A penny farthing machine in an iCampaign world

The Labour Party looks likely to spend an extended period of time ‘debating’ with itself. There will be a whole host of arguments made about which policies worked, which didn`t and essentially what the Party needs to do to win in 2020.

There will also be plenty of discussion about how the Party needs to reconnect to communities and what the nature of a mass movement political party is. There will, however, be less consideration of how the party itself works in wards and constituencies across the country. The leadership has failed to equip members. Even in 2015, around 60 years after Harold Wilson first used the phrase, the Party is still running a penny farthing machine but now in an ‘iCampaign’ age.

Take a typical Labour party organiser. They rely on endless sheets of paper and may, if they are lucky, have access to an old PC which they can input some of the data activists collect into. The infrastructure needed is not there. Data collection, whether it be from members or the wider public, is hit-and-miss at best. There is a lack of consistency and whilst some do brilliantly well, others are much less efficient.

Whilst many companies understand technology and data, the Labour Party does not.  Many organisations allow their teams to ‘bring their own devices’ but the Party has not considered this. Many people have more computing power in their own pockets than an entire constituency party enjoys.

So this is not just an argument about finance but ensuring that the systems are in place to allow information to be collected and maintained. More information means more effective targeting – just as companies do.

The Party found large sums of money to pay for a number of advisers from abroad but has not looked at helping the hard working activists and organisers across the country. There is also a problem of leaving history, information and knowledge in the heads of a few key activists.  If they move on, depart, defect then the knowledge goes with them. That level of information concentration is ineffective at best, dangerous at worst.

For instance, when candidates are fighting each other to become the PPC they all gather information on members but this is then rarely shared for the benefit of the constituency as a whole.

All anyone seems worried about is who has access to the party membership lists and when. These lists are probably more accurate than they have been before but are often sketchy and are not ‘filled out’ with detail which can be gathered from a local level.

The party buys available data so that it can try to target its messages, on the basis those messages are appealing, but the more information it has, the better the campaigning can be.

Of course, this is all based on have the correct legal protections in place to allow the data to be used.

At the central level, the Party tweets and posts with the best of them and at the election it did this really well. But that is not enough. This is an argument about empowering members and giving them a new type of role in campaigning.

The polls got the outcome of the election wrong but so did the feedback from the Party ‘on the ground’. There could be number of reasons for this but one may be that the information collected simply wasn’t recorded and then passed on.

Knowledge is power. The Party needs to appreciate this and give its activists the tools they need. Modern iCampaigning needs a party with more modern tools.