As the Labour Party begins coming to terms with the scale of the 2019 Election defeat, I felt it was the right time to put some of my thoughts out there as an (they tell us not to call ourselves) ordinary member of the Stockton South Constituency Labour Party. In the time since joining the party I've come to know some amazing people, and seen the selflessness with which some of our activists give all of their time to the unglamorous side of local politics — working with people who simply wouldn't have a voice, if it weren't for the organisational network which the Labour Party provides.
This underlying foundation of good people, doing the best they can to shield some of the most vulnerable people in our society from the vicious and calculated Tory attacks upon them and their community, is at once the light at the end of the tunnel, in terms of rebuilding our party for the future to win power again, as it tells the proud history of our movement and its roots in the industries which built our nation.
But we also have to face the fact that the 2019 election result tells us something about our failure to communicate the importance of that work to the broader electorate, as much as it tells us things which a small but vocal minority of activists I've also met along the way simply don't want to acknowledge about the changing times we now live in. So my hope for this blog is that it starts conversations about how we might avoid repeating some of the same mistakes we made in the Corbyn era, as we move into the '20s under a new leader.
So, I want to kick things off by talking about my belief that part of the blame for our terrible General Election campaign has to land with the Labour Party press team. Policies which are popular with Labour members don't automatically become popular with the electorate if we don't clearly explain the thinking behind them, as well as explaining how they're going to be practically implemented. And the response — or lack thereof — to some of the attacks upon those policies, not just from the usual tabloids, points to a much bigger issue which the Labour Party must address when it comes to the way in which the views of members are fed up the chain of command.
Remember, this was set in the context of daily abysmal polling numbers and that infamous piece to camera by the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg, where she appeared to admit to having witnessed Conservative Party candidates break election law by gaining access to postal ballots.
Now, in contrast, think about where we were when, as Labour activists, we first started to have a conversation about the digital divide — the parts of our country that simply cannot connect to decent high speed internet. More specifically, those parts of BT which are already publicly funded because of BT's commitment to maintain legacy networks, which were established when the UK's phone system was a division of the then state-owned General Post Office.
For me, this conversation was one of the first I had with "someone off the telly" back when I joined the Party. It was a five minute exchange with a then shadow cabinet minister, and while we didn't go into huge detail it was clear to me that this person shared my discomfort at the idea of a telecoms company the size of BT receiving public money to maintain, for example, phone boxes and connectivity to rural communities (holes, poles and wires), while the profits from these areas of BT's business goes to shareholders.
We should have been having a conversation with the general public about their money being used to subsidise one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world, ever since the mass adoption of the internet by ordinary consumers in the 1990's — not necessarily as a major front-line policy, but at the very least a way to tell a broader story about the practical ways in which a Labour government would bridge the digital divide, by using money currently being handed over by the taxpayer to wealthy shareholders, instead of being used to rebuild infrastructure which is crying out for modernisation - being as we are in the UK by some estimates 12 years behind many other countries in the EU, who already enjoy high-speed data coverage, even in some of the most remote locations.
With an effective strategy for communicating this to the electorate, Labour could have had at least four years to use it as yet another example of how far behind other EU countries the UK has fallen, while the general public were being told by the Tories that all of these issues would be fixed "the day after Brexit". But instead of Labour being able to point out that this happened on their watch, and in-fact has nothing whatsoever to do with our membership of the EU, we instead provided the Tories all the cover they needed to avoid taking the blame, whilst also managing to appear as if this so-called Free Broadband policy was being made up as we were going along — even though the rationale behind it was drawn from conversations which Labour councillors have with their residents on the doorstep week in, week out. Indeed, this problem is compounded in Local Authorities up and down the country, particularly in relation to new-build housing estates, because the cable company telecoms providers such as Virgin Media are under no such statutory obligation as those placed upon BT to even install let alone maintain reliable high-speed voice and data services.
And so, rather than making an informed decision on this issue, the only message the voters heard was "Labour lagging in the polls attempt to bribe the electorate with free internet by renationalising BT", when the real message should have been, "Remember that Telecommunications giant we all used to own until Thatcher sold it at rock bottom prices to her criminal friends? Why don't we use it to take back control of our very own red white and blue, post-Brexit Information Technology Infrastructure, instead of buying a system riddled with spyware from the bloody Chinese" - or, at least, rather more delicately chosen words to that effect.
Members of the Party up and down the country, who work in or have a good understanding of the telecommunications industry, not least members of the affiliated communication workers unions, could have helped the Labour Press team devise an elegant, easy to understand policy in this area, which we could have taken onto the doorsteps in those communities which struggle with poor internet connectivity, while pointing out that similar policies have already been approved by the European Parliament, despite the Tory lie that the EU is in-fact standing in its way.
Instead, we announced something which seemed so desperate and gimmicky, that we may have to wait another 10 years, before we can even begin to start making the argument in favour of nationalising those parts of our critical national infrastructure, which need massive investment now more than ever before.
And yet there appears to be a near total denial of how own-goals like this have, under Corbyn, been allowed to happen over and over again. Indeed, if some of the comments on social media from the Momentum contingent since the 2019 election defeat are anything to go by, it would appear that these failings are not only set to continue, but that those responsible for them are elevated to the status of "real socialist", having passed one or more of the requisite purity tests, where electoral humiliation, not being a Blairite, and a reputation for railroading every CLP and branch meeting with their received opinion, is mistaken for a kind of passion no-one tainted with the stench of having been in the Party when it was electable could possibly comprehend.
In my next blog entry I would like to talk about why I will be voting in the Labour Leadership election for Lisa Nandy. I am happy that at the time of writing this, my CLP has just nominated Lisa for leader, with Angela Rayner as deputy.
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