On leadership, teams and the grassroots

When I was out on the doorstep last week, I thought we, the Labour Party, were running a really positive, unified election campaign. A week later, with the Labour leadership contest already zig-zagging through the party like a drunken comet, I wonder what went wrong within the party itself. Maybe I am just disgusted with all the mudslinging at Ed Miliband. I feel the mud is oozing from my computer and TV screen, and it is seeping too much into my life and making me a very unkind and grumpy person. So I am asking questions, without having the answers, but some things do remind me of what happened in places I used to work in. Of course, any resemblance to real life is purely coincidental...

Leadership and teams

Of course Ed Miliband made mistakes. He made loads of them, some small, some real big ones. To err is human, after all, to forgive not possible in politics? For me, the biggest one was Scotland, where events were just allowed to happen, while more engagement by Ed and the Shadow Cabinet as well as better policies for Scotland could have made a difference. However, a leader does not exist in a bubble, ok, in this case maybe a bit in the Westminster bubble, but he (using he here since I am mostly talking about Ed) has a team, or most likely more than one. 

Did Ed ever have a loyal team? Can a party leader ever feel comfortable when so many of those surrounding him (especially in the Shadow Cabinet) are after his job (that’s the same in other parties and in business)?  From talking to him at a meeting that was about a serious and contentious issue, I never got the feeling that Ed was in any way unwilling to be challenged, but he listened to our arguments, asked questions, and told us where he disagreed with us. I also read that Ed led what is called a very inclusive leadership style. So why do former colleagues now come out of the woodwork, loudly attacking policies they agreed to and campaigned for seemingly enthusiastically only a few days ago, and discard them like old chocolate wrappers? Worse, did they let the unpaid but enthusiastic footsoldiers (ie the members) spend their spare time doing all the canvassing, while not believing in the policies themselves? Did they never tell Ed before that they did not like them? Either this is just very undignified electioneering for the leadership now, or there must have been quite a lot of syncophancy going on. There is always pressure to agree, to come to a decision, sometimes it is not so much pressure, but more of an urgent need to get something done, so yes, sometimes you do agree to something you aren’t that comfortable with in a rush, but if it’s something that jars with your values, than you should be courageous enough to fight against it. I want politicians to stand up for their beliefs.

Even leaders need support, in public and in private – without a good supportive team or teams they can rely on, leaders cannot lead. Only in the last two years or so, did our team in the Labour Party in Northern Ireland develop into an effective fighting force. We are still growing as a team, but the one thing I know is that we can rely on each other while still being able to argue and disagree. We have each other’s back, so to speak. With all these critics crawling out of the woodwork I wonder what was happening amongst the party’s leading team/s, the Shadow Cabinet and Parliamentary Labour Party? We all wanted to win this, right? ‘It’s brutal at the bottom and lonely at the top’, I wrote in February when musing about the election. While enthusiastic people on Twitter ran Twitterstorms against the Tories and for Ed, did the leading team do enough to support him?  I’ve seen this neglect in workplaces, where somebody at the top was left alone to fight our battle, and it ain’t nice, I am telling you! 

If people thought that Ed wasn’t a good leader for years, why did they not challenge him to a leadership contest say two years ago?  Why were they seemingly happy when they were not? Is it a case of ‘no guts’?  The same happened after Gordon Brown stepped down. Suddenly he was a monster. But if he had been SUCH a monster, why continue working for him? Most politicians never end up on the dole, they easily find a job through connections, so why stay and suffer?

With so many people apparently knowing Labour’s defeat before it happened (you always know in hindsight...), if this really was the case, then there was a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy going on. If you can’t believe you can win, you won’t. Certainly to me it seems that everybody was enthusiastic and positive, and Ed more so than anybody. So, if there was worry out the outcome, why did this worry not reach Ed? Even if Ed didn’t listen (which I don’t believe), surely, something should have got to a man I consider being genuine, kind, caring and sincere.  If nothing got to him, then maybe the structures are wrong?  A leader is not a manager. He is supposed to be the public face and the visionary of the party, while other people do the managerial, practical stuff.  These are two different shoes, and I have worked in a place where these two were mixed up, and it caused endless discussions and problems.

Of course, the leader should know what is going on, and intervene in management if things go pear-shaped, but in a big organisation, that is often tricky. Information gets lost and never reaches the leader, gatekeepers withhold information to play their own power-games or for other more benign reasons, or information is misinterpreted. There was a particularly nasty article recently, which claimed important polling information was not passed on. Now, this sounds like shooting oneself in the foot big time, and it does defy logic, so that’s why I am suspicious of that article, but if people withhold information, then really, that should be looked at. If information doesn’t flow, then we have a problem. This leads me to the next issue.

