Though Cowards Flinch

This, lest you need reminding, is my five step organisational action plan for the local Labour left.  This five step plan is itself the fourth part of a wider six part series on the Labour left generally.  When I’m done I’ll set it out all as a single pdf file.

Steps 1 and 2 of the action plan were about how the Left might take over the local parties again, and how it should refocus its efforts on engagement with the working class, not least through engagement with the unions.

 Step 3, which has met with a ‘cautious’ reception to date, is the ‘big idea’, which seeks both to reclaim real power for a revitalized membership, and to draw in further membership from outside (ex and non-members) with the real promise of democratic centralist influence over party affairs and ultimately party policy.

 Step 4 brings us back to earth, and focuses on how we ‘campaign’ as local parties, and what ‘campainging’ should actually mean. 

 I believe we should seek this transition even if Step 3 – important as it is – doesn’t come off, because changing the way we do things at local level, and becoming more successful both non-electorally and electorally, may draw in resources and power from the centre even in the absence of the radical shifts I propose we should struggle for with our trade union comrades.

 It’s a little schematic, but currently this is what campaigning means for many Labour activists all around the country:

 1.  Printing leaflets with messages about how well the local Labour representatives (MP, councilors, candidates) are doing and how good the Labour government is, asking for help to deliver leaflets, and a grumble sheet destined for a) the contact database b) the casework list of the relevant councilor or MP;

 2.  Delivering the leaflets;

 3.  Canvassing with the national database sheets to hand, identifying voter preference, and picking up case work problems.  This is on the phone or on the doorstep;

 4.  Entering the data into the database;

 5.  Campaign meetings, often separate from the CLP main body or executive, to co-ordinate the drafting, the printing, the canvassing, the finance for it all, the timetable, and to draw up an action plan;

And that, essentially, is that.  It’s focused primarily on winning elections, via ‘visibility’ of candidates, and by making sure the short electoral season is run efficiently, getting to ‘promises’ and ‘undecideds’

 Certainly, there’s more room for the political message with the new canvassing system and set of questions, if you’re a good enough canvasser, but in the end the objective remains information gathering, storage, analysis and electoral use.

 I know these things because I’m good at them; none of it’s rocket science.

But it is, essentially, crap. 

When done my most people, and most CLPs it treats people like numbers and fails to engage at all meaningfully.  That’s why people see us coming from behind the tweaked curtain and don’t answer the door.  That’s why people without babies in the bath upstairs say they’ve got the baby in the bath upstairs (who would generally leave a baby in the bath upstairs?).

Even the very best canvassers – those with the confidence born not just of doing it a lot but also the knowledge base to respond, to draw issues together, to make an action plan in the head as you go down the street – have all heard the less experienced canvasser two doors down saying something, or using an approach that makes you want to a) cringe b) try and get some more training sorted c) cringe.

 Come on, admit it, you excellent canvassers (you know who you are).  You know who the people are in your CLP that make your heart sink ever so slightly when someone other than them runs the board (and what’s that running the board about, anyway?).

 No, we need to do campaigning differently.  We need to make it a campaign, as in the military sense of the term – a struggle for victory, before another struggle for victory in a long war.

 In my mind’s eye, there’ll be one big indication of getting campaigning right.  That’ll be when we have campaign meeting which have an agenda about more than one campaign, and a slot for new campaigns.

 Sure, lots of campaigns will still involve doorstepping and time on the phone,  and there will also always be some scope for Dan’s opening line (see comment 9): ‘I’m just calling round from the Labour party to see if there’s any problems we can help you with or any improvement you’d like to see in the area’. In fact that’s almost word for word what I say when I’m just out and about.

 But that’s not enough in itself, because the problems get atomized, and councilors and activists end up becoming cheap council customer service staff rather than people involved in politics. 

Rather, we must have the courage of our socialist convictions, and trust people to vote for us at election time if we campaign for them on all the other things that matter.

 It’s not that this isn’t done in places, and Dan points to excellent examples of it in both John McDonnell’s constituency and Liam Byrne’s, but we need to make it the accepted form of campaigning.  The features that a new socialist campaigning should have include:

 1.  Newsletters which provide information not just about what Labour’s up to, but about what’s going on, and in particular about where there is injustice;

 2.  Newsletters which invite contribution and which actually pick up those contributions and take them forward;

 3.  A willingness of CLP activists to engage with non-Labour action, and to take the Labour hat off while engaging, but to ensure that it is fed back into newsletters (and accompanying websites);

 4.  A conscious move away from a simply focus on candidate ‘visibility’ to proper engagement;

 5.  A move towards the development of social enterprise/co-operative publication of newsletters, with people (not necessarily Labour members) getting paid to do, in the manner of the LeftNewMedia-related proposals set out, in relation to printed material, by Dave here;

 6.  A willingness and even determination not simply to focus campaigning efforts on housing areas, but to get into workplaces, especially with a view to unionization, initially through newsletter drops to canteens etc. in places where we know people will chew over what’s written with work colleagues (this was very effective as a measure when I was a trade unionist in hospitals);

 Is that an easy shift?

 Of course it isn’t.  Most active campaigners have never known anything other than the Labour canvassing board, and even members who still don’t get the rationale of the canvass board and data entry/analysis tend to pretend that they’re up to dare with it all.

 The key pint is, though, that the focus on Contract Creator and all that goes with it is a huge opportunity costs, and also creates both an intra-party cultural blockage to ‘proper’ campaign and worker struggle.

 Controversially, I know, what leftwing CLP should do at an early stage is to get rid of contact creator, get rid of the canvass boards and the regular Saturday mornings, and thus make a clear statement; we are about socialist campaigning, not number crunching.

 The effects of our Voter ID has can be significant when it comes to election time, but the remain relatively marginal compared with bigger swings in popular feeling, whether that be about who to vote for, or whether to vote for any of the bastards at all. 

Much better, I contend, to put all that energy and time into connecting more properly with working people, and have the confidence to know that efforts will be repaid (and of course, an early newsletter can send out that message).

Of course it can’t happen before this general election.  I’m realistic.  We are too set in our ways to make it happen now, and not enough CLPs are under leftwing control to give it the critical mass it needs to take hold,

But along with Steps 1 to 3, it should be part of the grand plan to move away what’s been imposed on us by a New Labour hierarchy keen to make us doorstep cannon fodder.

 In step 5, I’ll be looking at working with the rest of the best of the left. That may be a day or two away, as I am now officially ill.