We are all biased.

Every one of us has our prejudices and our preconceptions. We are socialised from birth in a society that feeds and waters those prejudices and helps them grow up big and strong. I certainly have my own. I have a left wing and liberal take on the world. I see the world through this filter and many others (some of which others would find considerably at odds with my assertion to be both liberal and left wing. people – myself as much if not more than most – are a mess of contradictions).

When I write, talk and think about politics, I know that I am doing so through the frame these prejudices have given me. I am aware that I am more likely to ascribe nefarious motives to my opponents and benign ones to my allies. Where possible, I try to examine this and mitigate it, but it isn’t always possible. In the heat of the moment, the heat of passion will escape. Where the Tories are being particularly Tory, it is hard not to just get very angry.

So yes, I think everyone is biased, and this includes Nick Robinson, Political Editor of the BBC. I also think he’s an extremely good journalist. I expect he – far more than me and far more than most – examines his biases and tries to think about how they might be affecting his work and the way he reports.

That Nick Robinson was once a Tory is a matter of public record. But many journalists have a political background and are perfectly capable of even handed and balanced reporting. Left or right, it’s examining the facts, and doing so while being aware of your prejudices that make for good journalism. Robinson can be just as challenging to senior Tories as he is to Labour members, and both Labour and Tory activists feel he is biased against them, which probably means he’s getting it about right.

However, yesterday, Robinson make a slight misjudgement in his reporting around the way Labour are approaching the tax avoidance of Lord Fink. His use of the phrase “Milly Dowler moment” (a phrase which did not appear in quote marks in his blog post, but did in the preview box at the bottom ) has led to a media furor with the right wing press accusing Labour of crass language around a young girl’s death. Labour activists have responded in kind by once again accusing both the BBC and Robinson in particular of pro-Tory/anti-Labour bias.

I don’t believe that is what happened. I think Robinson wrote up a story quickly and using journalistic short hand that was possibly sloppy, but had no bias or poor intention. I believe he was later frustrated by the reaction and instead of clarifying immediately, went into defensive mode. Perfectly natural, again we all do it.

Robinson was clearly aware his words were being used to attack Ed Miliband’s team in this way. He issued a tweet which sought to clarify, but didn’t write a second blog post, nor edit the first one until the next day. He has seen many a stupid politics row blow up this way, and so he knows how these things work. All the best advice experienced journalists like him would give a politician in the same boat would be to get ahead of the story, apologise or at least clarify as soon as possible. That it took until long after the story had been published in today’s papers for him to do so made this a two day story.

The other problem is no matter what Robinson did or didn’t do it wouldn’t be enough for his detractors. He is daily – hourly even – rounded on by both left and right on Twitter. So I suspect it took a little longer than it should have for this one to burst through what is usually a fog of partisan point scoring to understand that this was genuinely an issue that deserved clarifying.

The left have cried wolf over BBC bias so often that inadvertently, it may well have become harder for us to make the case when such bias – intentional or otherwise – actually exists.

Ian Dunt has written a superb piece today about the misguided nature of the attack on the BBC over their coverage of the Chapel Hill shootings. I think this illustrates well the problems the BBC has both of reflecting both factual truth and society. We all believe we know the truth, because we all believe we are always right. And these days it is very easy to fall into a pattern of only reinforcing your own views. So often on Twitter or Facebook I hear the phrase “everyone thinks…” about issues that are divisive (and thus by their nature not agreed upon by “everyone”). This positive reinforcement can be why neutral media sources can feel challenging and also protective of the status quo.

The BBC is a bit too establishment at times. It’s news agenda is still too driven by the press which is not a neutral source. It cares far too much what the Daily Mail thinks about it’s content and is far too defensive under the conditions of a mass media market to take the risks it once did. But it is still a source of powerful flagship journalism.

We can and should call out powerful journalists when they get it wrong, just as we do with politicians. But we should do so well and wisely. It should not have taken Nick Robinson so long to clarify what happened here. But equally, it should not be his job to respond to endless unfounded  accusations of bias. Perhaps just as Nick should have chosen his words more wisely, so we too should learn when to pick our battles.

