These are our contributions to the Labour Together General Election Review.
Our work looked into two aspects of the Labour Party’s 2019 General Election campaign:
Alongside the main report, today we are publishing two supplementary reports that the main report drew upon.
While the Labour Together report is a result of the collaborative effort of all commisioners, these are research pieces, commissioned by Labour Together, in our own voice. The raw material of this research fed into the review itself, as well as grounding our analysis and editoral work in collaboration with other commissioners.
The first report In lieu of strategy, outlines our general approach and problems we faced in producing the report.
It goes on to examine the ground operation in the 2019 and the general organisation of the Labour Party.
It examines the mixed results of various attempts at bringing community organising to Labour since 2015. These mixed results are partly due to cultural and organisation problems with Labour understanding this form of organising and hostility to change.
In lieu of strategy: ground operations and organisational structure
The second System updates required, relates to digital technology and in particular the use of digital technology within ground operations.
It highlights problems of producing technology by the Labour Party and makes specific recommendations as to how these could be improved.
System updates required: ground operations and digital technology
We also publish an organisational chart that shows how the Labour Party is structured. This allowed us to navigate some of our work and make conclusions on how this structure, and the decision making it allowed, significantly weakened Labour’s campaign.
The topics of our contribution became so intertwined that at points it was difficult to cleanly separate them out. It might be best to consider them as elements of an interlocking whole: politics, organising, technology and social change.
These elements and their relationship is what Common Knowledge was specifically founded to address. The General Election Review allowed us an opportunity to explore how political organising works, how technology enables it and how organisations can best organise themselves to make political organising happen.
Our general approach was to:
provide a good-faith analysis of practical and organisational matters, from the perspective of researcher practitioners of digital technology and political organising including in a UK and international political and third sector context. In our work here we have attempted to perform a “no-blame” analysis, looking at systems, limitations and possibilities, rather than counter-productively focusing on persons and blame, a technique common in the software engineering industry.
To produce these we embraced a range of techniques.
We looked in detail at the online survey of 11,060 people conducted by Labour Together, taking a largely qualitative and exploratory approach, while others handled more quantitative aspects of the survey.
We then interviewed people from across the campaign. From Labour HQ, to members of the leadership team, to regional staffers, to members of the Community Organising Unit, to those who had engaged in digital work for Labour across many years prior to the Corbyn era.
We’d like to thank the review staff for being kind enough to commission us. We’d like to thank in particular Hannah O’Rourke for allowing us to follow our interests and instincts as far as anyone could hope for.
We’d like to thank the other commissioners also, if nothing else for their patience wth our continuous barrage of questions.
There are a number of aspects of the report we would have placed different emphasis on, or spent more time with. We have some disagreements with its conclusions - partly always the case with group writing. These are for another day.
Today, take a deep dive into these reports.
You can get in touch with us on hello@commonknowledge.coop.
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We also published a more broad reflection on our goals for the review on our website.