One of the criticisms made of Labour over the summer was that the party was not battle-ready. While the Tories poached Barack Obama’s former campaign manager Jim Messina to work alongside Lynton Crosby on election strategy, Miliband’s MPs fretted as the party delayed naming a successor to Tom Watson as campaign co-ordinator.
Now, having appointed Douglas Alexander as chair of general election strategy, and Spencer Livermore, Gordon Brown’s former director of strategy, as general election campaign director in the recent reshuffle, Labour is seeking to show that it is on a “war footing”.
At an all-staff conference tomorrow, Alexander and Livermore will deliver a joint presentation on “election strategy and structures” and will explain “how the party will now be organised around a structure of seven taskforces in an election war room.” This will include a “strengthened Attack and Rebuttal Unit and a Digital Taskforce”. The conference will be opened by general secretary Iain McNicol followed by a Miliband speech and Q&A.
Judging by the early extracts released by Labour, Miliband will emphasise the message that he delivered at today’s PMQs: that the Tories’ U-turn on payday lending marked “an intellectual collapse of their position”. Here’s the key passage:
Two months ago, David Cameron and George Osborne were warning that a Labour Party that wanted to fix broken markets and build an economy which works for working people was flirting with communism and being inspired by Das Kapital.
This week, George Osborne has finally followed our lead on pay day lending and declared, with a straight face, that he now believes markets must be made to work for people, even while he and David Cameron still refuse to take on the big six energy companies.
So be in no doubt: we are winning the battle of ideas, the Tories have no answers. They will always stand up for the privileged few.
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But while seeking to show how it’s making the intellectual running, Labour will also point to its plans to win the ground war. The party has revealed today that it has already recruited over 100 full-time organisers in key target seats, more than the number achieved at the height of the 1997 election campaign.
Optimistic Labourites and pessimistic Tories have long cited the party’s superior ground game as one reason why it is likely to win in 2015. One shadow cabinet minister recently told me that Labour’s strength in this area helped it to win “a 1992-style share of seats on a 1983-style share of the vote” at the last election. The party currently has 187,537 members, significantly more than the Tories’ 134,000, a stat which prompted political and campaign communications head Michael Dugher to remark recently: “Labour still has its historic competitive advantage – people. Tory party membership is dying on its arse and no one is joining the Liberal Democrats.”
Conscious of this gap, Grant Shapps has written to every Tory MP asking them to increase the average number of Conservative members per constituency from 0.5% of Tory voters to 3% (something that would increase the party’s total membership to 800,000). But barring a dramatic transformation, Labour can be confident that it will retain its ground advantage right up to May 2015.
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