Did Victory Just Wash Up On The Beach?

From the way the media and unfortunately many people in the Labour Party itself are talking about the local elections, you'd think that such novel things as campaigning had nothing to do with election results. “Labour did well in the north because the north is Labour and the south is Tory.” “Labour did well against the Lib Dems because their national poll share collapsed but the Tory vote held up.” These comments look correct if you're being remarkably lazy, like most of the media – but that is no basis for learning lessons about how to successfully gain the trust of the electorate and therefore win.


Blackpool's a town where there's a strange flow to events that just seem to happen – it can be unpredictable, spontaneous but nearly always with a kind of absence of control. This is encapsulated in many things - the weather, the fortunes of our football club or what you might get up to on a night out. It also usually applies to politics. For many years now Blackpool has been a marginal town that's swung with the tide of who is doing well nationally. We had two Tory MPs before 1997, then Labour won both and held them until 2010 where the hung parliament nationally translated into 1 Labour and 1 Tory MP in Blackpool.


These local elections have been different. This has been about us taking back control of our own destiny. Blackpool's a seaside resort that's seen great decline and with no alternative to the tourism industry, deprivation has increased massively – exasperated further by the out-of-touch and incompetent Tory council that ran the town between 2007 until now combined with the more recent cuts. Government statistics revealed in that period the town had risen from 12th to 6th worst area for deprivation, whilst the charity Save the Children's research rated us 9th worst local authority for child poverty.


It couldn't be more clear that we need a new economic and political direction. One that doesn't just prop up a declining tourist industry and the low-wage, seasonal labour that reliance on such an industry dictates for a lot of people working outside the public sector (of which 4,500 jobs are being axed locally).


Such a future relies on Labour winning elections, and for the first time ever Blackpool Labour genuinely campaigned as if that was in their hands, not just a question of how well we were doing in the polls. From the day the general election campaign ended, the local election campaign began. Every week outside the short campaign had 2 or 3 centrally organised doorknocking sessions, with activists and candidates directed towards target wards selected the previous summer.



What people said to us on the doorstep fed into our local policies, we vastly increased our voter ID and it changed the perception to us being the party of the community. The result was us taking control of the council by a large margin - 15 gains, 14 from the Tories, only one was off the Lib Dems (who are traditionally weak in Blackpool anyway). This was one of the best results in the country but we didn't do anything particularly special – we just campaigned hard all year round and took the time to talk to people about their issues.


We've by no means completed the changes we need to make organisationally. We need to build our membership up, better organise our grassroots, improve our ties to the local unions, get more young blood involved and find more ways of fundraising. The point the local party here has learnt however is (and we looked at the successes of places like Oxford who made gains against the trend), as much as socialists like me would like to see a more significant political change nationally, you can't blame Ed Miliband for your own failure to organise properly on the ground. You can wait for a supposed messiah to sweep us to victory or you can make it happen yourself.


The truth is Labour didn't do better in many places because we weren't organised enough to change the public's perception through grassroots campaign work. The party needs to change the way it thinks about how exactly victory comes about, the central party could help by providing more local organisers or by enthusing the members with greater party democracy but ultimately it comes down to local activists doing the donkey work at local level.