Labour’s chatterati need to get a grip

The last few days have been gnaw-your-own-arm-off boring. Why is the Labour Party stuck in a cycle of self-criticism? Every April we get idiotic attempts to raise expectations of how many council seats we will gain. Every May we get a month of whining that we didn’t hit imaginary targets that had only been set by commentators, and talk-down the objectively impressive gains that the “poor bloody infantry” out in the CLPs have slogged to make. Every August we have a crazy season where any MP who isn’t on holiday and has an axe to grind gets to vent their critique of the leader at a position in the news bulletins that would never be justified outside of a slow news month. Every September we get told the Leader’s speech is make or break time … and so on ad nauseam…

It is sooooooooo boring. I’ve been writing the same blog posts urging people to get a grip for seven summers now.

I wasn’t going to write anything this summer. I was going to spend time on the beach and in a flat with no internet connection with my wife and sons in Margate. I was going to be a real human being with a life doing what the whole of the rest of the population of Europe do during August – having a well-earned rest.

Writing or broadcasting or speaking about politics in August is pointless. No one is reading, no one is watching, no one is listening. They are on the beach, in the garden, abroad, watching the test match or the athletics. Even if by accident they switch the news on, the last thing they want is a politician trying to elbow in on their precious summer break to talk about stuff that can wait until September, or for most of the population can wait until the couple of hours in May 2015 when they decide who to vote for.

Resting during this August is important. Even for ordinary party activists, this is the last real extended period of battery recharge before the General Election. For candidates, frontbenchers and the leader, it’s essential they take this last chance to step away from the 24-hour news cycle and have a bit of downtime before returning to the fray in the autumn. These poor people have families. They need thinking time. They need a break. And they will be better, more energetic operators in the autumn for taking one.

The central demand of the commentariat seems to be that Labour should be announcing policies all the time, two years before the General Election.

I have never understood this fixation.

We need policies so we have a programme of government to follow when we get in. So we are changing the country for the better, not just swapping managers (though just swapping to competent managers and stopping introducing policies of the kind we have endured in the past three years would immeasurably improve people’s lives).

We don’t need policies to go canvassing. The purpose of canvassing is to identify people’s current voting intention so we can communicate with them and get them out to vote on polling day if they are Labour, or send them some really good direct mail if they are undecided. It is not to have a conversation with them about policy. If it was then we would never be able to speak to the volume of people we need to, and most people would be unwilling to ever canvass as it would be incredibly difficult. I’ve been canvassing now for 23 years. I could count fewer than a dozen occasions when anyone asked me about a national policy. These were mainly during the two times I was a parliamentary candidate, and I told the voter I would write to them, went home and looked at the policy handbook issued to all candidates after the manifesto is published, and sent them the text from the relevant section.

We don’t need policies for their own sake. More does not mean more popular. We had loads of policies in 1983 and look where that got us. I have seen people on Twitter seriously propose some of the policies in the 1983 manifesto – particularly my bugbear of unilateral nuclear disarmament – as though they would suddenly be popular 30 years later.

We don’t need policies that the public won’t believe are credible. Given the state of the nation’s finances, that rules out pretty much anything that involves increased public spending. A lot of the silence from the shadow cabinet is because they have great, expensive ideas for a fiscal situation like 2001 but when they show them to the Treasury team they are correctly told to take a reality check. This is good practice for what it will actually be like being in government.

We need to be mindful of the adage from a former Labour General Secretary that “policies don’t win elections … policies lose elections”.

We don’t need to waste the limited number of chances you get to make major strategic announcements in August when no one is listening.

Some of the same folk calling for a constant flow of policy announcements are also vocal about the need to involve Labour’s members in policy making. They need to make their minds up. If we are going to respect the party’s democratic processes that means we should wait until votes have happened at the Warwick National Policy Forum next summer before we announce anything.

We seem to have trapped our shadow cabinet in a lose-lose situation. Look at poor Stephen Twigg. He says bold stuff about schools that gets in the media and gets berated for announcing policies that haven’t been through the NPF and presumably not signed-off in triplicate by the General Committee of the Anyville North Constituency Labour Party. Then within months he gets berated for not being visible enough.

My view is this.

The major speeches on the economy and welfare before the summer break established Labour’s ideological positioning for the next General Election. We are not attempting to re-run the video of 1997 but nor are we drifting off to the left and away from the British public, who are in a pretty hard-headed and un-idealistic place because their lives have been grindingly tough since 2008.

We have a consistent 38-40% in the opinion polls which is what we need to win a General Election. We have been steady at this level for years, not months. The fluctuation in our lead is caused by the interrelationship between the Tory and UKIP votes. We need to stay calm because panic is the enemy of an opinion poll lead.

Things will get more difficult because the public are getting more optimistic about the economy. We knew this was going to happen and that’s why the period from this Annual Conference onwards needs to be when we set out our positive vision for the kind of country we want, rather than just railing against the iniquity of austerity and cuts. We need to stay calm because panic is the enemy of an opinion poll lead.

Ed and the Shadow Cabinet absolutely need to rest during August. They need to take time out to prepare mentally and physically for the political season. They need to keep their powder dry and save all major announcements for the conference season when the public are marginally more focussed on politics and we can announce stuff in a co-ordinated way.

There is one aspect of what I just called the “video of 1997” that we should re-run. That is the model that we know worked in terms of when to announce key policies. Tony Blair (remember him?) announced five key pledges in 1996 and put them to a ballot of Party members. These five pledges were on every leaflet and on the little cards every canvasser carried and handed out to voters. They were costed, achievable, realistic but radical. They helped win us 418 MPs. They still read pretty well today:

• We will cut class sizes to 30 or under for 5, 6 and 7 year olds by using money saved from the assisted places scheme
• We will introduce a fast track punishment scheme for persistent young offenders by halving the time from arrest to sentencing
• We will cut NHS waiting lists by treating an extra 100,000 patients as a first step by releasing £100m saved from NHS red tape
• We will get 250,000 under-25 years-olds off benefit and into work by using money from a windfall levy on the privatised utilities
• We will set tough rules for government spending and borrowing and ensure low inflation and strengthen the economy so that interest rates are as low as possible to make all families better off

They were not announced at the point we are now in the electoral cycle. They were announced about a year before the election, as part of a “pre-manifesto”, the Road to the Manifesto, which was fleshed out when the real manifesto was published at the start of the General Election campaign.

When the summer is over I may well scribble some thoughts about what five key pledges for 2015 ought to look like.

Meanwhile I am getting back to the beach to do important stuff like build sandcastles and ponder why factor 50 sun cream doesn’t protect gingers like me. I suggest everyone else calms down and does the same.