Ideas for electability – Simply getting our message across

By Bryony King / @bryonyVK

Much of the great articles already submitted on the theme of ‘ideas for electability‘ seem to have focussed on specific ideas and specific policies that people would like to see Labour introduce in the belief that these policies would help us back to power. My thoughts on electability are much more generalised, basically, effectively communicating who Labour are, what we stand for, what our values are and what our vision for Britain is and when we do have new plans and policies, like those from this series, we need to make sure we let people know about them in an accessible way.

After the general election there was a lot of talk of how people had lost sense of who the Labour Party were and what our basic values really are and I think that this was a problem. In amongst all the dementedness of TV debates, Tory tabloids, Mrs Duffy and Nick Clegg’s smile any real affirmation of where the three main parties stood ideologically seemed to be lost. It is also unlikely that many members of the public have ever picked up a reader on political ideologies and decided which party most reflects their beliefs and values. You can’t really expect people to align and connect with a political party, or a movement, if they have little idea of what that party or movement believes in and stands for. We need to remind people what the Labour Party stands for. We need to reaffirm our beliefs and remind people what we have achieved in our history.

One fairly depressing element of May’s election, and there were several, was that there were many sound policies in our manifesto that were simply overlooked. The public simply did not know about them. Nobody I spoke to, bar those who had a great interest in politics, knew what a living wage was or that it was in Labour’s election manifesto, for example. Of course a great deal of this non-communication is due to having a not so friendly – to put it mildly – national press, but more effort could have been made by other channels, television, web and radio for example to get across the messages and the policies that the press were determinedly ignoring in favour of stories about handwriting. Gordon Brown, unfortunately, just wasn’t great in front of a camera and could never seem to connect with the vast majority of people in that way. We now have a leader who can and we should take advantage of that. The ‘internet election’ never came to pass, as no party seemed to work out how best to utilise their internet campaign and internet campaigning never reached its potential. Labour can change this and make sure they have the tools and people in place for a strong, well coordinated, effective web campaign at the next general election.

All Labour MPs, councillors, members and activists need to be making an effort to make sure Labour’s message gets across, in whatever way they can, from now until the next general election. We have a fantastic base of campaigners and they simply need to carry on doing what they are doing. Teams are already out on the #labourdoorstep for next year’s local council elections and this type of campaigning is where Labour really excel. Starting over the next few months I would really like to see more of Ed Miliband on the television, the radio, and in the newspapers (both local and national), reminding people who the Labour Party really are and spelling out his alternative to the coalition government. Political leaders hold a huge amount of power and influence, whether we like personality politics or not, and Ed has great potential to really connect with the public, build a following and get people out to polling stations to vote Labour.