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I will be honest, a year ago I simply did not believe that Labour would have any chance of taking Nick Clegg’s seat of Sheffield Hallam. But now, two polls have put Labour in the lead. We have an excellent candidate in Oliver Coppard, we have momentum and a campaign that feels lively, active and engaged locally.

It is too late to add Sheffield Hallam to the list of Labour’s 106 target seats and Labour centrally should probably not reallocated their already scarce resources. But unofficially, we should all get behind the campaign.

I’m not normally a big fan of symbolic decapitation strategies. If we had little or no hope of winning the seat, I wouldn’t want us to waste time and resources on it just out of a sense of loathing for Nick Clegg as an individual politician. Not while David Laws  exists in the world any way!

But there are good reasons for Labour to throw a certain amount at this seat. Below are five of them.

1. I am a big fan of Labour winning seats. And we could win this one. In an election that will be as close as this one, every seat will count. No seat where we have a reasonable chance – and seats where we are ahead in the polling definitely fall into that category – should be abandoned. We have a real chance of gaining an excellent new Labour MP. Let’s do our best to make that happen.

2. As George Eaton has pointed out on Twitter, losing Clegg as leader makes it much, much harder for the Lib Dems to go back into coalition with the Tories. It is highly likely that the next Leader of the Lib Dems will be Tim Farron who may well prefer to try to heal the Party from opposition rather than go into a formal deal with anyone. But he certainly comes from the more left wing faction of the Party making a smooth continuation of the current arrangement extremely unlikely. So if we don’t manage an outright majority, a Lib Dem Party without Clegg works considerably better for Labour.

3. Lib Dems are incredibly tribal. More so in many ways than supporters of other Parties, And they hate Labour. They hated us when we were in power and they hate us even more now we point out the ways they have failed and hurt our country while they are in power. Decapitating their leader simply cannot make them hate us any more than they already do. But perhaps it might wake them up to the lie they tell themselves that it is just Labour activists who feel this way about them. Losing their leader might be the wake up call they need as to just how toxic working with the Tories has been. It might help them kick start the healing process they need as a party. It won’t feel like it on the day after the election – but it could be the best thing that could happen to them as a Party.

4. The Lib Dems are currently running a “57 by-elections” strategy. Following the success they had in holding on to Eastleigh after they threw everything they had at it, they believe that this is their best bet at holding on to as many of their seats as possible. Of course the reality is you can’t do this very successfully when it’s diluted 57 times. Like homoeopathy, it doesn’t work. It’s a silly lie people tell themselves to make then feel better even when their sickness is fatal. They have lost a third of their members. They don’t have the resources they once had. They will not take a threat to their leader lightly. They will have to concentrate more resources on Sheffield Hallam than they had originally planned taking them away from other seats. So even if we don’t gain the seat, we win by stretching them thinner in other seats where we are challenging them.

All Labour Party members should have a think about what they can do to help Oliver Coppard win in May. At the very least, those of us who are a bit  far away from Sheffield can all donate to help Oliver get over the line. If he manages it – and he could well manage it – this will be a political moment that will put Portillo’s loss in 1997 in the shade.

Let’s go for it Labour. Good luck Oliver!

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It is the cry of our age: something must be done!

As we are better informed than ever we seem to know more than ever what a terrible world we live in. What a horrendous species we are. What horrors we can inflict on each other and on ourselves.

But we retain our basic humanity, our basic decency. Our hope and our faith in goodness, in justice and in the fact that right can and must win.

But there are problems with knowing that something must be done. Because it is not always clear what that something is. Something is hard. Something is complicated. Something has consequences and we know, we know from heart-rending and bitter experiences that sometimes something we do is the wrong thing. Our actions have consequences too.

So do we freeze? Petrified into inaction? Or do we charge ahead? Gung ho, and sure that our something is better than nothing? Losing our ability to do something the next time something must be done?

Maybe what we need is a doctrine. A defining creed that overrides all other considerations. Something that overrides all financial and practical considerations. Or maybe we should go the other way. Bury our moral and sense of obligations and look only at what we are practically able (and unable) to be certain to achieve.

I don’t know the answers. This is not a column with answers. It strikes me now, that every other column I read, by every other writer I admire has answers.

God I envy them. I look at the horrors of war and I want to act. I want to march in front of the guns. I want to stand between the messianic maniacs with machetes and their victims. I want to rip the rockets from the hands of those bombing schools and suburbs.

