for turning up at every meeting going (and being made Chair of your branch at the first meeting), but as soon as you question the way things are done you become a trouble maker. And yet, some of the excellent new ideas about how we can re-energise our party and make the most of our engagement with the public is coming from the younger generation.

It was the Young Fabians and Labour Staff Network who organised over 80, predominantly younger, people out to help campaign for Obama and who have come back stacked with ideas to improve the culture and success of our Party. Progress has been helping to disseminate the lessons that they learned across the pond, by co-ordinating speaker visits to CLPs throughout the country. Many of the young speakers so far have been enthusiastically received, but experience shows that translating some of the lessons into our day-to-day campaigning and support of members and party supporters on the ground is proving much slower. Good ideas are stuck at Executive Committee, or General Committee, rather than rolled out as an experiment and reported back with a view to encouraging everyone to do it. The culture in the Party still feels like it’s led by a politburo with impenetrable hierarchies coupled with unknowable rules which prevent innovation and change.

Yet we’ve got to embrace change and new ideas if we are to ensure that Labour continues to reflect the aspirations of the majority of the public, rather than those of us who turn up at branch meetings. We need less of a meetings culture, and more of an action culture. That’s not to say we should scrap the structures which have helped us to get out the vote and organise at a local level, but we should be more relaxed about how branches and CLPs organise and judge them on voter contact rates and the number of times members have organised at community events, rather than whether the minutes of each meeting are pristine. Young members may be the future, but only if you let them have a say and some control over how the Party is run at local and national level. Letting go may be hard, but with a declining membership and popularity, now is the time to experiment with new ways of working in the Party.

Jessica Asato is Acting Director of Progress and a former Chair of the Young Fabians and Vice-Chair of Young Labour.