Party democracy and the grassroots

I wonder if party structures stifle leaders and the leadership team?  Did we lose because our party structures are too centralised and allow little input into policy from the grassroots, CLPs and regions? 

Despite Ed’s ambition to create a movement and to have Labour in the community, this didn’t happen. Many CLPs are poorly staffed and rely solely on part-time workers and volunteers. This means, the party cannot support the people as they should, and is barely visible in the community. No wonder that voters think that the only time they see party members is before the elections.

Not much information flows through the party to the top – when we talked to Ed directly in January, there were quite a few things he had never heard before, and we’ve been telling people for years!

Labour needs to become much more a grassroots movement than it is now. Of course a party needs structure and leadership, but too many layers of structure and no say for members kills any vibrancy, new ideas and the connection with the electorate. 

Conference seems to serve only the press, we show them how united (and bland) we are – it allows no dissent, no new ideas, no interesting speeches, only repetitive ‘I am a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate from...’ pre-written and well-staged lines. Women’s Conference is much better with open mike sessions, because there is less press in attendance. The leadership actually hears what ordinary women members are saying. 

When I went to the Special Conference in Birmingham in March this year, I felt really disappointed. The conference itself was great, but far too short, and there was only one Q&A session with Ed Balls and Rachel Reeves instead the promised workshops and more engagement with members. Amongst delegates, there was a sense of ‘is this it?’

During the election campaign, I believe Ed really came to life when he was out on the campaign trail, talking to CLPs and members, but sadly we never saw much of it before. I don’t think that’s just Ed, there are some of the party leadership who actually talk to members at conference, but not all of them – and fewer ‘mingle’ in less formal settings. If you are lucky, you might get a visit from an MP or Shadow Cabinet member in your constituency – some are more amenable to it than others.

At conference, we should have a day where there is no press at Conference Hall. Let the members talk freely, let there be fierce debate, and let it all out. No prepared speeches, no staged messages of support, just honest words. This would do the party a lot of good, and would connect the leaders to their members again. There is too much elite-thinking, hierarchy, ‘heirs to the succession’ beliefs, and aloofness.

We now hear too much about the leadership contenders, but not enough about us, the party members. We need to be asked, we need to write, blog, speak up and reclaim the party. We are the party. We pay our dues, come out to support candidates, travel to conference, and many of us worked their behinds off to get Labour elected with no pay and no sleep.  

Maybe that’s the most important bit about the leadership contest now. Perhaps that’s the answer I am looking for. It’s about us – the members!

Why Labour lost – Questions and more questions...

Bewildered, shocked, bruised and with a permanent heartache, I look back on Labour’s election defeat and try to make sense of it. I’ve been trying to write this now for a week, but still don’t feel much wiser, ok maybe this week’s events made me just a bit wiser, but my mind is awfully fussy these days. So, here you go! I don’t know it all, but here are a few things I do know:

• ·         We  lost in Scotland to a (nationalist) self-proclaimed anti-austerity party (still need proof if they mean it)
• ·         Apparently we lost in ‘middle’ England, because we were too ‘left’
• ·         We lost to the Greens because we were not left enough
  
• ·         We lost to UKIP because we seemingly neglected the traditional working class
• ·         We lost because the Lib Dem vote collapsed and went to their coalition partner, the Tories, instead of us (a bit like the female spider eating their mate, if you know what I mean)
• ·         We lost because of a five years’ hate campaign by the right-wing media against Ed Miliband -he stood up against them and against vested interests, so it is kind of obvious that they did not like it. If you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes true. Now that Chuka Umunna claims to have pulled out of the Labour leadership contest because of press intrusion, it emphasises this point even more (although I don’t quite believe that this was the only reason Chuka left). How Ed could actually bear all this for five years is beyond me, and I admire the man even more for it.
• ·         We lost because Ed and the leadership team neglected Scotland (in the same way as they neglected us in NI, even if our cases are different)

What next?

First of all, forget about people who were irrelevant 5 or even 10 years ago and want to stick their ore in. Of course, everybody is entitled to their opinion, but not everybody is entitled to speak for ‘the party’. Don’t mistake frequent TV and press coverage for present authority.

We need to collect all the information we can get about the election to have data for analysis, not just opinion. We have more members in our party than any political party, we had masses of volunteer canvassers and helpers, and ‘4 million conversations on the doorstep’ in all parts of the UK except NI (but teams of NI canvassers were out in Chester and Stranraer), so we should have good information about what voters were telling us. We might not get this information from the leadership contenders, but we will get it from our members, branches and CLPs. It should be collected and analysed. So here is an example, well, my own.

