Blackham on Heartland Tour

Mark Blackham blogs:

Labour’s “heartland” tour was an artless, and now dead, act of sloganeering.

One of the most profound mistakes in modern politics is what I call ‘sloganising the strategy’. This is when politicians openly describe their political strategy – believing that by announcing it, they make the strategy happen. Nope.  Strategies are internal. They guide what you say and do to bring them about. If you publicise the strategy, you’re revealing, and reveling in, the artifice.

Yes, you do a heartland tour without announcing that it is a heartland tour.

The artless next step was to turn that tactic into a branded campaign; the heartland tour. Energy has been put into branding and imagery. The campaign identifies regions, lists what is wrong with them, proposes broad happy talk solutions, and then has a little form for people to give their “ideas”. Underwhelming.

As bloggers have pointed out, it is reminiscent of many other tours by Labour MPs to see the ‘real people’.

Like they were animals in a zoo 🙂

In fact I was responsible for perhaps the first MP regional tour back in 1991. That tour was the model of substance. It was conducted without fanfare by Labour MPs who would later become main members of the Clark Cabinet  It was about shutting the hell up and listening. It gave us all an appreciation of the views of our prospective voters, and gave us real-life ammunition against the National government and for policy formation.

The crux of what was effectively a three month tour was meeting real people in real life situations. Meeting them where they lived, worked and played. I can’t recall any speeches. 

Look, listen and learn.

Modern politicians dislike the risk of random interactions with the public. They prefer arranged meetings where they can talk. But can you imagine how hard it is to set up presentations from MPs few people have heard of, from a Party currently irrelevant?

Thus, the Heartland tour does not have a lot of substance. They aren’t doing walk-abouts, and they’re giving speeches to small groups of people.

In fact, it’s probably now been all but abandoned, given the Party implosion and  fighting over, er, something.

Mark worked for the Labour Party leader from 1989 to 1993.