The party needs to make the most of peoples’ skills for effective community activism and election campaigning, but must also offer people a way of influencing policy making on the basis of their work, skills and volunteering networks.

Unless they have already enjoyed productive contact, local parties cannot hope to know anything about the lives, professions and skills of their members. Equally, most party members know nothing about the other members and potential members in their area that might have similar interests to them.  Resolving this is the key to overcoming the problem of non-members not knowing why they should join, and most members not knowing how the party can help them influence what is happening in their community or workplace.

A good first start would be to ask that when people join, that they tick a box explaining, broadly, what area of the economy they are employed in, volunteer in, or would like to be a part of. That way, when other members are mobilising for change in their communities and are in need of people with particular skills and interests, they have some data to turn to. Imagine how much easier it would be to start a local park clean-up and maintenance group if you could check a list of party members for people with the necessary trades and skills to help. Equally, all local party work could be improved by making better use of the internet, to spread messages and start conversations: so why not have an easy way of seeing which members have the suitable web skills to help? If we employed this method, next time you knocked on a door and asked somebody to join the party, and they said “why?”, you could enter into a conversation about how their skills may be put to use in an existing project – one that may actually interest them.

The other side of this coin is that if we are interested in peoples’ skills and interests, we should facilitate them organising within the party on the basis of those skills as opposed to simply their geography. The party branch structure assumes a level of connectivity to local areas that simply doesn’t exist for a lot of people. Whilst this is perhaps a negative consequence of peoples’ greater propensity to commute to work far from their homes, there is no point in ignoring it. When communities were more homogenous, one could have expected people to have quite a lot in common with each other, in terms of their work and social lives, providing a strong basis for local collective action. This is no longer the case and whilst the party should, of course, continue to provide local focal points for action, it should also facilitate work based networks as well.

This could be achieved by allowing people to be members of a branch near their work rather than near their home, or it could mean that every member becomes a member of a local branch as well as a regional work-based network. If such changes were implemented, at the next conference we could be hearing from the Labour London plumbers and doctors associations, as well as Bethnal Green and Bow Labour Party, and the national party would have enhanced opportunities to learn what is happening and needed across the country.   

 by Ben Garratt