by David Talbot
Labour, said Douglas Alexander, the party’s general election supremo, would tap in to voters’ “submerged optimism”. The coming election battle would be a “word of mouth” election fought street by street. Traditional mainstays of the election campaign – posters, leaflets and election broadcasts – would be usurped by the surge of digital campaigning. While the party would be heavily outspent by the Conservatives, Labour would instead focus on “community organisation and peer-to-peer communication”.
Announcing that the party had learnt heavily from the Obama campaign, Labour’s use of digital media would pioneer real-time defence against the opposition as well as digital attack ads, raising funds and recruiting volunteers. This was in comparison to the Conservatives who would spend their considerable war chest on “posters and paid distribution”. Labour’s campaign wouldn’t spend flashy millions and would win not through “one-way communication, but one-to-one communication”. Labour’s approach could be summarised by Alexander’s view that “traditional methods of communication are just inappropriate”.
Sound familiar? Last week Douglas Alexander unveiled Labour’s central campaigning themes for the 2015 general election. But the quotes and context above are all taken from Douglas Alexander’s comments made in February, 2010. The similarity between what Alexander said in 2010, when Labour was to fall to its second worse electoral defeat in its history, and his comments last Friday, are striking. The comments are, in certain passages, in fact almost identical.
In this election Labour will, according to Alexander, engage with “the anger felt by so many in the only way a progressive party can.” In 2010 Labour would deal with “anxiety and anger over bankers’ bonuses, expenses and the recession, a general sense of grumpiness” in, infamously, a “future fair for all.” Labour will “fight this election conversation by conversation, doorstep by doorstep, community by community” whilst in 2010, borrowing from Obama, naturally, it would be “regular people briefing Labour’s message to their neighbours, serving as our ambassadors, block by block, throughout the battleground seats”.
