The solution however lies not in changing the identity of our leader but the identity of our party.

To be a compelling alternative we must appear not only distinct from the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, but also distinct from who were in 2010 when we scored our second lowest vote since 1918. Significantly, neither Refounding Labour’s review of organisation, nor New Politics Fresh Ideas review of policy have achieved this.

So why has the critical self-reflection that is the pre-condition of positive change been avoided?

Firstly, many MPs and officials lack experience of being in opposition and the opportunity it gives for internal debate and re-invention. Then there is Labour’s historic fear of division, with any candid discussions of our period in office often leading to dark mutterings about “what happened after 1979”. And the third reason we don’t look back is that several senior Labour figures are embarrassed because some of our past mistakes were made them.

But Bradford West proved, in the eyes of many voters, the party is still haunted by its past. And it is not just the ghosts of Iraq we need to lay to rest: it was our PFI that saddled NHS hospitals with a £60bn bill and led to seven London NHS Trusts recently being bailed out; we chastise dinner-for-donors but were seen by many as guilty ourselves of cash-for-peerages; we have never atoned for our collusion with rendition and torture, nor coercing the Attorney General over Iraq.

But what fuels the scepticism of lost Labour voters most is our economic record. The “light touch regulation” that US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner condemned as “an experiment that went tragically wrong”, added to our low tax/high borrowing fiscal policy not only plunged the swollen financial sector (we neglected manufacturing) and the government into a historic debt crisis, it left UK individuals owing £1.5 trillion, including £300bn in second mortgages plus near world record credit card debt. It is the government policy with the worst long-lasting consequences since appeasement and has rendered orthodox policies around growth and deficit reduction obsolete. Do we think that if we don’t mention it, the public are going to forget?

Change for the future entails a conspicuous break with the past. David Cameron got the Tories back into power only after boldly declaring he was “not a Thatcherite” and that “the look, feel and identity of the party” all needed to change.

So does ours. Recently, at a training day for future candidates, I was instructed “to learn from business, particularly customer service and sales” and told that winning elections was not about policies but “selling a brand”. This New Labour mind-set is exactly the sort of baggage the party needs to shed. It is the attitude that has lost us members since 1997 and cost us Bradford West. We are not some advertising agency trying to maximise sales whatever the product, we are a political party trying to build a better world. We must never again look at citizens and see consumers, look at society and see a market, look at services and prioritize choice over standards.

Past misjudgements need to be recognised and repudiated as they have been by the public. You cannot hide the legacy of Tony Blair by raising the spectre of Tony Benn. If the party must learn from “the longest suicide note in history” of 1983 it must also learn lesson from the illegal and duplicitous invasion of a third world country in 2003.

The last time the UK experienced a national crisis to equal the magnitude of today’s was in 1945. Did we respond with an appeal for consensus and continuity? No, rather William Beveridge said “a revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching”. Labour was elected by a landslide and established the welfare state we fight to preserve today.

An activist state funded through taxation not future borrowing, an economic policy predicated on reducing inequality not trickle-down wealth funded by growth, a foreign policy guided by transparency not expediency. That is the winning future facing the Labour Party should we be brave enough to confront our past.

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Half an hour of shouting, question avoidance, insults, planted questions, bad jokes and jeering.

If it didn’t exist you certainly wouldn’t invent it. Unless you were a deeply disturbed individual.

“Wednesday Shouty Time” seems like a far more appropriate name for what we endure in the name of “scrutiny” each week. Out with PMQs, in with WST. At least it’s honest. Quite often the time feels WSTed anyway…

Not that it’s new for Cameron to avoid answering questions, but today was just the most flagrant example. Four times Cameron was asked if he backed the key proposal from the Beecroft report – widely known as “Fire at will” – which would make it easier to sack people. Four times Cameron praised the report but refused to answer the question.

Slippery doesn’t even come close.