But I’m not going to. I am a coward. I am too comfortable in my life. I do not have the right stuff. My morality is that of an armchair general, an armchair tactician, God, even an armchair politician. As i have written before, I don’t even have the courage to be the one who has to sit comfortably at home making these life and death decisions.

And knowing this of myself, I can’t come to an easy doctrine that always believes in British intervention. I can’t have that be my first option every time something happens that is hideous and brutish elsewhere.

But I can’t always rule it out either. I can’t rule out sending the younger and braver people of this country who volunteer to protect us and to police our world into danger.

I don’t have a singular rule that says we should always or never take action. In some ways, I think that those who do are possibly more comfortable than me. Their certainty is their comfort blanket. But perhaps that is me passing off my responsibilities again, passing off my own guilts for the results of the positions I do and don’t support.

This is not a column with answers. God I wish I had answers.

I am also aware that that was the third time I made a reference to a deity I am not sure I believe in. As someone who has travelled in her life from faith to agnosticism I understand that faith itself has degrees. Faith in concepts you were trained to question and those you weren’t.

The tradition in politics is to be wedded to answers and bend the questions to fit them. Socialism, Capitalism, Communism, Fascism,  - comfortingly uniform answer to a discomforting world.

This was supposed to be the summer lull. This wasn’t supposed to be a time when we had to face the toughest questions about ourselves and our politics. This should have been a column about sandcastles and windmills. About the fun that politics can be.

So no, I don’t have answers. But maybe, just maybe it’s OK to admit that. To say – as someone privileged enough to have a platform – that I don’t know what to say. To admit that I am winging it.

Because we all are.  Many with better information than me. Many with better understanding than me. But we are human. And as we face the worst of what that means, we need to allow ourselves to be as open and human with each other about how we reach consensus on what must be done.

Because let’s face it: Something must be done.

This column first appeared on LabourList. 

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Three days ago a group of prominent Tory women warned that the Lynton Crosby led negative campaign the Tories are running risks re-contaminating their party and damaging their electoral prospects.

But since when did the Tories ever care about women and their uppity opinons?

Yesterday (30th July 2014) before 11pm, @CCHQPress – an official Tory Twitter account tweeted 62 times (including retweets). That seems fair enough, with all that’s going on in the world.

Guess how many tweets were about the situation in Gaza? About Russia and the decision on sanctions? On Ebola and the precautions being taken to protect citizens of the UK?

None. Not a single one.

So maybe they have a great deal to celebrate? All those Tory successes and all their many plans for the future?

Maybe not. In fact onlyfFive of these tweets were positive. Of these three were retweets. Which meant that in total, the Tory press office could be arsed composing a massive TWO tweets about their work and plans.

56 of their tweets yesterday were negative – 55 aimed at Labour and 1 at UKIP.

If they keep this work rate up from now to the election, they will have managed to say a massive 560 positive things about their own side. That might sound a lot – particularly about this shower. But it isn’t really. I’ve probably tweeted that many times about Emmerdale. It would certainly be as nothing against the 15,400 negative tweets about Labour.

Now regular readers of this column will know I don’t always have nothing but gushing praise for everything Labour ever has done. So maybe this criticism is justified?

Well that’s up to everyone to judge for themselves. But one thing is indisputable – they didn’t have 55 different things to say about Labour. In fact four of those tweets were a twisting of a quote from an Ed Balls quote during an LBC interview. And a quarter – a massive 15 different tweets were accusing Labour of plans to impose a “death tax”.

Yep, Death Tax. Those words lifted straight from the Tea Party movement in America. Because what’s really needed in these difficult times are the politics of Sarah Palin. Not.

There is room in politics for pointing out the flaws of your opponents. Let’s face it, this post is hardly a beacon of positivity! And I’ve had a problem with Labour going too negative in the past, yet I have slagged off the Tories before and will do so again. And again and again. Because they are deserving of criticism. They stalled the recovery with austerity economics that have failed to pay down the debt. They are punishing the poor and vulnerable with measures like the Bedroom Tax (and no more bloody “Spare Room Subsidy” nonsense from any party who tries it on with “Death Tax” if you please). They have failed to rebalance the economy leaving wages low and employment insecure.

