Party funding or party spending?

This was going to be a piece explaining my experience as a former member of Labour party staff, but I find that Hopi has already done so far more eloquently than me. I’ll just say that the people I worked with went into politics for the best of reasons and maintained their loyalty to the party and its principles even when times were very hard for all of us, and it was very hard to leave those people. I’m sad that they are being used to create a sense of crisis when there are better things we could be thinking and talking about.

These are just my thoughts, probably not very well informed and I’d welcome any comments from people better placed to find solutions to the problems. While this is very important to me, I’m not convinced that people are as concerned about it as the press and politicians in Westminster are, and we need to move on to the things that are so we don’t surrender to a news cycle which will portray a permanent crisis.

It is worth mentioning that without the Labour government passing legislation to monitor donations and to set up an independent body to oversee it none of this would ever have seen the light of day. Likewise, if the Tories could be persuaded to even entertain the idea of spending less, we would be able to sort it out for good.

But there is still a job of work to change the way party finance is viewed, because there is a danger of seeing the issue standing alone. In fact, there is only a problem with how money is raised (whether that problem is real or cosmetic almost doesn’t matter, if it damages trust it damages politics) when that money is essential to keep up with spending. This is related to how the whole organisation works, because it impacts on how we communicate, how we develop policy and how we keep refreshing ourselves to bring through new generations of politicians and opinion formers. These after all are necessary functions of political parties.

The political parties can end up in a chase to do more and more, bigger and bigger things to get attention. The more expensive things are mainly commercial advertising space (billboards, newspaper advertising space etc) and are done on a national basis. The cost of these is prohibitively high for most voluntary organisations. There is an important legal difference between money spent nationally (to put it crudely, it says ‘vote Labour’ without mentioning your local candidate) and that spent locally on candidate-specific materials. There may be nothing we can do about the cost, but if parties worked together I’m sure we could do something about the chase.

For obvious reasons, national spending is high profile and high cost, and if one party falls behind the others it is noticeable. The simple fact of the matter is that it is hard for any party to keep pace with the Tories on this, and no party can dare not to try, even if the benefits of the spending are difficult to quantify. So, most of the attempts to get funds to keep up with the spending are a sticking plaster rather than a solution, so it is no wonder if they are sometimes imperfect.

Political parties need money in order to communicate with voters. I was taught to ask of everything I did as party staff ‘how will this help to win the general election?’ I think this is the same question as ‘Does this help communicate with voters?’ Whether it was a case of me spending money on projects or just my time as a paid employee, I like to think I usually remembered to ask myself this question. Sometimes that meant literally producing leaflets for a candidate or a policy. Sometimes it meant organising a media event or ministerial visit. And sometimes it was about developing and training members to communicate themselves as campaigners and party advocates.

These are the things that party staff want to concentrate on and by and large do so. But there are distractions and frustrations which make demands on the paid organisation that might be better served elsewhere.

The professional staff of the party have made an enormous contribution in the run up to 1997 and since in keeping up with campaign techniques and making sure our messages get out where they need to get out. But there is a danger that this de-skills the activists as campaigners and more importantly as leaders on their own campaigns. This is not always the case, and I know that attempts are being made to reverse the trend, but it needs to be a high priority for the next regime running the organisation.

Some of this is about members themselves and officers in particular, deciding to take a lead and responsibility for local politics. I would estimate that around 80% of the problems in local parties which came through to me were things which officers could resolve on their own, and indeed the party would be stronger if they did. But the organisation sometimes found it hard to encourage that leadership as it weakened our position of influence and would cut us out of the loop of what was happening.

I’ll probably get hung for saying this, but there are some members who seem to think that the party is at best a discussion forum for them. Actually that’s just a small part of it. Being a member of a party committed to social change means taking responsibility for the change the party brings. Yes you state your views. But the most important thing a party does is communicate with the outside world or it can’t change anything. If members are responsible for this, I think this would bring a new perspective to the politics that is fed through to the leadership.

Another factor which takes up a lot of staff time when they would otherwise be communicating with the electorate is their roles as NEC representatives, for example in parliamentary selection procedures. Party staff have had to do this as we are familiar with fairly complex rules as procedures as set by the NEC. But should the NEC itself carry out some of this function? Being out there and among members could strengthen its role and make all members more engaged with the views of members. If not the NEC themselves, then the NEC could presumably find people on Regional Boards or with plenty of party experience to help out.

As well as just freeing up time for voter contact, this will also mean the staff arriving in an area to help are viewed with less suspicion and would be able to develop member skills in a more straightforward way.

The other people of course who need to take on more of a role in the politics of organisation are the elected politicians. Mainly, they are fantastic and hard working and I really mean that. The good politicians are consulting and communicating all the time. But perhaps we need to systematise their role to ensure that all politicians communicate and listen in the way that the best do, so that when elections are called we don’t need a party staff to do all the communication for them.

Again some of this is happening, but I’d welcome anyone’s views about how we keep communicating without spending the sums that the parties are to keep an election machine going. There is no denying we are in a difficult place at the moment, but if we get the changes right, we could improve the politics of the party as well as the organisation. I’m quite prepared to be wrong, but the way party staff are used seems to be crucial to communicating within the party and to the outside world, so maybe we should be a little bit clearer about what we as a party want to use them for.