“Together I know we can do it” – Douglas Alexander’s State of the Race memo

Here’s Douglas Alexander’s latest state of the race memo  – which LabourList readers can read exclusively before anyone else. We’ll be posting these each week to give you a unique insight through the final weeks of the campaign.

Dear Friend,

Yet again in last night’s debate, David Cameron made it clear that child benefit and tax credits are now on the ballot paper on May 7th. This week we learnt that as well as planning a £3.8 billion raid on families’ tax credits, Treasury papers show that the Tories also plan deep cuts to Child Benefit too.

And they will put it into practice in just seven days’ time if they get the chance.

So in this final week, I think the choice has become clearer and our shared task has become even greater.

4 million conversations, one clear goal

I have worked on five general election campaigns and one thing I learnt is that you don’t want to have someone knock on your door to tell you that something truly surprising and unexpected has happened. We have been there before, and it almost always ends badly.

This week was different. This week the knock on my door was from Labour’s Director of Field Operations – Patrick Heneghan – and the news he delivered was something that genuinely made my week.

He said we had hit the target that Ed set us on January 4th of having 4 million conversations with voters by polling day. This is almost twice what was achieved in the last election and more than any party has done before.

I always knew we would meet this target. What I didn’t expect is that we would beat it.

Thanks to the work of our activists, members and volunteers we spoke to four million voters in four months, with one week still to go till polling day. And in a week where we also passed a very significant milestone in our membership – over 200,000 now signed up – this campaign has already delivered some really incredible achievements.

In an election where we see low trust and high cynicism, conversations, even more than speeches, are the true mouthpiece of this campaign. And that is why today Ed challenged our party to get to one million more conversations before polling day.

This is a challenge we should be striving to beat, not just to meet – because although we have already come so close, we can’t think for a moment that this election is already over.

With so much at stake, slowing down or easing up in this final week is simply not an option.

Practiced Passion

If you have to practice your passion, then it’s safe to say you shouldn’t really be trying to show any in the first place. That is clearly a lesson David Cameron hasn’t yet learnt.

In a week where Tory focus groups have no doubt been saying that voters feel that David Cameron has been off the radar during this campaign, Tory strategists have clearly begun to demand new tactics.

So the order went out and the performance began. David Cameron dully raised his voice and rolled up his sleeves.

But the truth is, demonstrating real passion and conviction is something that you do over years and months of setting out your case to the public. It is not something done in the final hours of a campaign that has simply run out of other ideas.

Ed Miliband has become the story of this election, but not in the way that so many newspapers thought he might. He has connected with the public in ways that some of his critics never expected. And that is because his pitch to the public began on day one of his leadership. His politics, his drive and his determination hasn’t changed. And that consistency of character is what ultimately meant that whether the public were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt has.

This week Ed gave a speech to Labour Party staff in HQ where he said that at this election, we are trying to do something never before achieved – to get a Labour Party back into government after just one term in opposition.

And in the coming days, the scale of our effort has to match the scale of that challenge.

We know that in the final week of this campaign we have the chance not just to be change makers, but to be our generation’s history-makers. And every phone call you make, door you knock on and leaflet you deliver is your chance to play your part in that.

Together I know we can do it.

This week is our chance to prove it.

Best,
Douglas