Labour’s Unsung Heroes

The incredible achievements of the Barack Obama campaign have loomed large over Labour Party staffers since 2007.

As the Labour Party’s Head of Digital 2007-2010, I can’t tell you how many times I was asked why we weren’t collecting 13 million email addresses or raising the incredible sums of money online like Obama’s campaign had. To which the rejoinder of this jaded hack became “There was a crucial part of BarackObama.com – Barack Obama”. Oh and the 120 staff who worked solely on digital by the end of the campaign.

And so when I saw yesterday that another “look Labour, here’s what you should be learning from Obama again” pamphlet had been published, I have to admit that my initial reaction was, I’m afraid, “YAWN”.

To be completely fair, I have since read much of it –and as with last time round, there are of course always lessons that, if not directly transferable, inspire and guide our campaigning in the right direction.

I enjoyed the realism of Kirsty McNeil’s piece in the New Statesman. Noting that “The unsung heroes of Brewers Green resent pamphlets like Forward (and blogs like this) because the movement expects them to take the blame when things go wrong, but not the credit when things go right”, Kirsty goes on to explain the systemic reasons why some of the executional successes of Obama’s campaign are sometimes hard to implement here.

But I’d like to add an additional point to this debate. The old adage goes that it’s the only the victors who get to tell their story. I’d go further and argue that it is because a US campaign actually finishes that we get to hear of its successes. The UK model – where a permanent political party begins looking ahead to the following General Election almost as soon as the last one is over – doesn’t afford much scope for “this is what we did, aren’t we great” back-slapping that you see Stateside. Neither do you tend to get individuals who, entirely understandably, seek to cash-in within the private sector off the back of their campaign successes – providing a huge incentive to ensure their story is told.

Whilst the stories of our campaign successes rarely get told.

We never get to hear the story of how the ground campaign for the 2010 General Election, led by Alicia Kennedy, played such a huge role in denying David Cameron his Commons majority.

We never get to hear the story of the comprehensive training programme established by Tom Geldard’s team which is skilling up an entire generation of activists on the techniques they need to learn to run first-class campaigns in their local areas.

And we never get to hear the story of the data-led campaigning of Patrick Heneghan’s team at Brewers Green delivering highly-sophisticated campaign materials pinpointed to precision target the voters we need to persuade in our marginal seats.

Our campaign staffers, who I might well be in trouble with for even mentioning here, remain quietly in the background. They study and learn from campaigns from elsewhere – of course they do – and apply the relevant lessons here. They don’t seek the public limelight or even thanks for the work they do. They won’t even complain when, 6 weeks before the next election, the usual team of Americans turn up to tell them how to do their jobs. But perhaps there’s an onus on the rest of us, not at the coalface, to look a little deeper at what’s being done here and try to ensure that they’re not always the “unsung heroes” of every campaign.

Sue Macmillan worked for the Labour Party 2003-2010. She is Chair of Hammersmith CLP and a candidate for the local elections in Hammersmith and Fulham in 2014.