Though Cowards Flinch

This wasn’t supposed to appear here. It was supposed to appear at Labour Uncut.  However, I made a total balls up around saying what I’d do when, and by the time I’d written it they’d already posted this edited version of what I’d already said here.  They are now so bored with me they’ve stopped answering my emails.

But I’ve written it, so here it: the TCF definitive guide to being good at campaigning and winning in unlikely settings, and then getting really bleeding grouchy at no bleeder in the Labour bleeding hierarchy ever listening to a word I bleeding say.

The TCF guide to winning elections

Three years ago, I won my council seat. 

I added 600% to the Labour vote, on a turnout amongst the highest 1% in the country, and became the first ever Labour councillor in this rural area, hitherto put unthinkingly on the ‘unwinnable’ list.  Local Conservatives were, quite literally, stunned to silence on election night.  Mind you, you could have knocked me down with a feather.

The election campaign I ran was, until the last month or two, a ‘single-hander’ because my local party thought I was wasting my time.  No resources were pulled in from the wider campaign, during which we lost two seats to the Tories anyway.

Until May 2010, I was the only Labour councillor in a ward other than the ’heartland’ of Skelmersdale new town.

In May 2009, I had won a tightly contested elected to become leader of the Labour group.

In May 2007, we had held Tanhouse Ward – just about the ‘safest’ seat you can get in Skelmersdale – by 26 votes.  In May 2010, our ‘old warhorse’ councillor Bob, who had reluctantly submitted to my newfangled ways, won by 984 votes against the same Tory candidate, a local woman who’d spent three years campaigning.

In May 2010 we took back four seats for Labour all told, the first Labour gains for nearly a decade, other than my own.  We also held the constituency comfortably enough in the general election, with a swing of less than 2% against Labour. 

Last month, I was re-elected leader of the Labour group by unanimous vote.

That’s a reasonable record of electoral success, I think. 

You might think that the Labour party hierarchy might be quite interested in what I got up to before 2007, and whether or not there’s anything to be learned from the way I’ve done my bit to heal old wounds in the local party since then.

Unfortunately, that’s not been the case.  When I wrote up a 10 page report on ‘how the ward was won’ (available here as a pdf) just after my election in 2007, the regional office wouldn’t even acknowledge it. 

 My face, and my approach to winning elections, didn’t fit.  At HQ level, they still don’t fit, though the personal criticisms of my supposed motivations for increasing the Labour vote so markedly have now abated.

 So it’s very refreshing now to see Labour Uncut do what it’s doing about campaigning.  

It was interesting to read Gisela Stuart’s account of how they tore up the top-down instruction book on how to conduct a campaign, and got on with what was locally appropriate.  It was good to learn a bit about the efforts to keep Broxtowe Labour. 

It was especially good to read my local colleague Jude’s piece about locally made decisions to do away with the ‘glossy’ material provided by the party and go for deliberately ‘homemade’ looking material as part of a successful campaign, which took two of the four seats we won off the Tories.

These reflections from good grassroots activists fit with the emerging picture of the general election, where candidates who laid more emphasis on political organization and proper engagement with electorates did much better than those content to ‘deliver the party message’ to an electorate sick to death of being treated like voter fodder.

That’s why people like John McDonnell defended wafer thin majorities, while New Labour clones up and down the country lost once handsome leads.

The Labour leadership candidates would do well to look at this evidence, and recognize that local activists often know best.  For too long head office and their regional delegates have been seen as the experts, and for too long millions of pounds have been wasted on glossy material that heads straight for most people’s bin at election time.

If you want to win elections, you could do worse than stick to the following basic principles:

1) Voters like to be treated like adults

Give people the full story. So many Labour leaflets are obsessed with getting pretty pictures in that there’s no room to tell people anything.  People appreciate news of what’s going on, not whether you’ve just met a minister. 

I don’t deliver leaflets; I deliver newsletters.  They are often 12 pages long, have no pictures, and have up to 50 times as many words as the ‘traditional’ leaflets that Labour HQ would have you put out.  Yet I know that most people read it because a) they know it’s going to contain relevant news; b) it does.

2) Not everything is a ‘Labour achievement’

Too many leaflets only cover what the local Labour party has been obsessing about.  Try to cover a wide range of news, and celebrate the achievements of others (check with them first that it’s ok).  This approach will generate more news as more people come forward for inclusion, and ‘their’ news become ‘Labour news’ by osmosis.

3)  Stay political, stay challenging

 Just because you aim to please doesn’t mean you have to follow the mainstream. Stick with your political principles and ensure that theyshow through in your written material. 

Lots of people in my own ward have a bit of a thing about gypsies.   That’s not stopped me writing articles sticking up for their local rights, and criticising the Tory council for its underhand behaviour.  People respect honest comment.

4) Glossy presentation counts for little if there’s no substance

 Don’t worry about gloss.   My newsletters, seven years after the first one, are still in ‘Word’, and printed in black and white.  No-one minds, and some people appreciate the fact that it’s clearly a local effort.

 5)  Every voter counts

Go to everywhere in the ward/area.  No house/flat is a no-go area just because it looks like it.  Don’t try to second guess where people are coming from; you’ll probably be wrong.   If people live half a mile up a track, get on your bike.  It’s those votes that’ll win it.

6) Voter ID is important to us, but not the voters

Don’t be scared to leave your voter ID quite late.  You’ll get a warmer welcome and a straighter answer if you’ve already been in contact about something else that actually matters to them. 

Do you like cold calls?  Of course you don’t.  Warm your cold calls up.  I spent my campaign introducing myself as ‘the –  you know - the bloke with the Bickerstaffe Record’.

All this worked for me, and is starting t work elsewhere in my borough.  I added 600% to my local vote, and I’m a desperately boring middle-aged fart with a face like mouldy pizza. Just imagine what you can do if you’ve got talent and looks as well.