Labour want to run the country – the country need to know why

The election campaign has begun in earnest. I know because the Tories have started photoshopping posters. Last time it was airbrushing David Cameron until he resembled a Ken Doll. Perhaps Barbie was the Worcester Woman of the 2010 election. Perhaps not.

When you’re a geek like me, following every nuance and utterance all year every year, politics doesn’t feel very inspiring at these times. The Conservatives entire strategy is “we’re not Ed” and lying about the economy. The Lib Dems’s seems to be “we’re not really the Lib Dems (at least not those ones you don’t like doing all that stuff we did in Government over the last five years)”.

Politics is not meant to be appealing to me now. It is about reaching the biggest part of the electorate and inspiring them enough to vote for your party. It is sweeping grand statements and big bold colours. Or at least it used to be when this was all filtered through two news bulletins a night.

Labour has a decent policy offer coming out of the NPF but seem fairly determined not to tell anyone about it. We have narrowed our offer to just the NHS. I am enormously in favour of our approach to our health service. I also get that it is the place where we are most in tune with the electorate. They trust us to deliver in a way they are right to simply not do the Tories. And in the midst of a bad winter crisis, this is foremost in peoples minds.

So of course it is right to talk about the biggest and most important public service our country has and the vastly different political approaches the two main parties have to it.  But it must not be – cannot be – all we talk about.

Why has housing disappeared from our agenda? It’s a vital issue to practically all demographics. The young (and less young) people desperate to get on the housing ladder and the older people whose children and grandchildren are stuck either at home or in poor quality rented accommodation. Labour has an appealing offer to Generation Rent and those who love and support them – we should be shouting it from the rooftops.

As I walked 20 minutes from the tube station home last night, I was approached by three separate beggars. Food banks usage has gone through the roof. Meanwhile those at the top are getting richer and richer as the rest of us find our wages stagnating, our benefits cut and our services slashed.  Ours is not a recovery in which we all have a share. In fact to far too many of us it does not feel like a recovery at all.

Labour’s deep red on the NHS and the passion we have for our national religion must be matched in other areas of our lives. In places where we need to know not just what our future will look like when we fall over, but how government will help us as we try to build up our lives.

This too must be campaigned for in primary colours backed up by policy details. There is nothing inherently wrong with “sound bites” however much the word came to epitomise all that was wrong with the command and control methods of Labour as the internet made that increasingly ridiculous. Being able to communicate policy in pithy sentences is fine – great even – as long as it is also backed up with real depth of policy understanding. At present, we too often fall between the two, trying to prove how on top of our brief we are while at the same time afraid of being reviled as Teacher’s Pet.

Labour paint a fair and grim picture of the challenges facing our country under the poor leadership of the Tories. We need to match this with an equally clear picture of what changes when you elect Labour. This primary colours vision is what is currently missing. It isn’t the pledge cards nor is it the manifesto. It isn’t about policy specifics but a sensibility and an understanding of what Labour is for – not just what we’re against.

Labour want to run the country. The country need to know why.