Poetry and prose please!

“As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for roses, too!”

Bread and Roses, Lyrics by James Oppenheim

Mario Cuomo once famously said that “you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.”

When I took the decision to support Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign, I did so because his rhetoric reached out to me. I had previously  seen him campaign from government and his governing at DECC had inspired groups of young, politically neutral people who were passionate about the environment. I believed he had the ability to inspire our movement and to take that inspiration out to the wider country.

But Ed chose instead to campaign for the Labour leadership in inspiring terms but to lead us as if we were already governing. We opposed in prose then wondered why we weren’t moving people.

Poetry matters. A good policy offer doesn’t amount to a story for the nation. For our policies to mean anything, we need to make sure we are first touching the hearts of people. understanding their hearts and hopes not just their minds and fears. We need to touch their whole lives. Then we can relate that back to our policy offer.

Valence is a weird word. It’s the way psychologists and marketers quantify those moments, senses, instincts that make us human. But it’s not a word humans use about ourselves. About our hearts. Those intrinsic truths that instinctively don’t want to quantify. are what we think of as art, beauty and poetry. But this election was won and lost on valance. on instinct not policy. On the triumph of a strong narrative of fear up against a confused and weakened narrative of diminished hope. Valence is what we encounter on the doorsteps. We can’t counter valance concerns with policy answers. We need to reach people’s hearts before we get access to their minds.

If we are to reach those people that don’t vote Labour we need to speak to their instincts and hearts. Not assume that the former are evil and the latter misled. That does not mean offering a small but slightly left of centre policy platform. it means having an unshakable central vision which all policies feed in to. And it means being ready and willing to sell that central vision to those beyond our party. We need to stop assuming that everyone shares our values. We need to get out there and convince. As believers this should be easy for us. If we can’t convince our friends and neighbours of why we are right, what makes us think we can do so with 5 minute doorstep conversations with perfect strangers?

We are at the start of a long leadership campaign. After a defeat as bad as we have suffered it should be challenging and brutal. We need to exorcise our failure. But the candidate who will get my vote will be the one who can offer a story of Britain that the British want to buy – and one with a plan to sell it.

We need to reach out, reassure and resonate. And this must be all at once. There are not separate strategies for different voter groups. These must be demonstrated though our adherence to basic fundamentally decent values that can be demonstrated through messages that we constantly test and sell sell sell. Yes this is hard and challenging. So is running the country. The mesage of this elections is that the country is not crying out for a Labour victory. We must earn it.

We need a sense of having a grip on our mistakes and what we would do differently but we also need a totally new conversation. To have that we need to earn this space. We need to understand that the big issues don’t have singular policy answers but that voters who are open to our messages need to go through a process of being reassured and then and only then will they find resonance.

This cannot be done just by whoever we elect as leader and their deputy. A good song is made up of many harmonies. Voices that are subtly different but come together to deliver the same message.

Our political poetry can and should be the same. Not embodied in one voice, but in the  coming together of a party ready to represent a country that cries out for the same basic aims. Great poetry talks to great themes, great prose makes a great difference. A great politician understands how and when to use both. You can’t inspire without great poetry and  you can’t reassure without great prose. The next leader of the Labour party will need to be able to draw on both.

So among the cacophony of policy, strategy, messaging,  campaigning and political asks I have a simple message for those people who seek to lead my party:  Show me how you fight not just for bread, but for roses too.