Respect, Empower, Include: Everyday people. Extraordinary results.

Stronger together. Big tent. Opportunity for all.

Three phrases we’ve all heard within the broad spectrum of the labour movement. If we are to take one thing from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, particularly noting where we stand politically right now, it is absolutely imperative that we start living and breathing such mantras in all we do as thinkers and campaigners on the left.

Unlike much of the Young Fabians’ excellent work over the years, the three publications we are presenting on our website today are not about policy. They are about people, relationships, our values, and the way we on the left organise and campaign. What the 80 members of the Young Fabian and Labour Staff Network delegation to Ohio last October/November saw was not a campaign impossible to emulate, nor one which formed on a radically different basis to any other successful campaign. But they did take part in an organisation that succeeded in spreading its best practice nationwide, which was coherent, attractive and approachable. It was a campaign that recognised the value of individuals and the strength of their collective endeavours. And it gave them a reason to take part in what Gordon Brown has called, people-powered politics.

Respect meant taking seriously the experiences, knowledge, skills and resources that were brought to the table by anyone and everyone. Include meant incorporating that offer when making decisions. And Empower meant the establishment of a structure that didn’t just assign tasks but allowed well-trained and supported volunteers to take real ownership.

In the neighbourhood in Columbus I campaigned in, the canvassing teams were run by volunteer Cecil Webster, a retired colonel from Texas. His military experience was recognised and utilised. And it made him perfect for this role: his skills of motivation kept canvassers plugging away to cover the patch; his sense of discipline ensured the tidiest campaign office you’ll ever see with everything in its place and no panic searches for GOTV sheets as volunteers line up waiting; his sense of humour helped people through the tougher times when they’d had a bad knock or were beginning to tire; and his self-styled ‘after action reports’ which allowed time and space for a proper group debrief, allowing volunteers to learn – semi-formally – from each other.

Internally and externally the campaign understood people and sought to build strong relationships. Relationships that it could then request something of. Alongside the mantra of Respect, Empower, Include, the campaign was frank in its assessment that ‘we build relationships because they are the only way to win’ and it didn’t seek to limit these relationships to its stalwarts. Everyone was not just welcome, but actively pursued to join the fold and trained in what they were doing.

Some Labour supporters will have been active in one seat all their lives; others will have campaigned in different areas of the country. Falling into the latter camp, I know there is some excellent campaigning going on in the Labour Party. But I also know, sadly, that (and not always without reason) the spread of our best campaigning ideas and methods is patchy.

The launch of three publications today will hopefully go some way to addressing this. They chronicle the experience of over 100 Young Fabian and Labour Staff Network members and others who took part in Obama’s campaign and offer ideas for Labour and union campaigns in the UK. From Ohio to Oxford Eastpresents the collective thoughts of the delegation and subsequent workshops and roundtables to offer practical suggestions for your campaigns. Lessons from the Obama campaign is a collection of individual articles written by grassroots participants from the UK. Lessons from the US union campaign for Obama brings together the methods of union campaigning in the US and presents a case for the Labour Party and trade unions to reassess the ways they work together in UK elections. No one is pretending that replication of Obama’s campaign is the golden egg we’ve been reaching out for. But these papers present some ideas that can make a difference.

What is exciting about the present is that it is the left in America who offer the ideas about organising campaigns for Labour to seize. The approach the Obama campaign took fits much better with the values of our movement than it does with our opponents.

We must consider how we interact with voters and each other, alter our attitude to trust, invest in people’s talents and develop them as individuals within our movement. In providing opportunity for all, within our big tent, we can be stronger together. As a party and as a nation.

Please click here for more information on the delegation and to download the publications. Let us know what you think – please comment below.

Adrian Prandle, International Officer, Young Fabian Executive

Additional event this week!

From Ohio to Oxford East
from 6pm, Thursday 30th April 2009
The Abbey pub, Westminster (1 Abbey Orchard Street, SW1P 2LU)

Following the hugely successful Young Fabian & Labour Staff Network delegation to Barack Obama’s campaign in Ohio last year, we are pleased to present three publications. These share the experience of the delegation and others who took part in the campaign, offering many ideas for your grassroots campaigning in the UK.

Please join members of the Young Fabians and Labour Staff Network for an informal drinks gathering at The Abbey pub on Thursday 30th April to mark Obama’s completion of 100 days in office and to discuss the publications.

Kindly RSVP if you intend to attend by emailing Adrian Prandle, International Officer, aprandle@youngfabians.org.uk. For more information on the delegation and to read the publications, please visit the Lessons from America page on the Young Fabian website.