What I heard on the doorstep: 

Talking to voters on the doorstep in Chester and Stranraer, I noticed that the Bedroom Tax and zero-hours contracts were issues that were often mentioned by people who were voting Labour. Voters who were considering voting Labour often decided to vote Labour because they were concerned about these issues.  These were certainly winning policies (and rightly so!)

What came up a few times with voters was ‘you only come to our door at election time’, which is and shows that constituents feel neglected and unappreciated by parties. However, a lot of Labour voters told me how much they appreciated the local Labour councillors, and how they were helped by them. 

What I heard often were ‘you are all the same’ and ‘voting makes no difference’, showing alienation from politics. If voters think we are all the same, then it means, Labour needs to distinguish itself more from the other parties. I don’t think ‘out-Tory-ing’ the Tories would be a good idea.  They do Tory best, so let’s leave them at that. 

Not knowing that voting can make a difference shows lack of political knowledge and education (or people are just too busy to care about something that seems so far removed from their lives). More political education work needs to be done on the ground, ie talking to people, and also in schools. Quite a bit has been done online, but perhaps not enough. We also need to look at the registration and voting system to see how democratic and inclusive it really is (and we kind of know it is not).

Comments about Ed’s leadership were more frequent in February, and hardly existing in May, which means that his campaign was perceived as positive. A few times Labour voters told me: ‘You picked the wrong brother’ – which I now think is quite extraordinary, after all, this was nearly 5 years after the leadership contest and much water had gone under the bridge. We should have knocked that argument on its head a long time ago – the Tories of course kept rehashing it, and it is now being spread again by enthusiastic Blairites, hoping for their saviour’s return, but this should not have been an issue after all those years. Or is it a case of, the political elephants never forget? Sorry to be sarcastic, but maybe after David Miliband’s sudden re-appearance and getting his moment of revenge, this is the end of that myth. 

What I also heard from a few former Labour voters was that they never forgave the party for the Iraq war, and they are still angry at Tony Blair. Those wounds do run deep, and no matter how much you tell them that we are a different Labour Party now, there is still no closure. Maybe that is another thing the party never put to bed and moved on from.

‘It’s the economy stupid’ also came up, and those who brought up the argument that Labour trashed the economy when they were in government were what I think either Tories or swing voters. Again, more myth-busting should have been done previously.

UKIP supporters were mostly focusing on immigration (obviously) or said they wanted some kind of ‘change’, but didn’t define that change. There was a sense that UKIP was more ‘for the people’.

In Stranraer, SNP voters who were previous Labour voters told me of their sense that Labour had betrayed Scotland. 

There were an awful lot of undecided voters, even on polling day! I don’t believe all were ‘shy Tories’, but some voters really went to the polling station and decided in the booth, which again makes me suspect there is on the one hand an alienation from the political system, and the other hand a confusion about Labour’s message and what we stand for.

This is only my experience, and although I focused more on the negative than the positive, I also got wonderful supportive comments and thumbs up, and love for the Labour movement, and a sense that we were winning.  Well, we did win in Chester, so that was true.

If we pool all the canvassing experiences together, I think we can get a good idea of where we as a party have to work on, and if we do, we will only become stronger and better! We really owe it to the people to win again, don’t we?

On failure

Had a chat with a good friend from Germany yesterday who commiserated me on Labour’s election defeat, since she knew how much I worked for a successful outcome. When I told her that the Labour leader Ed Miliband resigned, she was like: ‘resigning has become the norm now, hasn’t it? Same here. As soon as somebody makes a mistake, they resign. What about using their experience, learn from mistakes and keep going?’

I explained to her, that in my view (and having met Ed), it would somehow go against Ed’s sense of fairness and honour to stay on after such an election result, but it made me think. A lot.

At a time when some people have appeared on TV and in the press who hadn’t had much to do with this election or elections for quite a while, but are eager to peddle to us the idea that going back to the political ideas of the election in 1997 as a quick fix because that was ‘a winner’ (yes, but in another century!), I want to look at failure. 

Does losing an election make you a loser or a total failure, such a failure that you now have to be wiped off the political map, crawl under a rock and no longer have the right to speak? 

First of all, yes, the leader takes it on the chin, but not one person can be totally responsible for it all. A party is a huge machine, there is a leadership team, there are advisors and structures that can either help or hinder the flow of ideas, there are routines and sudden occurrences, there is excitement, there are rather boring periods, there are elections and there are blind-spots. Of course, the leader leads, and a lost election is a failure, but a big failure made out of small failures all over the place. And there are also the things that went right.

My take on failure is rather based on what American friends tell me about failure: if you have never failed and fallen hard, then you have learnt nothing! I am told that American business leaders who fail badly and recover again after learning from their mistakes are more respected than those who had a plain sailing all along.