But I will always try to balance that. Try to ensure that the majority of my output is on what Labour’s offer is and why electing a Labour government will make a difference to the lives of people in real, significant ways that matter.

Because ultimately the country has a choice. Between a Labour Party that is offering a strong positivepolicy offer and a Tory Party unable and unwilling to shake off their nasty image. A Party with so little left to offer they have to resort to that image as their best chance. Not to win, but to beat the other guy.

We’re a better Party than that and ultimately we’re a better country than that. We sent Lynton Crosby that message the last time he masterminded this kind of morally bankrupt Tory campaign in 2005. Let’s make sure we send the same message again.

This post first appeared on LabourList. 

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Today there has been an apology in the continuing saga over the fallout of Lord Rennard being accused of sexually harassing several women.

Was the apology to the women for the way in which the Party left them exposed and unsupported? No.

Was it for the fact that some of those women have felt so unsupported within their own party they have had no choice but to leave? No.

Was it for the fact that despite the women being described by the late appointed over-seer of their discipline case as “credible” Rennard was let off through the byzantine loopholes built in to protect the powerful within their party? No.

No today’s apology was – incomprehensibly – to Lord Rennard himself.

Now admittedly, it is clear that the processes of the Lib Dems need a great deal of work to make them able to properly deal with the kind of behaviours we are talking about in this case. And it is not just the victims who suffer when such cases are so badly handled, but the accused too. Byzantine processes may have meant that Lord Rennard has been let off the hook, but they equally mean that he has been found guiltyish.

No one has been satisfied by this dogs dinner. But some people have been deeply, deeply hurt by it. Some women and their families have been forced from their party. Many others have been given the message that the establishment will circle their wagons around your abuser as long as he’s one of them. Once again the subtle message has rung out: Women in politics – know your place.

Reading the story in the Guardian, it is quite clear that Lord Rennard may soon be reinstated to the Liberal Democrats. The only outstanding charge is of bringing the Party into disrepute through “criticism of party processes”. The stampede for the door if that holds up will be enormous. Who of us – in any party – don’t occasionally criticise it’s processes?!

So it seems to me like Rennard will be back soon. And according to certain Parliamentarians this is a good thing. They have been expressing fears that the Party is suffering because of their lack of “campaigning expert” Rennard.

That they are willing to express this – even anonymously – show how far in denial the Lib Dems are about their standing with the electorate. Like all they really need is the right campaigning expert. It’s an astonishing lack of self knowledge about what their real problems are. How badly they have let down those they promised something so very different to. How little they are trusted and liked.

One campaigner is not going to make the difference. But being so blind as to the damage you have done to your female activists might well do. Once again the Lib Dems have proved themselves unworthy as a national party. Once again they have let women in their own party down. Once again the political establishment has protected their own at the expense of the less powerful. A less “liberal” or “democratic” state of play is hard to imagine.

Over the last few years I have been pretty open minded about the potential of a future coalition. Politically, I can see both sides of the argument. But how could we have a working realtionship with a Party so willing to throw their female activists under the bus. How can we leave our women in situations where they might not feel – or be – safe from harassment?

If Lord Rennard resumes his role in the Lib Dems it doesn’t just irrepreable taint them. It taints anyone who says “We’re ok enough with that to do business with him”. I cannot support Labour being that Party.

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Tags: Lord Rennard

I haven’t been posting here much lately. Sorry to those of you who’ve missed me (Hello Dad!).

Between becoming more than usually busy at work and out of it has swallowed up a lot of my spare time.

Equally, I am now Contributing Editor of LabourList and so am writing a lot more for them.

But I will try to do better! I miss writing here and will try to be more disciplined about making time for it.

Emma.

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Four years ago, when I first joined the NPF, I didn’t really know what to expect. I had heard stories of course. That is was a talking shop, a stitch up, an irrelevance.

My first experiences were not good. First in Gillingham and then in Wrexham my hopes of having a constructive role to play in the policy formulating process of the Labour Party were comprehensively dashed and abandoned. Then cameBirmingham. Things had changed. We had meaningful discussions. We had a sense of purpose. We had a belief that this was an important thing to do. That our time was not being wasted, but that we – as members – were going to have a say in how our policy was formulated.

