The party needs to take back control of its campaigns
At the height of the influence of Militant in the Labour Party it was common for members of the Trotskyist Tendency to canvass for the candidates they backed. Many working class voters were alienated by the hard Left takeover of Labour. Some voters, however, stayed loyal. Whenever Militant activists were out on the doorstep and found voters still willing to vote Labour they invariably tried to sell them a copy of Militant’s paper. The result, inevitably, was to alienate the few remaining Labour voters. Now, Momentum is not an entryist party within a party, but it is a separate and distinct brand locally and nationally and Labour lost out in Thursday’s local elections because of this.
First, local elections are just that – local. Their importance to national politics is as much presentational as anything else. And the key to presentation is spin, or technically “expectation management”.
Lord Baker, when he was chairman of the Conservatives, turned the disastrous 1990 local election results into an apparent triumph for the Tories by relentlessly focusing on the importance of Westminster and Wandsworth. When these stayed in Conservative hands Lord Baker successfully declared victory. This year, the Labour Party has achieved a reverse Baker by overclaiming potential success in advance and,
almost inevitably, underperforming. I say Labour, when it was really Momentum and its massed support on social media who touted a “redwash” in London which would see Tory strongholds like Kensington and Chelsea, Wandsworth and Westminster tumble. When this didn’t materialise Labour were seen to have gone backwards.
Secondly, outsourcing activism and organisation to Momentum defines not just your expectations but your face and your image to the public. Even at election time, voters have little contact with party politics. It is estimated the average person spends a maximum of three minutes a week thinking about politics.
This is why social media has gained such a central importance in political campaigning. Rather than trying to find a voter at home by door-knocking, campaigns find people via their smartphones and the channels they
browse. Twitter and Facebook magnify political messages, but this can backfire. Lack of attention to politics doesn’t mean that voters don’t form impressions – and the echo chamber of social media has given two big messages about Labour over the last few months.
One is that the most passionate Corbynites want to give Russia the benefit of the doubt over the poisoning of the Skripals. The other is that they are in denial about the reality of anti-semitism within the Labour Party. The latter lost Labour seats in Barnet with its significant number of Jewish voters. But the former undoubtedly contributed to Tory gains in Derby and Walsall, where working class voters saw it as unpatriotic.
The Labour Party – and particularly its MPS – need to take back control of campaign management. It turns out that New Labour’s “control freakery” brought some benefits.