His response – to attack the unions. Of course! What verve! What elan! According to Dave, the unions dictate Labour policy. Which is amusing for two reasons a) unions are increasingly hacked off the Labour DOESN’T back union
policies enough and b) Cameron was, at that very moment endorsing a report by a major Tory donor.

Come on DC. Try not to be so blatantly hypocritical. LOL.

But if this session were already descending into farce (which it clearly was), then Flashman Cam confirmed it with his attack on Ed Balls as a “mumbling idiot”. The Balls obsession continues. The shadow chancellor is so far under the PM’s skin he may as well wear him as an apron for his next BBQ.

It was all frightfully un-Prime Ministerial. What would his coalition partners think? But here’s the cherry on the WST cake.

There were no Lib Dems on the front bench. Not one. They had left him to stew on his own.

And stew he did.

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“I genuinely don’t know what I’m going to do in my private and political life. I would like to stand again but my seat has been cut in half [in the proposed boundary changes] so I might not be able to stand again. The strange thing about this whole affair is that I do genuinely lack personal ambition now. There are things I do because I enjoy it and I’m very ambitious for Ed Miliband but I don’t have to do it. I can do it in whatever capacity. You know if he wanted me out of the shadow cabinet tomorrow I wouldn’t be unhappy…In fact I’d probably be relieved.”

Surely Watson would have no problem getting reselected (or finding a new seat) ahead of 2015? Not only is he one of the most well connected people in the party (and a master of the selection process) he’s also consistently one of the most popular Labour MPs with activists (winning our 2011 MP of the year award.

It’s more plausible that he may one day leave the shadow cabinet to focus on campaigning from the backbench. But hopefully not too soon. As Tory MP Louise Mensch told Prospect, Watson is an asset to the party. One we (and Ed Miliband) can’t afford to lose either from the frontline, or behind the scenes.

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“I think he is a socialist who found a home in the Lib Dems”

You know what you have to do Vince…

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Amongst other things, the figures revealed that the impact of the government’s cuts programme on trade union membership is becoming apparent. In a year when the size of public sector workforce shrank by over 250,000, union membership in the sector fell by 180,000. Overall density, that is the proportion of employees who are members of a union, fell slightly to 26% and membership by 143,0000 to 6.4 million.

Arguably a more accurate way of assessing union influence is looking at the proportion of employees that unions collectively bargain on behalf of. Today in the UK just 30% of workers have their pay and conditions negotiated collectively by a trade union – in the private sector just 1 in 5 workers are included in collective bargaining arrangements.

To prove that this is not just a problem for unions and their members, but also society in general and the cause of equality and social justice in particular, we need only look at the proportion of the nations GDP that goes on wages.

In 1975 the share of wages accounted for by GDP was 65% – today it is just 53%. Between 1978 and 2008 the wages of middle income Britain grew by an average of just 56% against an increase in GDP over the same period of 108%. Over the same period the pay in real terms of those in well paid jobs and professions has more than doubled.

It wasn’t all bad news and there were a few shafts of light piercing the gloom. Membership in the private sector increased and despite the fall in membership the proportion of employees in the public sector who are union members held up. We should also member that the trade union movement is the UK’s largest voluntary organisation with levels of membership and an activist base that our political parties can only dream of.

However the debate isn’t so much about whether or not unions do face some significant challenges in respect of membership, as to what to do about it. Of some things we can be certain. A wholesale return to the false promise of credit card trade unionism and individualised membership won’t work anymore than relying solely on a fundamentalist approach to organising.

Those of us in the trade union movement who have been involved in supporting union efforts to grow know that there is no silver bullet solution to the challenge of increasing membership. However, the collective experience of many TUC affiliates and the TUC over the last 15 years has demonstrated that working collaboratively and sharing experience, prioritising resources for organising and training and developing new and existing staff so that they are better equipped to adapt to the changes demanded by a more focussed approach to building membership; have all put unions in a better position to organise more effectively.

