I basked in the glory of my re-selection as the Labour candidate for South Swindon for about five minutes, and then reality kicked in. Whilst we had a better result in 2010 than many Southern constituencies, the Tory MP still has a majority of 3,500 for us to overcome. There are 8000+ Liberal Democrat voters for us to squeeze, but the results of the recent local elections showed that whilst Labour gained most from the collapse in their vote, the Tories also made gains.
That’s how it is in the South. The Tories are still making progress amongst voters and we cannot expect our vote to come back unless we work harder, smarter and more ruthlessly than ever before. The Liberal Democrat vote allowed the Tories to win my seat, but they’re not the main target for us at the next General Election. A vote to the Lib Dems in Swindon means we’ve lost the argument with natural Labour voters.
To win back voters we need to acknowledge what we did wrong in Government otherwise we’ll never be credible in their eyes. This includes immigration and libertarian issues which turned different groups off Labour, as well as social issues such as benefits and problem families. Many people who voted Tory or Lib Dem in 2005 and 2010 left us for those reasons. Europe is a big issue for many of them so I hope reports that Ed Miliband is rethinking our approach are correct. We must also acknowledge what we could have done better regarding the deficit. During our long leadership election the Tories wasted no time in sticking the deficit on us; the public don’t blame us for the recession but they do blame us for the deficit.
The Tories locally and nationally are vulnerable on trust, which will become more important as the Government goes on. As cuts bite deeply into frontline services and the economy continues to flat line, Labour nationally must continue to point out the madness of cutting public services so deeply and quickly and contrast the outcomes with the promises made before the election. This needs to be tied locally to Tory councils’ performance and their MPs’ reluctance to criticise them. In Swindon, Tory councillors have made disastrous decisions such as spending over £450k of council tax payers’ money on a Wi Fi scheme that’s fallen flat on its face; they’ve screwed up on section 106 money, owe a vast amount of money to developers and tried to build a school on a site with no safe access, yet their MPs have been silent. Each of these issues has shown the Tories up as secretive and untrustworthy; it’s up to us to expose this to the electorate.
It’s great that the party has brought back trainee organisers and we’re ecstatic to have one in Swindon. Unfortunately our experience is that other areas with a stronger Labour presence often claim our regional staff during election campaigns. Mysteriously everyone disappears to Scotland, London or the latest by-election. This is short-term thinking: to be a truly national party we need more MPs in the South, and we’ll only win again if the party nationally recognises that we need party organisers on the ground during our own election campaigns.
Keeping up contact numbers through traditional campaigning is still vital. We’re out every week knocking on doors and we run a regular phone bank, even during the dog days of the summer. But it’s not enough, and we need to expand into the community in a big way if we’re to earn people’s trust back again. For example, I’m tapping into some networks in Swindon and organising social meetings at friends’ and sympathisers’ houses. I want to know directly from them why local people did or didn’t vote Labour last year - we’ll see if they’re interested in telling me.
In Swindon we are now much better now at using social networking properly instead of just talking about it, which is what we mainly did in 2010. My blog http://www.annesnelgrove.org.uk/ is gaining readers and we’re working to increase the readership. In the last ten years the left trailed the right in using social media: opposition gives us the opportunity to reverse this.
Finally, we have to accept the same discipline about target seats we had in 1997. The South loses fewer parliamentary seats than other regions, but even this has the effect of turning previous Labour seats into ones with safe Tory majorities. We can’t afford to waste time on squabbles about who is on and who is off the target list; scarce resources and experienced campaigners must reach those constituencies with a decent chance of winning.
Anne Snelgrove is Labour's prospective parliamentary candidate for South Swindon and was the Labour MP for the seat 2005-2010
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