I’ll vote for a candidate who listens

I don’t know who I’m going to back for leader, but the person who’ll get my vote will be the one who answers some serious questions for our party. I want to know how they will connect with people on issues that matter, and I need know they have learned to listen, too.

As a parliamentary candidate in May I increased Labour’s share of the vote in Calder Valley by over 5,000 votes and cut the incumbent MP’s majority by over 2,000. It was one of the strongest results against a Tory in the country, on a better night nationally it would have been enough. However May 7th was a bad night. Unless whoever wins our leadership election has learned the right lessons then we will have more bad nights. Those who need a Labour government can’t afford that.

In my area Labour missed out on potential votes that went to the Greens and to UKIP , who also gained new supporters who had never voted before. The election was complex and to understand what is needed to win we need more than sound bites.

Some people suggest it could simply be a different result if we had a new leader, or made minor policy adjustments. But they are not just offering the wrong answers, they are asking the wrong questions. How did we seem to do so much at the last election but not convince voters we could be trusted with power?

Conversations with voters

As a party we need to hang on to the truly brilliant organisational gains we made in 2015 but we must make that contact meaningful.The ground campaign was fantastic, and we should be proud that we spoke to 5 million people and connecting with hundreds of new members and supporters. We should protect that infrastructure while also learning from the experience.

The problem is too many of our five million conversations were one way transactions – not conversations at all. It is great listening to people about what issues concerned them and what would affect the way they chose to vote. Those conversations should have then influenced policy. But there was no way that we as candidates and activists could feedback; we couldn’t tell the leadership what messages worked. We essentially had a focus group of thousands of swing voters a day but no way of learning from them.

The party remains fundamentally suspicious of members’ and activists’ ideas. The party’s message was dictated to activists by London-based advisors and former advisors often insulated from opinions of marginal voters by safe seats. In my area we could see the mistakes being made but as a candidate I have only been asked what went wrong since the election; I was never given an opportunity to avert disaster beforehand.

I would like to know from all leadership candidates how they would structure a party built to listen and learn from our grass roots.

Tory votes

One fundamental issue with our campaign was the assumption that we could get over the line without winning over 2010 Conservative voters. One of the key themes we never addressed was our narrative on the economy. This allowed the Tories to build a culture of fear around our competence to govern and hold onto potential swing voters.

I fundamentally believe the Labour Party has a strong story to tell on the economy and the argument isn’t won by parroting the Tory myths. However in the last campaign we failed to articulate it. Too many times we confused policies with narrative.

Leadership candidates talking about aspiration now in meaningless terms is nether policy nor narrative and we need clear statements of how they see the economy. I believe Labour should be the party of a productive economy, representing every square mile of the country, not only the City of London. We need a strong message on small businesses, on manufacturing and apprenticeships. A party that realises the key to a functioning economy is local transport networks connecting the north, not simply pulling people to London more quickly.

Labour should be a party of stability for all who export, not a party who will risk being at each-others throats throughout the European referendum campaign, risking those exports. We also have to work against the dangerous nationalism whipped up over Scotland on both sides by the Conservatives.

Entrepreneurialism and SMEs are important, particularly in communities like mine. But there are also plenty of non-small business people whose businesses aren’t built to expand. Handy men and market traders who are struggling workers whose lives Labour’s tax credits have improved.

Finally we must say the 2007 recession was not caused by Labour, but American banks. We needed to point out that had we continued on the path that had us growing in 2010 then recovery would not have been so slow, so unbalanced and so fragile – as the continued growth of the American economy shows.

Talk human, no one votes UKIP or Green on policies

In Calder Valley, a large and demographically diverse constituency, our vote was squeezed by Greens on the “left” and UKIP on the right. However responding to both is not a simple question of what our policies were, but about how people felt about Labour. We had a former climate change minister from the left leading the party and he carved a pledge about immigration into a giant stone! The policies for both sets of voters were there but we didn’t sound like we meant it.

No one votes for either of these parties based on individual policies. But both parties act as a blank mask onto which people project their dissatisfaction with a political class perceived to look more like policy wonks and middle managers than anyone one might chose to have a conversation or, dare I say, pint of beer with. We need to talk again about what we care about and why we care about it, and in terms that mean something. Simply coming out with message tested policies and sound bites doesn’t do that.

The question is

What will all the leadership candidates do to make sure we hang on to the coalition of voters we built in 2015. And what about the the 2-3% of Conservative voters  we need to win over, while picking up several from UKIP and the Greens? If they are then elected, what do they want to do with our country? How will they make it better?

I don’t know all the answers, but I’m sure we can’t find them only talking to ourselves. In Calder Valley we are already canvassing the public –  not for how they’ll vote, but to find out what concerns them most and what their answers are to the issues our country faces. All the leadership candidates have my contact details; they are welcome any weekend to join me in talking to the people we need to hear.