But if the trade union movement is to make a serious attempt to halt the decline in membership and density, break out into new sectors of the economy and fulfil their potential in the fight against inequality we’re going to have to be more radical and innovative.

Such innovative approaches might include increasing collective bargaining coverage by organising along supply chains, bringing trade union membership within reach of the majority of employees who work where there isn’t a union via affinity schemes and promoting trade unions more generally and membership and activity specifically via both current and future campaign work. A clear and present opportunity exists in the way the TUC and the trade union movement in general has lead the opposition to the government’s austerity programme.

As we rededicate ourselves to the task of building the movement we do so with the realisation that increasing membership is not an end in itself. It is merely a means towards the achievement of a greater goal. Restoring dignity to work and securing adequate reward. To give working people more control of their lives both within and beyond the workplace. To offer protection against the worst that this government would subject them to.

We know that those with power tend not to give it away. Those that need it have to get it for themselves. Trade unions have always played a vital part in this process. Today, though the strategies and tactics may differ, the goal remains the same.

Carl Roper is the National Organiser for the TUC.

To hear more of these ideas, Carl will be speaking at the TUC’s Grassroots conference, on 26 May For more information and to register go to http://grassrootsuk.org/register-to-come/ 

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That is why Ed Miliband was right to talk yesterday about vocational and academic qualifications and the binary divide between further and higher education which if maintained, threatens to hold our country back. His words are an encouraging sign that in the face of the Coalition’s slash and burn approach, Labour is taking the lead in developing the policies to build a lifelong learning society and establish it as the bedrock of economic recovery.

Higher education receives a lot of attention because those who make policy and report on it have prior experience of university and their kids are likely to do so too. Far fewer have studied at a further education college or institution of adult education.

Indeed, it is quite telling that before scrapping EMA on the flimsiest of evidence, Michael Gove had not set foot in a further education college during his time as Secretary of State. So blinkered had he been to the potential of further education to stimulate the economy, he is missed one of the silent engines of growth and personal development which transforms lives every day, up and down this country.

Figures from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ own research show that those with further education qualifications generate around £75 billion for the economy. Meanwhile, the return on Government investment for apprenticeships works out at around £40 for each £1 spent, when taken as an individual’s first qualification at that level.

But this Government has slashed further education funding by 25% over the spending review period. They have axed EMA and put in place a postcode lottery of financial support that provides nowhere near the support young people need in order to access post-16 education. These are decisions which fly in the face of sense and threaten to do lasting damage.

They are on the cusp of introducing a higher education-style FE loans system for over 300,000 adult learners and which the sector – lecturers, students and colleges themselves – have openly opposed. It will hit those who have missed out on basic qualifications the first time round and those taking to access to university courses. In the south west, where I was born and raised, nearly 20,000 adult further education students face the prospect of taking out adult loans. If they want to move on to higher education, they face the prospect of taking out another loan to pay fees. The pathways to learning are being churned up by a dangerous haphazard ignorance of not only the transformational power of education but real people’s lives, families and communities.

It is indeed harder to climb the ladder when the rungs are further apart. But the ladder is not only being taken apart by cuts, it is being pulled up by those who are not committed to delivering educational opportunity for all.

Nick Clegg can wax lyrical all he wants about the importance of social mobility. But these are only words, and they are all he has for us. The ample evidence provided by the Government’s actions and their effects tell a different story – the austerity programme and the degradation of education overseen by the Coalition will do lasting damage people to those in and out of work, those in and out of education, those on the margin who have more potential than opportunity.

Labour is right to continue to talk about further and vocational education and its role in creating a growing, skills based economy that works for the many, not the few. Let’s now really look at jobs and skills for the future, let’s look to low carbon technology and green growth to skill a generation.

