The new political map of the south

Following Labour's success in May's local elections here's the new local government map of the South West, South East and East of England. It is still overwhelmingly blue in nature, but that reflects in part the Conservative hegemony in larger rural districts.

Small Labour groups make a difference

The first lesson learnt from the ‘Small Labour Groups’ workshop at the Third Place First conference workshop was that, while Ed Miliband may be leader of the Labour party, within local communities it’s often the small group of hard-working councillors (sometime lone councillors) who are seen as the face of Labour in the Tory and Lib Dem heartlands and yet they are not given adequate resources to fulfil their roles.

This point is not always recognised by the party leadership.

The workshop acknowledged the critical role small Labour groups play in ensuring the party is a truly national party and how they ensure our values and voice is heard in council chambers across the country.

Hard-working Labour councillors gave first hand examples of best practice:

• Building a strong partnership with the local party, small Labour groups need support from local members.
• Maintaining a high profile.
• Using the local media.
• Regular newsletters, surgeries and surveys.
• Setting the local political agenda.
• Picking the right issue to attack the controlling group.
• Using the call-in process to scrutinise the executive.
• Being pragmatic. Today’s defeated Labour motion can become tomorrow’s council policy.
• How to be both the representative of your ward and voice of Labour across the constituency and district.
• Create regional networks of Labour groups.
• How building a strong base in the community can lead to further electoral success. For example, my own group in Rushmoor has grown from five to 11 in two years.

Councillors present at the workshop felt their effort and achievements were not recognised by the party leadership.  All too often the party focused on Labour Manchester and other Labour local government strongholds rather than the success of our hard-working and dedicated councillors on non-Labour councils.

The workshop also discussed if small Labour groups should accept senior roles on the council such as mayor or chair which would result in a members being apolitical for perhaps two years. The workshop felt this decision should be made in partnership with the local party.

We strongly endorsed the view that there are ‘No no-go areas’ for the party with every ward and seat being contested, and that ‘paper candidates’ should be made history and in the future seats fought with ‘pioneer candidates’.

We agreed a strong local government base is vital if Labour wants to win the next general election. Labour must have a presence at every level of government whether parish, town, district, borough, city or county.

As joint chair of the workshop I believe councillors such as Howard Linsley (Liss parish council), Keith White (Dacorum borough council) and Jude Robinson (Cornwall council) and their colleagues are true heroes of our party as they are a voice for Labour in the council chamber and stand up for our values as Labour champions in their local communities.

We all agreed hard-working small Labour opposition groups can and do make a difference.

Keith Dibble is leader of Rushmoor Labour group

This article was first published on Progress Online.  Southern Front was one of the media partners for the recent Third Place First conference.

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Targeting to win a ‘no-go’ area

It was February 2011 and I had just been employed as the local organiser for Oxford East. There were no elections in the city that year so the campaign committee agreed we would put our resources into trying to win a council seat on a district council in another part of the county – many of which had little or no Labour representation.

Deciding which seats offered the best prospect of returning a Labour councillor was the first task, and carries lessons as part of the Third Place First campaign.

Because of limited resources we knew we had to focus on only a few seats to give us the best opportunity of winning. There was very little historic voter ID in the areas we were looking at so we used Mosaic to analyse which seats had the most favourable demographic make-up. We also spoke to local activists asking for their input and spoke to the candidates that were in place to determine their level of commitment to the task. We decided upon two seats to target – Abingdon Caldecott being one of these.

Abingdon was in the Vale of White Horse District Council, a council that had no Labour councillors. In the 2007 election Labour stood only one candidate even though both of the seats in the two member ward were up for grabs. Labour received just over 100 votes, coming fifth with the Lib Dems taking both the seats with over 500 votes for each of their candidates and the Tories came third and fourth. Obviously we were taking on quite a challenge.

We chose Caldecott for a number of reasons:

•    Caldecott had many similarities in its demographic make-up to some of the wards in Oxford that are considered amongst some of the safest Labour seats.

•    Over 44 per cent of the ward fell within the Mosaic categories of I, J and L. These are the groups of voters who are historically some of the most supportive of Labour.

•    We had two fantastic candidates who were willing to run a high-tempo campaign that would take over their lives for the forthcoming months. We also had a very able and committed agent and branch chair and a relatively active membership.

The campaign centred around an ambitious door-knocking schedule that allowed us to: build up our pool of Labour voters; identify swing voters; gain the knowledge that allowed us to build up a strong narrative bringing together local and national issues (ie Caldecott deserved better services but the Tory and Lib Dem cuts were only going to make things worse). Leaflets and targeted direct mailings were used to reach these swing voters to reinforce this message and to emphasise that Labour were a viable alternative and with their support we could win.

To deliver our campaign we needed to energise local activists and to divert resources from Oxford to Caldecott. This allowed us to surpass all of the VID targets that we had set and to deliver more leaflets than we had thought possible (not always to the delight of the local residents who hadn’t seen a campaign like this before).

On polling day, we amassed a sizeable team that were prepared to go from 5am to 10pm to turn our Labour promise into actual votes. The on-the-day operation was essential as many of our promises had not voted Labour for many years, and indeed many had never voted at all.

At the count the next day, after two recounts it emerged that Labour had won its first seat on the council for over a decade. The Tories came first and we came second, beating the other Tory by four votes.

This narrow margin of victory showed just how important our targeting strategy was. If we had allowed ourselves to be sidetracked and divert resources elsewhere then we would never had gained this all-important foothold.

Labour can win in areas which might be seen as ‘no-go’. However, it takes good organisation and the ruthless targeting of particular seats to ensure that our resources are directed in, and only in, the seats where they will yield success – the other areas will just have to wait their turn. Oxford is a great example of this. After years of hard work, Labour now dominate Oxford East and are spreading up to areas of the city that in the past were not seen as winnable and were not part of our campaign strategy. It is important though that we can never allow ourselves to become complacent about our strongholds. That is why in Oxford we are out canvassing all over the city and all year round, not just at election time.

Harry Gregson is Organiser for Oxford Labour Party

This article was first published on Progress Online.