Reading back my post from that time, I was sceptical that we would get things like the policy submission and discussion website. I was wrong. Your Britain has been a resounding success with something like 200,000 submissions coming to it. As a Socialist Societies representative on the Stronger Safer Communities policy commission, I was emailed every time there was a submission to our section. I got a lot of emails. It was great to read ideas from members and supporters all over the country. Many of those ideas are now encapsulated in the final documents that have come out of not just this weekend, but the continuing iterative process that came from allowing every member of the NPF to sit on a policy forum.

So by the time we came to this weekend and the so-called “Warwick process” I was feeling substantially better. But I was also wary. I knew the proof of the pudding would be in the eating. I know our party’s tendency to try to control everything from the centre. I wondered how much strong arming, bribery and blackmail would be involved in achieving consensus.

The answer was very little. Ok, I wasn’t in the negotiations on the really contentious issues – Trident, Rail etc. – only those who have submitted or seconded amendments on the issues were part of the separate processes negotiating final wording, and none of mine were on those topics (mine ranged from housing to local government finance, Research and Development in health to Science education – the joy of being a Socialist Societies representative is the breadth of topics we get to cover).

But the openness and good natured approach from the staff and the Shadow Cabinet made these negotiations easy, pleasant and most of all fruitful. More than once I was told “I want you to go away with something”. There was a genuine desire to ensure that delegates views and priorities will be reflected in our policy offer. If and when Labour get into government next year, I will be able to point at things we do and say “I did that. I played a small part in the grand collective that is our party in making that happen”.

That’s quite a humbling feeling.

That desire was reflected back to them by the delegates. This was a process that treated us like grown ups so we behaved like grown ups. The word of the weekend was consensus. That we achieved it around a programme that is both radical in its scope but also deliverable is nothing short of extraordinary. We have a blueprint now for a new Britain. A new type of society in which it is power and opportunities that are redistributed – meaning there is less need for money to be spent on interventions that happen too late. Now we need to be relentless in pitching this to the nation. It is exciting, but our challenge now is to excite others.

This was an incredibly hot weekend. Tempers could easily have frayed but they didn’t. If someone had told me when travelling home from Wrexham in 2011 I would be so excited by a National Policy Forum meeting I would have given them a few choice words. We have come so far in such a short space of time. We achieved what few thought we would back in 2010. We are a party united behind a new offer – one quite unlike anything we have had before.  That we have is testament to the incredibly hard work of Angela Eagle, Jon Cruddas and Ed Miliband and to the dozens of Party staffers who worked so hard to make this the success that it has been.

This post first appeared on LabourList.

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I am currently reading the brilliant book Everyday Sexism by Laura Bates. It is a powerful account of the way society treats women and girls differently in our expectations of them from cradle to grave. The examples given are heart breaking and moving – all the more so because most of them come from women and girls who are not in the public eye, but yet are expected to permanently live as is expected to live up to the standards expected as subjects of the male gaze. It’s essential reading – especially for those many commentators who are the first to comment on any piece here and elsewhere about the supposed iniquity of “positive discrimination” measures.

It hasn’t been a good week for those who try to claim that sexism in politics is a thing of the past. Cameron’s reshuffle – one that was heavily briefed by his own team as a reshuffle for women – has been lacklustre at best in the gender equality stakes.  Women now make up a whopping 29% of the cabinet. Whoop-de-flaming-do. The new female leader of the Lords was due to earn £22k less than her male predecessor until number 10 were shamed into a quick step reversal on the pay. Her position it seems remains downgraded. Meanwhile we hear tales of Tory MPs acting like sexist morons as a woman isphotographed near them. Women having their image captured can only be doing so for your gaze, right lads? (Wrong lads).

Meanwhile, the coverage in the press, be it the lamentation of the loss of the middle aged white men or the Downing Street Catwalk, has made sure women are told exactly what their role is in political life. Sure you can be a Secretary of State, but what really matters is your hemline. The snappers were all but chanting “get them out for the lads”. The headlines have been so unsubtle, they may as well have.