Further and vocational education offer so many opportunities for people of all ages and in all stage of life. Ed Miliband is right to make them a part of a wider strategy for social mobility and growth. As a Party for the many, not the few, we can be bold, we can offer hope and opportunity and we can build a sustainable, skills based economy for the future.

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At the same time, for those of us who have worked at the political coal-face as staffers, the detail of elections is our bread and butter. We are intimately acquainted with wards, polling districts, the intricacies of contiguous and non-contiguous boundaries in a way which is not entirely normal (as I said to a former colleague a couple of weeks back, it is a measure of the total anorak this party has made me that, even years later, I can still recount the names of the parliamentary divisions in cities I have never lived in: Southampton, Sheffield, Liverpool). And it is this same, backroom party perspective that caused me a butterfly-like feeling of apprehension as I watched Ed Miliband announce “the biggest voter registration drive for a generation” at the Progress conference ten days ago.

I want to feel pleased about this and, in one sense, I am. It’s important that we formulate policy for reconnecting voters with politicians and something, looking at recent election results, that Britain urgently needs. But it is one thing to propose a policy, and quite another to roll up your sleeves and implement it yourself from Opposition. Or, put it this way: I’m not happy with the state of the health service, but that doesn’t mean the party should go out and build its own hospitals.

So, the first point is: shouldn’t this be the role of government, rather than party? While it’s a fair comment that government doesn’t exactly seem to be killing itself to get people to polling stations (and, indeed, it may even not be in its own interests to do so, although that’s debatable), does that mean we should take matters into our own hands?

Second, the art of party management is the best use of scarce resources. How will it be paid for? Labour is not the Democrats (perhaps this worked for Obama, but his party also has funding far in excess of our wildest dreams). Neither does it have the larger state funding of some Continental parties. And it is currently broke. We’ve always done a little voter registration, but this is different. In short, should we be using what little money we have on a big push, with demonstrably diminishing returns for increasing effort, and which will surely not come for free?

Now, it may be that we can leverage the resources of the community organisers Movement for Change, who look to be part of the deal: all to the good, but that will surely not do it all (and what figures have we seen on their performance in London’s voter registration, did it make a difference)? Simultaneously, we have some big challenges, especially in Scotland, coming up in the next couple of years, while proposed changes to the funding rules could result in less, not more, funding for Labour. This programme needs absolutely not to be a massive diversion from the main chance, i.e. the ruthlessly focused campaigning that we’re, well, rather good at.

And finally you have to ask the question, having got someone to complete a ballot paper, will they vote for us anyway? There is a lovely, and possibly apocryphal, story of an elderly lady who always insists on calling the local Tory party to get a lift to the polling station, just so she can vote Labour and waste their resources at the same time. But it’s about more than that: it’s also about the fine work that my colleague Anthony Painter has done with Searchlight’s Nick Lowles in Fear and Hope, pointing out that modern British society is segmented in many new and different ways, less class-related and more about the social groups they feel part of. Many of us have trudged round an estate which was once naturally Labour territory, to be rudely awakened by how many residents were prepared to vote for a Tory party which would do nothing for them. Or for a minority party. Or along solely ethnic lines. Or who were simply lost causes for ever voting at all.

In short, it’s probably still true that the worse-off are less likely to vote than the better-off. But that doesn’t mean that, if and when they do, they’ll vote for us. Even if these non-voters came, marginally, to vote a little more for us than for other parties, how much difference would it actually make – especially when we compare it with what we might have achieved spending the same money in a more targeted, less scattergun, way?

There is an appealing altruism in the scheme, to be sure. But when you’re managing party resources, there are times when the right thing to do is to be entirely selfish in favour of your higher cause, not altruistic.

Why? Because this is party, not government; here we deal in thousands, not billions. When we get into government, we can spend all the money you like on voter registration. But at that point it does not make us broke, and it is as a non-partisan buttressing of the democratic process, not a tool to help us get into power.

I want to like this idea, I really do. If it were to work, it could make a big difference to winning us the next election.

