How the Labour Party needs to accept that everything we do must change – and learn to let go

There’s a new pamphlet out from the Fabians this week “Forward: The change Labour still needs“. It’s an enjoyable read with much to recommend it, but it’s probably best avoided if you’re one of those people who has grown tired of stories about the Obama campaign(s).

Yes – of course there’s much we can learn from the way Barack Obama was elected and re-elected. He ran two of the biggest, most expensive and most complex campaigns in history. If the Labour Party can honestly learn nothing from that kind of campaign, then frankly we should all go home and gives the next few elections a miss.

But what was particularly interesting to me wasn’t the tales of derring-do from the Obama campaign and how we can/should/must transport them back to Blighty. What caught my eye was the foreword from Labour General Secretary Iain McNicol, which said:

“There’s a danger that Obama’s victories can be misunderstood and misinterpreted. It’s not merely a case of effective local campaigning, nor of harnessing social media to reach voters.”

Exactly right. Far too often the “lessons from Obama” that people (myself included) have sought to foist onto the Labour Party (and which the party has at times beaten itself up over) is that if only cherry-picked tactic “X” or hopelessly expensive tool “Y” could be used in Britain then it would be a game changer, and the Tories would be reduced to saving safe seats in Surrey as our brutal electoral machine crushed all before it.

No – changing the way we do politics and building a different kind of party means changing everything we do, and how we do it.

That doesn’t mean ripping off the Obama campaign – or any other campaign for that matter – and it doesn’t mean ripping everything out and starting from scratch, but it does mean taking a genuinely hard look at every aspect of how the party works, and how we can and should do it better. Our campaigns, our election strategy, our godawful reliance on poorly attended meetings, our expensive and closed conferences. Even the things that we do well – and there are numerous things we do far better than the US Democrats (a constant voter ID database for a start) – need to be done better. Every penny will need to be squeezed.

But more importantly, the party will need to continue to devolve power to members. The Labour Party has never had the money to run staff-only campaigns, in future budgets are likely to be so constrained that members will need to be even more empowered to deliver the campaign the party needs to win. As McNicol says in his foreword:

“I want our campaigners and activists not to be used as unpaid leaflet distributers and data collectors, but as the human face of a political movement of change and reconstruction.”

Quite right – but at present, that’s what too many Labour members are. If the party is going to run a highly effective and targeted election campaign (which is the plan – judging by this excellent piece by Archie Bland in the Independent today) then members and activists and supporters are going to need to be not only enabled, but enthused.

That means as well as the party “letting go” a little and devolving responsibility to members organisationally (because there is no alternative), the same will need to happen on some level with policy-making (because if we want good policy that people feel reflects their own lives – there is no alternative). Many of the best ideas that have come through our movement come not from on high, but from below. They are driven by the needs of the people this party exists to represent and whose voices are *still* not heard often enough in the corridors of power. If, for example, the last Labour government had listened to the party members, we’d have been building far more houses to head off the growing housing crisis. But party members were only shouting about housing because it’s what we see in our local communities, it’s what our families tell us bothers them, it’s what people tell us needs to change when we canvass and campaign.

It’s exactly the kind of campaigning-meets-policy style of party that Jon Cruddas and Arnie Graf were advocating in their piece for the Guardian earlier this week – a party rooted in work, community and family.

Yes, there are things that we can learn from the Obama campaign. It would be churlish to argue otherwise. And yes, there are things that the Labour Party could and should do better. It would be churlish to argue otherwise. But more importantly, instead of looking at how we campaign and operate in a piecemeal fashion, we should look again at the whole. How does everything we do better serve engaging party members, activists and communities in the task of winning the election and changing the country?

That is the question that must be asked. And the answer starts with letting go a little – of power, of organisation and of policy too.