Labour now has a rare opportunity to build a new thriving base of support, enabling it to develop both an effective and inspiring governing alternative and to win the next election. The key is to understand and harness the dynamics of self-organisation and to concentrate on creating networks between and within different communities.
Events, such as electoral victory, are the end result of numerous structural trends and ongoing processes that emerge over a long period of time. The sooner Labour can mobilise itself to participate and lead in these processes, the stronger its political gravitas will be. The good news lays in the fact that Labour, in opposition, holds two great resources – time; and the conceptual freedom to develop long-term local and national agendas that complement its values.
In order to create deep and self-sustaining support, Labour must encourage and facilitate the creation of a broad and versatile base. This renewed support, whilst drawing on Labour’s traditional core, must be related to the socio-economic, cultural and technological context of 21st Century British society in which modular communities and networks rule. The recent election proved the value of local mobilisation – Labour must now take the opportunity to seed and cultivate community networks for the sake of future electoral gains and campaign successes.
Whilst the era of big ideologies is over, political leaders often underestimate the wish and need of ordinary people to identify with and participate in public life. Labour must lead in providing a hub for individuals to self-organise and voice their opinions on issues close to their hearts. This should be actively supported on a continuous and long-term basis rather than merely close to elections.
By creating structural networks that truly correspond to peoples’ needs and habits, Labour will succeed in harnessing community energies, necessary for both deepening its general support and for mobilising around specific campaigns. On a practical level such infrastructure should be designed on the following principles:
- Individuals should be able to choose to collaborate sporadically with the Party and its campaigns depending on their area of interest, skills and personal time.
- Communities should be able to come together under the Party umbrella in different contexts e.g. geographically-based, professionally-based, and issue-based clusters.
- Different clusters should be given the freedom to choose how they organise with each other for the sake of regional and national campaigns.
Labour’s current mission should be to design the right infrastructure to allow individuals, communities and clusters to communicate, come together and create collaborative actions and campaigns.
This emerging Labour community, like a kaleidoscope, will then take on diverse patterns and forms, mobilising and inspiring deep and positive change ahead of the next election.
Dr Orit Gal is the Director of the Complexity Hub, a London-based organisation set up to address the following dilemma: how to define, strategise, and realise objectives under high uncertainty