Following the ‘hidden landslide‘ of 2010, identified by Joan Ryan in Progress last year, Labour now faces majorities of more than 10,000 in seats like Hemel Hempstead and Wimbledon. We held constituencies like these for two terms until 2005; now we are in third place there, and local Tory MPs have built up a personal vote and entrenched themselves. So the road ahead for Labour may seem an uphill struggle – but a solution does present itself.
Labour should take a different approach to winning these seats back, ideally within two terms. Part of the solution is to take a long view when it comes to its candidates by introducing selections for ‘long-term candidacies’ in seats that the party believes are not on our frontline of targets for 2015 – both a tortoise and a hare approach is needed for winning back key seats. To do this, the party needs to reform itself to allow ‘tortoise’ candidates the time and means to reach their destination.
The process would initially work like any other selection. Candidates put their names forward and members then select a candidate. However, after the election the candidate, should he or she be unsuccessful, is automatically reselected via a trigger ballot, similar to how sitting MPs are currently reselected.
This system would hugely benefit local CLPs in constituencies that are not frontline targets. Contesting these seats would cease to become something aspiring MPs use to polish their CVs, but would instead help attract high-calibre candidates who buy into the vision that becoming the MP for this constituency can be achieved through hard work and dedication. The trigger ballot could be combined with a ‘candidate’s contract’ between the prospective parliamentary candidate and regional party to ensure that he or she acts as a campaign leader in the seat. Part of the contract would include ensuring that voter ID rates be kept to an expected standard, to enable a proper polling day operation and thereby maximise turnout for Labour. The contract would also stipulate that campaigning levels be upheld all year around, with the PPC embracing community issues. He or she would also work with council candidates to help strengthen Labour’s local base. If long-term candidates do not meet certain goals, then they go up for reselection.
This approach has a precedent. Liberal Democrat president Tim Farron set up shop in Westmorland and Lonsdale in 2001 and worked the seat hard, taking it from the Tories, crushing the Labour vote down to barely 1,000 last time, and raising his own majority to over 12,000. Conservative Karen Lumley unseated Jacqui Smith on her third attempt in 2010, while Grant Shapps in Welwyn Hatfield has firmly ensconced himself, with a decade of vigorous campaigning since first standing in 2001.
Long-term candidacies can help provide a way back for constituencies across the country where the aim of electing a Labour MP again seems a distant dream, and help rebuild the party in areas, like the south and the east, where Labour has been virtually wiped out.
I stood in the East of England in 2005 in South Suffolk and this is a very interesting article piece. It suggests that any seat is winnable and that isn’t true – I would stress that the groundwork described would ensure that we won more seats but only when we were riding a national swing similar to that of 1997 – without that kind of national momentum and without a candidate for PM that can appeal both in Scotland and the East and South, we just cannot do this. If we had had candidates doing what’s described in this piece for five years in the run up to 1997 – we would have won and possibly retained with incumbency many more seats. The article also reminds one that some seats in 2010 should never have been lost had the Labour MP being doing their job properly – sadly – with Jim Murphy as the example of how you do it properly at the constituency level.
This is a good policy, but it will only work effectively with a minimum of interference from the higher echelons of the Party. With certain people within the Party pushing all-women quotas to the exclusion of all other priorities, the potential exists for male candidates to work a constituency to the point when it becomes winnable and then to be de-selected by the Regional party in favour of a female. This is not a criticism of attempts to increase female representation within the Party but, rather, one of how this policy is implemented in general and of high-level interference in local party affairs in particular.
Long-term candidates are going to make some places harder to win (I’m in a seat that’s selecting early): 1) It alienates all other hopefuls at an early stage, something which from experience does have a real impact on their campaign output, and since many of those hopefuls hold senior campaign positions it trashes the local structures; 2) We learned at the last election that PPCs selected three years out can rarely maintain the momentum needed to remain in the public eye; 3) Without regaining the local council we have no hope of taking back the town, this alternative campaign focus will only complicate things.