Unions can mobilise to influence the issues the next election is fought over and its outcome

The union vote matters, more so than has been previously realised. 60% of union members in America said they voted for Obama. In the last general election in the UK, only 46% said they voted Labour. Where this was important in the US election where 12% of working people are union members, it is even more important in the UK where union density is more than double that, around 28%.

With a year to go before Gordon Brown must call a general election, these figures alone make a very strong case that of all the lessons the Obama campaign can teach the Labour Party, the most important might be to strengthen their work with the unions.

So what do unions, and the Labour Party in the UK have to learn from the Democrats and US unions?

I’ve worked with trade union officers from the UK and US, as well as Young Fabian colleagues, to put together a paper which I hope goes some way to answering that question.

To be published online here on Thursday 30th, the paper will follow the Wednesday night Young Fabians event: “Will there be a British Barack Obama?” and be part of our celebrations of Obama’s 100th day in office.

It will ask some tough questions of both the Labour Party and the unions, and encourage some of the changes that need to be made so we can work together as effectively as the Democrats and US unions did last year.

So before then, whether you’re a trade union or Labour Party activist, what do you think we can do to work better together in your local area?

The Budget – Whats in it for young people?

Alistair Darling wants to ‘lead the young back to work’ in tomorrows budget, with incentives for re-training and re-skilling. But with career prospects and job opportunities looking worse as the recession deepens, it will be young people who will suffer the most in the tough economic climate.

Many Young Fabian members may have an undergraduate degree, or like me may be taking post-graduate qualifications to boost their employability, but for the thousands of new graduates leaving university in a couple of months, the employment opportunities that were available only a few years ago are disappearing fast.

Companies that are looking for new staff (and many are not) will be overwhelmed with quality applications from people with experience, knowledge and qualifications to match. Recent graduates and those in entry-level jobs will find it more difficult than ever to push forward with their careers and may decide to stay-put on a lower salary until the recovery starts. Anecdotally, after advertising recently for an intern in my office I received three applications from PhD students who were struggling to find employment which utilised their skills.

But this is not all doom and gloom, it offers Alistair Darling a real opportunity to make lasting changes to the prospects of young people in the UK economy and to release their potential rather than stifle it.

Young people are more likely than any generation before them to volunteer and offer their time to community causes and activities. This should be built upon by Labour and new incentives and rewards should be offered to young people to get involved with rewarding projects in their communities if paid employment is not always an option. Practical and essential skills and experience can be built up through volunteering at a charity shop or in a community project involving financial management skills and other soft skills like communication and presentation which employers are quick to pick up.

But the downturn must not be an excuse for pushing young people out of the classroom and into the job market. Education and training continues to offer a strong route to success for young people – across the board, from accounting to bricklaying – and should not be seen by Government as expendable. The Tories promises to slash public spending smack of knee-jerk reaction to a long-term problem. The most damaging thing government could do in the current climate would be to pull-back from funding projects like Building Schools for the Future, educational maintenance allowances, Train to Gain and other investments in education for young people. Now is the time to invest in future generations, not cut them adrift.

If you want to have your say on how the Government should respond to the recession, why not attend the Young Fabian seminar with Treasury Minister Stephen Timms on 6^th May?

Or if you can’t make it and want to ask a question, then post it here as a comment and we’ll make sure it gets raised.

Strengthening Labour – our politics are moral, our practices must be too

One of Barack Obama’s successes last year that isn’t actually discussed at every opportunity is the link between the man and the campaign. The creation of a campaign organisation in the image of its figurehead. Realising through his published writing, the strength in using someone’s real perspective and experience to make a political point, Obama’s campaign succeeded in part through making personal connections such as the sharing of personal stories and journeys between campaign colleagues, between staff and volunteers and between volunteers and voters (and crucially, vice versa). At every opportunity those involved with the campaign were encouraged to interact on a very personal level in order to be able to build relationships with voters. The mirror was also seen through a style of working. ‘No Drama Obama’ was the part-descriptor, part-mantra the campaign used to describe itself and its candidate and the characteristics of this – calm, considered, emotionless and not reactionary (to a degree), the lack of in-fighting and the lack of micro-management – could be seen right down to the neighbourhood organisers.

