by Jon Ashworth Published 13 July, 2015
In the wake of our shock defeat, the temptation is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But don't write off ground game.
A Labour canvasser out on the campaign trail. Photo: Getty Images
“Perfect your organisation, educate your followers, look to the register, spread the light and the future is yours” was a Keir Hardie quotation Harold Wilson was fond of reciting when urging the Party to take what we these days call the ‘ground war’ seriously.
Of course knocking on thousands of doors, delivering thousands of leaflets and delivering thousands of targeted direct mails isn’t sufficient on its own to win a national election. A party also needs a leader who can command broad appeal, a policy offer that hits the sweet spot offering in today’s terminology ‘hope’ while remaining credible with a national message that connects.
But the “ground war” does matter so I would caution our new leadership team against completely throwing overboard the 5 million conversation strategy and trying to replace it with vague touchy-feely platitudes about community organising. To do so risks learning the wrong lessons from the 2015 election. We didn’t lose the 2015 general election because of our efforts on the ground. An effective ground war is necessary to get us over the line in marginal seats when the ‘air war’ of national messaging and policy platform makes us competitive.
Unfortunately the 2015 results shows we were a considerable distance from being competitive in the vast majority of target seats. But there are lessons to be learnt from the performance of our ground campaign.
Firstly voter ID or ‘community organising’ should never be an either/or. The best organised campaigns are those that do year round door knocking alongside running campaigns on community issues. It maybe that the top-down target of 5 million conversations forced parties to place too much emphasis on door knocking at the expense of other campaign activities but there is evidence that the CLPs with the highest contact rates in 2015 also got the best results.
Secondly, the real value of the new system is that it allows local campaigners to genuinely build a movement where constituents who might not want to be full members but share our values can have a direct stake in the Party’s future and hopefully become active as well.
Thirdly, modern doorstep campaigning is about so much more these days than just boots on the ground. Political campaigning should never be about segmenting voters into patronising categories but smart use of big-data to support local campaigners on the ground is effective. Labour’s field team at head office are more than capable of analysing big data but we simply didn’t have the finances to compete on the same scale as the Tories until the last few months of the campaign. We can’t allow that to happen again in this Parliament.
Our new leader and deputy already have a bulging in-tray waiting for them in September. They will very quickly need to start preparing for a tough set of elections in 2016. These elections will be part of the long road to 2020 where our biggest challenge is making Labour competitive again in a whole raft of seats where we lost so badly in 2015. Of course the national political scene will play a massive part in how we do in those constituencies but like their four-time election winning predecessor Harold Wilson, our new leader will need to both “perfect the organisation” as well as “spread the light.” That means working with activists at all levels, future candidates, MPs and our brilliant Labour staff to craft an appealing message with a winning ground operation that ensures the future is indeed ours.