We need to talk about the "ground game". It's politics, but it exists outside of Westminster and has nothing to do with parliament. For all our news coverage and political punditry, it is hardly ever talked about. For the last 30 years, it has been trodden on by most party leaders. Now Labour is silently revolutionising its ground game, and it is going to help decide the outcome of the next election.
So what is it? In short, it is the health and activity of our parties' grassroots. For Labour it is the 200,000 members of the party, their activity, influence, training and organisational power. These are the people who knock on doors, collect voter preferences and get out the vote on election days. They are your friends, neighbours and colleagues who reach out to church meetings, schools and unions. They ground the party in local communities by sharing their experiences with national leaders. And they do everything on a voluntary basis.
For the past 30 years, Labour has been doing its best to take the soul out of the ground game. Members were reduced to drones. They were expected to deliver leaflets, but they couldn't influence their content. Their say over policy was reduced. Under Tony Blair, members were more like consumers. They paid their fees and they got a government. Under Gordon Brown they were not part of a movement; they were subjects to a bureaucracy.
But now all that is changing. Arnie Graf, described by one member as "the king of the ground game", has been brought in to change the way the party works. As I've written before, he's not your usual political suspect. This silver-haired American doesn't have the ego or celebrity of Steve Hilton or Lynton Crosby, but he's got as many friends as they have enemies. He has spent years working as a community organiser in Chicago under the Industrial Areas Foundation, training new and unlikely leaders to fight for the things they care about – including the living wage and better housing. Now he's been recruited to help Labour do the same.
It's not easy to turn a tanker like the Labour party. But under Graf's leadership and Iain McNicol, the party's relatively new general secretary, change is starting to happen. The party has granted funding for 200 organisers to be trained under Graf's guidance with Movement for Change, the community organising wing of the Labour party. In a sign of complete victory, this approach has even been able to win round Tom Watson MP – reputed to be one of Labour's most controlling politicians – who announced yesterday that there would be another 1,000 volunteers trained in marginal seats with genuine influence over their wards. One of the little-trumpeted success stories of Ed Miliband's leadership is that he is also making spaces for these initiatives to happen.
So what does this look like on the ground? It starts small. In Carlisle, local members have been given permission to leave their stuffy meeting rooms to campaign against rubbish in the streets. Stella Creasy MP has been supported by Graf in campaigns for an interest rate cap. Caroline Flint is organising around energy prices. In Dover, Lord Maurice Glasman has worked with the local community to stop the privatisation of the historic port. These campaigns don't come out of nowhere, they come from working with communities.
This kind of politics is successful because it is rooted in people's concerns – housing, wages, transport. It's a sign of Labour engaging with non-voters as well as swing voters, the working as well as the middle class. The Tories don't have anything like it.
Some say we are learning from the radical new techniques of Obama. But speaking to Labour members who flew out to help in the last presidential election, Obama's campaign of timetables, easily fired volunteers and acute data analysis was an example of extreme top-down control. What Labour is doing is much more bottom-up, and therefore more radical. Right now, Labour is being inspired as much by its historic roots with Keir Hardie and the suffragettes as it is with modern Barack.
Of course there are still obstacles. We haven't tested this new approach on an election yet. There are also doubts about whether old-school operators are capable of "letting go" (the new community organising manual is still safely behind bars on Members Net). Most importantly, there is a question about whether this new way of working will be allowed to change Labour's policies. As one influential member put it: "No one is organising around the five-point plan."
But there are two reasons why we should persevere with this change. The first is about survival. At the moment Labour has very few members for a country of 63 million. People are apathetic and cynical about national politicians and journalists talking at them through TV screens. The most effective way of cutting through to voters now is face-to-face contact, local members who are their neighbours and friends. This requires more volunteers, and you won't attract new volunteers without giving them a more meaningful role.
The second reason is more profound. It's about the nature of democratic politics and what it should be about. The point of Labour is not just to capture the state. The point is to work together with others to find and fight for the things we care about and have in common. Anyone who has won elected office knows what it's like to pull the leavers of government only to find that nothing changes on the ground. People have to own political decisions for them to work. For a meaningful victory in 2015, we need to win the ground game.