Activists and strategists

By Emma Burnell / @scarletstand

At some point last Saturday – as things went from protest, to violence to riot in Tottenham – somebody though to themselves “How do we play this best for Ed”? They will have turned on their television and seen not just burning buildings and violent clashes, but an opening/threat for the leader of the Labour Party to stake out some territory on law and order issues. They will have been conducting a SWOT analysis in their head and thinking of lines to run.

Good.

Some of you may think I’m describing a compassionless monster, someone who sees only political advantage in carnage. Certainly those who benefit from the mood of anti-politics will want you to see just that. But I see someone who knows and understands their job and is capable of fulfilling their necessary role in a dispassionate way. There will be time for grieving – and it will come, that’s why the burn out rates of political strategists are so high – but for now, there is a job to be done. Like first responding emergency services, someone has to have the wherewithal to cope with the political triage.

For those of us who believe the country would be better off with a Labour government, we have to be glad someone is doing it. It may not be a job we all want to do, some may find it distasteful, but it is an essential part of modern politics. If we didn’t have someone doing it, you can be damn sure the Tories do and would have killed us for it. All our singular compassion would have achieved is an increased likelihood of a second Tory term. With all that we believe that entails. How is that better than a few people knowing they have to think of the bigger picture at times when our natural instinct is to focus on the local hurts?

So activists should be grateful that we have people with strategically wired brains looking after the interests of the party. We should be thankful they have these instincts. But we shouldn’t let them forget what made them want to work for the party in the first place. At heart, they are simply activists who went full time. They are not different from the average Labour Party member. Just as we should be grateful there are people to think the difficult thoughts, so we should be equally and eternally grateful for our army of volunteers. Just as we can’t take strategy for granted, neither can we assume activism will happen without tough decisions either.

Some strategists become too big picture. They forget that a strategy requires implementation and the people, hard work and good will to implement it. A good strategist never forgets that they started delivering leaflets or if – like me – you grew up in London in the 80s selling Tote tickets (anyone else remember London Labour Lotteries?).

A good strategist needs to think in terms of ‘us and them’. They need to combine making sure their party has a good day with making sure it’s raining merry hell on the other guys. Sometimes they get frustrated in doing this by the large sprawling and by degrees democratic nature of political parties. Often on a day-to-day basis, the people most frustrating the brilliantly Machiavellian strategy they have outlined are fellow party members, not their opposition (who are being similarly frustrated by their own members).

The danger lies when ‘us and them’ becomes blurred. When ‘them’ becomes the activists you forget you need and the ‘us’ a smaller and smaller self-congratulatory group who have not only lost any desire to listen to their own members but far worse, and understanding that to do their job effectively, they need to continue to engender that good will to keep the hard work and implementation coming.

We are often too hard on our strategists. I know I am. They do make some bloody awful strategic mistakes. But in the difficult times – especially in opposition – we need them to do a difficult and sometimes distasteful job, for which they know that the best they can hope for is no credit, the worst for the very work that they do to be attacked and reviled. Activists need to remember this.

Equally, we all need to remember, in this scenario, no one in the Labour Party is ‘them’.