So as I started to read Everyday Sexism on the day my weekly LabourList column was due, I was pretty sure I knew what my likely topic was going to be. And I wasn’t wholly wrong.I am writing about sexism in politics. But there was a line in the section of the book that jumped out at me. After a series of quotes and examples of the way women are discussed in politics, the author poses the test “try to imagine the same quotes being included in articles about David Cameron or Nick Clegg” and – as anticipated – I couldn’t. But there is a name screamingly missing: Ed Miliband. And now I think about the way Ed’s opponents in politics and in the press like to portray him, it is quite obvious why.

The number one word Ed’s opponents like to use against him is “weak”. It’s an odd attack when you think about it. What is weak about standing up and saying “Despite the obvious personal cost I feel I am the right person to lead my party”? What is weak about standing up on issues that really matter to real people, such as the Bedroom Tax, the cost of living and the skewed way our economy is managed? If this were the easy option don’t you think we’d have had an easier time of it? It is because these are the tough questions, and because Ed refuses to act like simplicity is the answer – despite siren calls from left and right for a more simple and comfortable answer – that he is called weak.

Since becoming leader, Ed has endured not just the additional scrutiny that all who are thrust into the limelight must undergo, but a particular flavour of derision, one that is very familiar to women.

Ed has been told he is “too ugly” to be Prime Minister a common trope used to keep women down. Remember the outrage about the horrendous “Women who eat on Tubes” crap? Wind forward a few months and we have the insanity that was “baconsandwichgate”.

The harder of thinking among you may now believe that this is the time to start cheering the death of sexism . “Yay,” you might be thinking, “If this is happening to a man too, then we truly live in an equal society”.

Well, no.

Firstly there is no anti-sexism campaign in the world whose aim is for us all to reach the lowest common denominator no matter how hard our detractors may try to paint it that way.

Secondly, I think it’s more complicated than that. The press are hunting in their pack and they are after Ed because they believe they see “weakness”. They believe they see “weakness” because he is not behaving like their outdated version of an alpha male. The tropes they use to attack him are used to highlight his perceived womanliness and attack where whey know a woman – in their experience – can best be wounded.

As long as our images of “strength” reside in desperately outmoded and old fashioned ideals of manliness then women will suffer in comparison. But so will men. Men who do fit that mould and men who don’t. They key point about sexism and gendered stereotypes is that they force all of us into boxes that constrict us. They force our dialogue onto boring tracks when we should be free wheeling.

Is Ed Miliband a victim of everyday sexism? On a conscious level, I think I’ve made a case that he might be. That our politics have defined roles for women and men and if you don’t fit your stereotype you will have to pay for that. The Tories and their press acolytes have decided to treat Ed as a “not-leader” and one of their ways of doing so, if to treat him those others they see not fulfilling their predetermined set of leadership characteristics: women.

But the real point is this: of course Ed Miliband is a victim of everyday sexism. Because he lives in a society that is daily harmed, traduced and twisted by it. Ed is a victim because we all are – boys and girls,women and men, perpetrators and victims alike, we are stuck with the consequences of this demeaning, narrow and constricting culture.

This post first appeared on LabourList. 

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I’ve just read Charles Clarke’s interview with the Huffington Post and I’m angry. I’m not – however – disappointed or let down. Over the many years of his career in hubris and internecine attacks I’ve come to expect nothing better from Clarke who has been happy to behave as nothing better than an embittered hack  since he was reshuffled out as Home Secretary. Any sense that he was right or had a point was lost in the ferocity of his fire. He turned those who might have agreed with him against him. His persuasion skills are not his strongest suit.

Don’t get me wrong. I think some of Clarke’s criticisms are valid. We do lack a coherent narrative. We do need to offer more than “we’re not the Tories”. Though other areas of his criticism are totally void of all sense. They spring not from a sense of proportional political understanding but from his continued all-consuming hatred of Gordon Brown – and by association, those who worked for him.

But Charles Clarke has been around long enough to know how his remarks about Ed Miliband will be reported. He knows the damage that even the remarks of a has-been like himself will cause. Former Cabinet members predicting an outright Tory majority is neither helpful or numerically literate. Labour are at 38% in the polls today. You wouldn’t know it from Clarke’s doom-mongering, but that’s more than enough for a stable Labour majority. The public may not like Ed much, but that has been factored into our steady lead for so long now that it is clearly already part of their decision making. The Westminster bubble may not be onside, the press may be as hostile as it is possible to be, but the lead we have remains pretty solid.