I have failed so many times in my own life, maybe not quite as spectacularly as losing an election, but certainly trying to make it as a freelancer and running a business are also areas you can fail badly. I have pulled the duvet over my face thinking I never recover and that my life is over, but these were the situations I learnt the most from. Not that I particularly wanted that experience, thank you very much, but still I haven’t given up trying, and I am certainly growing. 

It is easy to gloat from the outside, it is easy to bring in people who haven’t done much for the party in years and pay them to spout their rather unwanted wisdom, it is easy for the press to stir up the soap opera of family discord, but one fact is clear, if there is a gap at the top, vultures are circling, and although Ed said he has stepped back so that honest debate can take place, well, it’s not really honest without him, is it?

We need to learn from our mistakes, but if the main person who led us is gone, we will learn nothing and improve little. We will have a shiny new leader who may or may not have been in the previous leadership team, who shall suddenly make it all better. No, making it better is a process. After the last election defeat, there was a need to change course, and a need for a new leader because there had been a long period of discord. The party was split. This was seemingly not the case this time, the party seemed by most accounts pretty united under Ed’s leadership, and it seems that most members supported the direction it was going (ok, we weren’t exactly asked, but also didn’t leave in droves, in fact, membership increased and is still on the up). 

We all know better in hindsight, but to say defeat was a foregone conclusion is telling us, the unpaid footsoldiers who came out en mass to knock on doors weekend after weekend culminating in a 4 day gruelling slog right until the polls closed, that you sent us out while not believing we could win that battle? So we were sweatening it out, believing in the party and our party leadership’s vision with, while some of you were sharpening your knives for a new leadership contest already? If yes, we were fooled, and will certainly not forget that in a hurry. However, I don’t believe that. We thought we could win this, but we didn’t. So what now?

We all need to learn from our mistakes, but if we just change leadership and come up with new buzzwords that are endlessly repeated like ‘aspirations’ and ‘voters with aspirations’ (huh?), we might not learn anything. 

Ed made many mistakes (more than I can count on my two hands), but he also got many things right. He is a genuine, caring, sincere and witty politician. Maybe not the most spontaneous speaker, he nevertheless was willing to participate in all leadership debates that were on offer, unlike Mr Cameron who chickened out on as many as he could get away with.  He wanted as many people as possible to hear our policies. He inspired young people, he took risks and by talking to Russell Brand (like him or not) showed young people how important it is to vote and to get involved in politics. He spoke truth to power, he took vested interests on, he dared to be himself and yes, be odd at times, but show me the person who has never done anything odd, and I show you an empty suit. He was gracious under attack and showed people like me, who hate to be embarrassed in public and say the wrong thing that it is actually not a big deal. Making mistakes should also not be a big deal, you learn from them and will not repeat them. Ed never pretended to be perfect, and thus allowed us to be imperfect, too. He showed me that you can show greatness even when you don’t look ‘right’ in a society that tells us all how to look like all the time. And sadly, his defiance in how a leader should look like and speak, was never quite accepted by many people who still don’t believe you can be a leader and not look like what a leader is expected to look like. OK, that was quite a mouthful, but well, you get the jist of it, I hope.

And we call such a person a failure, weak or loser??? 

We – and not just Ed – lost an election. I still feel emotionally so bruised as if I had wrestled with a dinosaur, but I don’t consider the last months spent in the election campaign nor our policies as a total failure. We had good policies, we had a leader I (and many others) strongly believed in (or otherwise I wouldn’t have got my behind over to England and Scotland that often) and we had fantastic candidates, too. Things went wrong, but if we now roll on the floor in a collective mea culpa, go on about Red Ed or Ed the loser, Ed who we can blame everything on and get off scot free, we will just stay on the floor.

Let’s dust ourselves up, take a hard look at what went wrong in all areas we actually made mistakes and also those which may have been out of our control, and get on with it. With Ed, not without him. 

As a historian, I know how quickly things can change (which is the thing most people fear, but it happens all the time). I know that you can rise from total ‘failure’ to ‘winning’ very quickly, just look at the SNP who lost the Scottish Independence Referendum but won the elections with a landslide nine months later.

I would take Ed back as leader in a heartbeat, but he might not want that. However, we need him back at least to get his input into the debate about how to move forward. I for sure want to know what he thought went wrong, and would prefer that this happens at a large members’ meeting somewhere central where members from all over the UK can come together and slug it out – without any press presence. I don’t want my party direction dictated by the newspapers or political programmes on TV. At the same time, we need to become active and start resisting the Tory policies which are on the horizon. If we lie down now in some kind of guilty navel gazing without learning anything, now that would be failure!