Posts Tagged ‘campaigning’

Monday News Review

02/08/2010, 08:09:57 AM

Labour likes an idealist; but it hates being in opposition even more

And David Miliband, the man in pole position? He looks relaxed in an open-necked blue shirt. But he is sombre, statesmanlike, low-risk. There are no sound-bites, promises or grand gestures. Instead he warns the party that it could be out of power for ‘a long time’, and needs to pick a credible alternative prime minister to take the fight to the Tories. The coded message is simple: this is no time for an idealist. We’ve been here before, and we don’t want to make the same mistakes. Follow your head and not necessarily your heart. It is a tough, pragmatic argument. But it is one that just might work. Labour likes an idealist; but it hates being in opposition even more. – Manchester Evening News

Text campaigning first

Labour leadership contender Ed Miliband said tonight he had recruited 1,300 potential campaign volunteers in 24 hours in an Obama-style two-way text message drive. His campaign team claimed the mobile marketing exercise was a first for British politics. Miliband’s team sent thousands of text messages to Labour party members through data supplied to all candidates by the party and instead of just sending a message, asked for a response. About half of the recipients replied, of whom 45% said they were supporting the former energy secretary. – The Guardian

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Nick Palmer on how to mobilise the army of the unaffiliated

25/05/2010, 08:41:07 AM

This is a really good time to be recruiting new members – indeed, people seem to be recruiting themselves. In Broxtowe alone, we’ve had a couple of dozen newcomers who signed up entirely spontaneously after the election. People who left us a while back are putting Iraq behind them, dismayed by the change of government and seeing us as the only anti-Tory game in town.

That’s great – a core of party activists is absolutely essential. But we also need a strategy for involving people who don’t, for whatever reason, want to join. Being a member of a political party is unfashionable, seen by many as rather like joining the Jehovah’s Witnesses: it doesn’t make you a bad person, but many people think it’s not very cool. We can deplore that but we need to recognise it. And it’s not just us – Tory membership has been falling, even in the year up to the election that they expected to win.

I was MP for Broxtowe from 1997 until three weeks ago. Broxtowe, a mixture of towns and villages west of Nottingham, is traditional Tory territory and the demographics are changing against us, with more and more prosperous commuter housing. In 1992, the last close-run General Election, they won it by a 14% (10,000 votes) margin. This year, they won it by just 0.7% (389 votes), with a swing since 2005 of 2.6%, one of the lowest in England. We lost, but seemingly we’ve still been doing something right. (more…)

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