I think that one way of making sure that this mistake isn’t made again in the good times is for more paid Labour Party Organisers to be paid by, and accountable to, local CLPs (or in some cases shared by CLPs) rather than purely being answerable up the chain of command. Grassroots members in CLPs are probably better able to judge short-term vs long-term benefits than people who are employed to win single elections.

I’ve noticed that more recently (since 2005, certainly) there has been an acknowledgement that we need to be having conversations with voters, building a relationship with them etc, but in doing so they were drawing on models of engagement that some of us were already using. If those models hadn’t been available to replicate and build on, I shudder to think where we might be today.

It’s an excellent series and looking forward to the rest.

*I think it is a caricature to say that the left focuses on small minorities rather than the working class as a whole, but that’s probably a discussion for another time and doesn’t affect the substantive.

*One of the important things about the role of a councillor is that being a councillor is one of the relatively few ways of getting paid to be a front line organiser in local communities. Compare and contrast the opportunities to make a career writing policies for think tanks/civil service/advising ministers to the relative scarcity of jobs which involve political work at the grassroots – I think that as part of revitalising the left we need to look at this.

*I don’t know where you are going with your argument about electoral politics, but I hope your alternative still involves activists knocking on people’s doors and talking to them. This is by far the most effective method of community organising ever invented.

The New Labour training a few years back was that activists should introduce themselves as ‘doing a survey’ and just ask questions about voter identification. When I go canvassing, I say that I’m ‘just calling round from the local Labour Party to see if there’s any problems we can help with or improvements you’d like to see in the local area’ and only then get on (or not) to the questions about voting.

I think there is something fundamentally different about ‘doing a survey’ vs ‘calling round to see if we can help’. The latter delivers immediate electoral and other benefits (people like it, and we help sort out their problems) and also teaches activists about the main problems and ideas that working class people have.

So I don’t think there is a trade-off between real politics and electoral politics, but there might be one between real politics and ‘electoral politics done badly’. I shall await part 4 to find out

Yes, in principle at least that’s a fair point as a strategy going forward, although such a strategy doesn’t need to involve councillors, for whom it is actually more difficult (though not impossible) to engage given their formal role as employers in a local authority; it is the CLP which needs to engage more directly with pubilc sector unions.

I didn’t see much evidence of such ‘fraternization’ betweenpublic and private sector unions, and there’s a good deal of discursive engergy from the right gone into divide and rule tactics (esp re: pensions) since then so the challenge is all the greater. Indeed, even in the public sector, as a nurse shop steward in the 80s being battered by NHS management (tho by 1988 resisting quite well and actually winning major concessions on pay if not the shift to the internal markets, I don’t remember any engagement with anyone from the local authority.

I’m not certain that I am overstating my case, though if you’d have put me in a time machine a couple of years ago and shown me what I’ve just written I would have said so.

Certainly, as I draft I have your (and Dan P’s) electorally-focused leftwingery in mind as something that may in time (in another more thought out version of this I have in mind)which may counterbalance my somewhat stark statements about the doubtful(opp cost) value of what we all engage in pretty well within its own paradigm. To that extent I can foresee that I might modulate stuff somewhat to embrace your countervailing messages about the validity of electoral politics etc.

Even so, at this stage I feel it necessary to set out a strong case in favour of throwing out the vote-winning manual in favour of an approach which definitely treats people like fellow members of the working class rather than fodder (here I pause to acknowledge both that you do not do this, I can tell from afar, but that you know that I know that you know that lots of CLPs do).

As you know, i’ll come bakc to that in section 4 of this five parter.

On the LSC, PCT stuff – yes, you’re dead right. My original plan for the whole six parter was to focus part five on the role of local councillors in the whole, but I do now realise (not least in respect of what I’ve written this evening) that I need to address how we tackle all public spend decision making through intensive investigative reporting at local level combined with intelligent party-based placepersonship and a bit of direct action to round it all off before bedtime.