Translating that to victory on the ground should be the focus of every single Labour member right now. That’s what the members are focused on. The volunteers who give their time and energy week in and week out to make sure that Labour are returned to government where we can make a real difference. Those members deserve better from those whose efforts they have previously elected.

At the next election the country faces a simple choice. We can go for more of this right wing government who will continue to undermine our social contract, our rights at work, the security of our housing and the fabric of our lives and communities.

Or we can go for the Labour offer which looks to deal with all of these issues. Are we defining that as best we could – no. Ed is trying to do some very complicated things in a land where only simple narratives prevail. He has to sharpen up the message so there is a better understanding of the changed economy he wants to bring forth.

But the last thing this means is arguing about the deficit. The difference in deficit reduction plans between Labour and the Conservatives is a couple of years. In economic terms this difference is all but negligible. The real difference lies not in how we change the effects of our broken system but in whether and how we change the system itself. The Tories simply don’t want  to change an economy that works for the few against the many. Ed Miliband does.

That is what the fight for the next election is for. It’s bigger than the hurt pride of a former cabinet member. It’s better than the sloppy comparisons to other former leaders. It’s what matters. If Clarke retains any sense of what it was that brought him into politics in the first place, I hope he can remember that in future.

This post first appeared on LabourList. 

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The battle’s done, and we kinda won so we sound our victory cheer?

(The geekier (and cooler) among you will recognise this as a lyric from the Buffy Musical song of the same title as this blog.)

So, we won the local elections – narrowly. We beat the Tories into third place in the Euros – even more narrowly.

This is not cause for celebration. We should have done much better than this. We need to do much, much better than this. We cannot carry on as if falling over the line is either desirable or even inevitable. After results such as these it is anything but inevitable.

But the Ashcroft poll! But we won 300+ Councillors! But the Tories came  a historic 3rd!

All true. But here are the counter arguments:

While Ashcroft’s poll is encouraging, we cannot let it blind us to the results of an actual election. One where we have underperformed.

While those extra councillors are a fantastic boon and will make an enormous difference to their communities, they are too concentrated in areas where Labour were already strong. I love London. I am only half joking when I talk of one day wanting to be mayor of the greatest city in the world (and I can more seriously be wistful about what could and should have been in 2012). But London is only a small part of our great nation. And it accounts for way more than half our councillor gains. That is not a good balance.

And we should never, ever, ever rely on our opponents to do badly in order to achieve success.

So, where do we go from here?

When firstly we need a proper and full analysis of what went wrong with our campaign. I of course have several theories which I shall expand on below. But they are my theories, formed by my subjective judgement, based on my own political ideas, allegiances and prejudices. We need some objective views (and that doesn’t mean media commentators). We need to bring in some outsiders and some pollsters to be blunt with us, and to test and understand what we failed to do and perhaps start to text what to do next. In the next few days I will post about how the Tories should be more worried than we are (not least because they aren’t). But we are what matters to me, so here is where I will start.

So caveats over here are the things I think we need to discuss. And I’m going to start with the hardest.

We need to talk about Ed

We can’t ignore the fact that the man I supported for the leadership of the Labour Party (and still support as Labour leader) has not won over the voters. They think he’s well meaning but weird. They don’t connect with him.

The last thing Labour needs is a leadership contest. We cannot turn in on ourselves now. We cannot spend this time talking to ourselves about ourselves.

On a more positive note, I am a fully signed up member of the Ed Miliband project. I believe in the changes Ed has brought to our party and the policy direction he is taking us in. Ed is the right leader for us.

But we have to talk about his public perception. We have to address his negatives and understand how to work within that framework.

Ed is never going to play as the good old average guy you want to have a pint with. Fair or not, people with far less claim to that space (Boris, Farage and even Cameron) are beating us hollow on that score. The weakness of us geeky types is we let that then go on to define us. Ed should play to his strengths and stop trying to annul his weaknesses. He needs to be as honest as the electorate are saying they demand of their leaders, and be the serious policy geek he is. There isn’t another positive choice. So let’s embrace Ed’s inner Sheldon and let it be. Be honest with the voters and present them not with the dork who wants to be a jock, but with the geek with ideas enough to run the country.

No it isn’t ideal, but the alternatives are unthinkably worse.