But I’m struggling to see how it will work.

Rob Marchant is an activist and former Labour Party manager who blogs at The Centre Left

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I do not pretend that all debate has now ended. That would be the unity of the graveyard.

But the political events of the last few months and weeks have brought us to a far stronger position in the mid-term than many thought possible.

On 3rd May Ed Miliband proved he can win elections, and win them handsomely. Leads of up to 14% mean that leadership speculation has gone from fashionable to fringe. Serious commentators are writing about the prospect of Prime Minister Ed Miliband. The position of Iain McNicol as General Secretary has also been consolidated by electoral success.

Ed’s reshuffle has brought the soft left into the tent in the person of Jon Cruddas whilst at the same time making the Blairites feel they are being listened to by promoting Progress Chairman Lord Adonis.

Old enmities of the Blair and Brown era are being buried or at least shelved by the prospect of being part of an election-winning project, with Ed Balls and Lord Mandelson co-signing an article on Europe.

The double-dip recession has proved Labour’s semi-Keynesian economic narrative was correct.

Fractures in the relationship with the unions back in January seem to have been repaired through better communications.

And the Coalition staggers from crisis to crisis. The Lib Dems remain toxic but now the Tories are too, fighting a two front war with the bulk of the electorate to their left but UKIP pushing 10% on their right and giving right-wing backbenchers ammunition to demand a march away from the electoral centre-ground. The phone-hacking scandal is creeping ever closer to 10 Downing Street.

I don’t pretend this means we are necessarily going to win in 2015. Coming back from a 29% vote share to win after only one term would be unprecedented. But it now looks possible because we have that elusive but essential political asset, momentum.

Whilst we are not fire-fighting, as NEC members we suddenly have a mid-term opportunity for a year of building and strengthening the Labour Party to make it fighting fit for 2015.

My organisational priorities would be:

• The 200 new party organisers by 2014 Iain McNicol has promised.
• To go further than the 100 candidates in place this year that Iain set out and try to get every parliamentary candidate selected by the end of 2013.
• To use the Police Commissioner elections this November to re-energise our organisation in the shire counties and obtain data from canvassing and the count that helps us target properly in the 2013 elections.
• To use the County Council elections in May 2012 to break into rural and suburban areas in a big way – a “no no-go areas for Labour” campaign. Scope for changes of council control next year are limited as we start so far behind in the counties, so instead we should go for maximising seat gains (e.g. going for a big number of gains in Kent and Essex even though we can’t take control there), targeting seats that make up parliamentary winnables and put us back in the game in seats we won in 1997 and 2001, and symbolic gains in unlikely areas where the demographics tell us there may be a hidden potential Labour vote.
• To drive forward the implementation of Refounding Labour so that best practice from re-energised and outward-looking local parties like Cardiff, which stormed the May elections, becomes the norm.
• To complete the un-finished business of Refounding Labour and actually have a policy-making process that is worth members engaging in.
• To support Jon Cruddas in coming up with the ideological vision and broad-brush policies to complement the detail the shadow frontbench teams have already done in the Policy Review.
• To restore faith in Labour’s internal democracy with greater transparency in our processes and zero tolerance of fixes and fiddles. We need to determine policy and candidates on merit, not as a competition for who can do the most imaginative stitch-up.
• To comprehensively audit the health of our CLPs and go in and rebuild the ones that have atrophied. We can’t expect new members and supporters to engage in our campaigning or policy-making when sadly, indeed disgustingly, there are CLPs that never meet or only meet once a year, or never organise campaigning.
• To not accept that membership has peaked, and to set ambitious targets for recruitment and get those 200 new organisers out signing up members.
• To strengthen the union link by the Party playing a key role in building the TUC anti-austerity demo on 20th October.

Luke Akehurst is a standing for re-election to the NEC.

* This is Luke’s regular weekly column, but we welcome posts on the future direction of the party from other candidates for the NEC *

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