If this was in any doubt before the weekend, the Labour Party must build a way of working that reflects the morality, fairness and equality of our politics and values. And I mean this in the most thorough of senses: our politicians, in government or not, party staff or those working for politicians, our members, our democratic structures and openness to participation. For too long, many – but especially those in the Westminster bubble – have not admitted or not sought to answer the very evident conflict between maintaining power for power’s sake (be it for the party or for individuals) and doing the right thing, the things we joined the party, or stood for election, to do. As someone who used to work in the bubble, I do not absolve myself. This is no longer anything to do with the electoral cycle, it is simply essential for those things which the Labour Party and its affiliates like the Fabian Society and Young Fabians stand for remaining at the centre of political discourse, action and legislation. This is not about the right versus left of our party, not about pragmatism against values. It is not anti-big tent politics and is definitely not about failing to understand how the media works. It is not about individual personalities. Rather it is about all of us taking responsibility as individuals and within our groups, communities, offices, societies and CLPs, to ensure that the content of what we believe and what we want to do for Britain (and the world) is heard. And empathised with. And trusted.

We can, must, still communicate through the traditional media. We should use new media in innovative ways to engage our supporters and the wider public. We should be realistic that not all policies can please all people at all times. But we must be honest that we want the best for as many people as possible. And we must be honest in how we seek to achieve this.

The slippery slope that Derek Draper/LabourList (for it is unclear how to separate the two) were headed down, could be seen on the BBC’s Daily Politics last month when Andrew Neil failed to referee a horrible and petty argument between Draper and Paul Staines (the video is conveniently on the DP homepage as I write). In a comment on this blog, I argued:

Where I talk about the web being a new Westminster Village, in essence I mean the blogosphere. I think both LabourList and Guido are successful, worth a read, and important in different ways to different audiences. But the Derek Draper and Paul Staines ‘debate’ on today’s Daily Politics on the beeb demonstrates exactly what I mean. Despite the freedoms of the web, the political blogosphere is incredibly insular and dominated by a small number of people.
This may change over time. But right now, for me, it isn’t going to be the most important battleground for Labour to win the next election – or even mobilise support. Actually, it has a lot of potential to be as off-putting as many people find politicians’ speeches or party meetings.

Draper/LabourList had made the mistake of allowing itself to be sucked in to competing with Guido Fawkes instead of ConservativeHome. Perhaps implying this was Staines’ intentional strategy gives him too much credit but the outcome has clearly worked in favour of him and against the Labour movement. I believe Draper’s intentions were good and though Damian McBride’s differed, they were founded upon the quality of intense loyalty. The problem came in judgment. Firstly, that thinking the Guido model blog was in some way significant to Labour/Brown winning the election. Secondly, in misunderstanding that the vast majority of voters only know what is being said on Guido’s site (or prospectively RedRag) when the story becomes big enough, and for ‘big’, you can practically read ‘true’ enough, for the mainstream media to report it. We saw that this weekend. Thirdly, in believing that Guido Fawkes represents the Tory party and therefore Labour must have its own counterpart. An irritant on the other end of the political spectrum to us does not necessarily mean the Tories are ‘winning online’. The right is winning through sites like ConservativeHome because they are having debates, generating ideas, organising campaigns online, but also, and vitally, offline with voter contact. Labour can actually be very effective at this.

Being able to separate real world politics from village stuff is hugely important here and where the failure lied. But it’s a bigger problem that has been bubbling for years and that we must seek to address. In getting caught up over the latest big story we must not forget it comes on the back of a succession of stories on MP’s use of allowances that – objectively, whatever your view of the coverage and the rules in place – has been damaging to Labour. We must quickly separate what goes on and, to a certain extent, are deemed appropriate ways to behave and work in the Westminster village from what we actually stand for. And just as quickly, we must rebuild the former in the image of the latter.

Adrian Prandle, International Officer

End child poverty, who cares?

Last Tuesday the Young Fabians held a roundtable discussion looking at Labour’s commitment to end child poverty in a generation. There was an interesting discussion around a lack of understanding as to what was meant by “end child poverty” and whether low media interest was perhaps the cause or effect of this. However, there was also talk about public apathy towards the issue and what struck me most about our event was the turnout. For me, child poverty is an issue that should be at the heart of Labour policy, surely it’s the very embodiment of social justice, yet there were fewer than twenty people in the room.

It left me wondering, is it that the young just don’t care, perhaps they don’t believe poverty really exists in the UK, or is it that the banner “end child poverty” leaves people uncertain as to what the issue is? I don’t know, but I’m hoping it’s the latter, because if we stop caring about something as fundamental as children’s life chances then I’m not sure what, as a party, we’ve left to offer?