The 80s are over

Rightly or wrongly, I got a sense from Labour that we should leave UKIP alone and let them steal the Tories votes letting us cut through the middle. It feels like our strategists were looking at the SDP effect on Labour in the 80s and expecting a straight line replication on the right of politics. Turns out it’s more complicated than that and the electorate has moved on, even if we refuse to view them as having done so. This means that we should stop expecting UKIP to behave as an SDP style spoiler.

But equally, that simply name-calling Nigel Farage a Thatcherite has less and less resonance. Yes, there are areas  - particularly in the North  - that will never vote Tory while those who lived through the 80s live on. That doesn’t mean they can or will be taken for granted. They need us to be the Party on their side. They haven’t felt that for along time. So culturally they can’t vote Tory. But we need to stop assuming that means they will automatically vote for us.

Southern Discomfort discomfort

A long time ago, some very clever people realised that Labour were not doing enough to reach into the more affluent middle class. A pamphlet was written and it’s ideas were first lauded, then adopted, then normalised.

And they were right. We weren’t reaching into the burgeoning middle classes. We needed to change. To accept that we had to build an electoral coalition to succeed.

The problem is we over focused on the people who want a conservatory and not enough on the people who will never be able to afford one. In the mean time, our left flank drew themselves into those who can’t afford to get on the property ladder.

In the meantime, since Thatcher’s Right to Buy bribe, the Tories too haven’t offered the working class anything positive to vote for. They tried to sell private ownership of utilities as a share owning democracy, but now the people that was advertised at know they didn’t gain. If you see Sid, tell hin his future’s owned by a hedge fund.

So now we have a huge proportion of the electorate who feel (fairly or not) the political class has not cared about them for a generation. They aren’t the target market. No wonder they vote for a party that tells them they will think and act differently – however false that prospective.

Announcing is not doing

One of the most prevalent and most resonant criticisms of Gordon Brown (the mentor of both Ed and our Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls and Campaign Chief Douglas Alexander) was that they had initiativitis. That they confused announcement with action.

That sort of works short term in government to rebut criticism. It doesn’t work at all when you are an opposition trying to build a strong and coherent narrative about why you should form the next government. I haven’t seen polling data, but I know from conversatations on the doorstep, with shop keepers and cabbies, that people have no idea about our rent proposals, our wage announcements or our cost of living contract.

So now we’ve got over our blank slate problem, maybe we can get on with talking to the parts of the country we haven’t managed to reach for a really long time. Maybe we can talk directly to them about what we offer them and not what they should fear from our opponents. And maybe we could stop assuming that as soon as a policy is written about once we’ve done the job of selling it to the voters.

A party that leads

Yes, when we get into government, we will have to overturn a lot of the damage done by the Tories and Lib Dems. Yes we will need to put the health service back on a better, more stable footing. Yes we need to repeal the bedroom tax. But if our offer is only about undoing negatives we lose the chance to have a more positive conversation with voters.

Pretty much all of the coverage of these elections has been about negatives. People don’t like immigration or Europe etc. But they don’t think we will be the party who will stop immigration and we don’t want to stall our first two years of administration with a divisive and damaging argument over Europe that logic and common sense can’t win.

And actually, I think voters get that about us. I don’t think they vote for us to do those things. Polling massively indicates otherwise certainly. So why do we run these small campaigns afraid to say where we are on these huge issues? We have so much capacity to be brave. Ed has shown that when we are – on issues from phone hacking to the energy price freeze -it benefits us. So why not lead? Why not put ourselves out there more.

Yes we now have a great policy platform that I am proud to say I believe in. But we have undersold it while expecting it to over deliver for us. We haven’t pulled it together as a policy platform that can be boiled down  from (and – essentially – built up to) a vision for the different county that the UK will be after the first 5 years of an Ed Miliband led Labour Government. This must be the focus of the coming months. Not daft attacks on long since defeated opponents.

Get battle ready

Labour can and should win the next election outright. It is within our grasp. But we are going to have to step our game up to do so. I wish I could afford to focus group my thoughts and feelings beyond the doorstep but I can’t. But I would love for someone to test my ideas and the many others that will come. Because Labour needs a better tested, more robust, more battle worthy party than we are now. The electorate expects and demands nothing less.

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