Rich Wilson

15 000 new members joined the Labour party within 24 hours of the election and they are entering an organisation which is not as welcoming as it could be. I am one of the new, a returning member so to be fair I knew the score.

I attended the first Stroud constituency group since the Corbyn surge on Friday. It was a packed house with a couple of great talks, one on Human Rights and the other on the local response to the Refugee Crisis. I chatted to a couple of new members, but I think the three of us, out of around fifty or sixty people, might have been the only new members there. Which you might think a little disappointing given the national surge in members, and if the numbers of locals joining the party on my Facebook feed are anything to go by. But I’m not sure people did.

The thing is, as far as I can tell, that Labour has never really had a good system for welcoming new members, what they call in business jargon ‘on boarding’. At present you are sent a welcome pack, which includes your card, and if you are lucky you’ll get added to the local email list. I did receive a ‘welcome’ call from party HQ, but it wasn’t very welcoming. Instead it was just a list of questions about who I’d voted for before and whether I’d ever been a member of a different party. It wasn’t a welcome call it was a vetting call.

This attitude of vetting new members goes to the heart of how labour needs to change. Instead of seeing new members as people that need to checked to see if they should belong to our gang; new members need to be embraced and supported to achieve the change they, the individual new member, want to see in the world. Instead of being asked whether you’ve ever voted for a different party, you need to be asked what do you want to see change and how can we the party help you achieve that. For members that don’t have something they want to do, then the party just needs to make them feel loved and that they belong.

Sadly this is very far from what is happening; and it is potentially fatally wounding for team Corbyn and profoundly damaging for Labour. Many of the new members are young people who have never been involved in politics before. They will have however be members of other things like 38 Degrees, Greenpeace, Amnesty, Tesco Clubcard, The Costa Club to name a few. Each of these makes it very clear that you are hugely valued by them and that they exist in a major part to serve you. With the real clincher being that they don’t want much back in return, either a few clicks of your mouse or a few pounds spent. Labour on the other hand makes it clear that they expect you to support their vision, and right from word go you are bombarded by emails requesting more and more of your cash and time. This model of top-down politics will alienate many of the new members, and as the tough business of opposition starts many will drift away, feeling as if no one really listened to them.

This cannot be allowed to happen. If Labour is to stand any chance of winning in 2020 these new members need to be cared for and not taken for granted. Corbyn’s team right now should be creating a new onboarding process for each member where their starting position is to ask: not what can you do for the Labour Party, but what can the Labour Party do for you?