Shadow minister sets out her pitch for deputy leadership of the party by saying Labour needs to do more to connect with people

The Labour MP Stella Creasy has urged her party to stop acting like a “machine that turns up at election time trying to harvest votes”, as she set out her pitch for the deputy leadership.

The shadow minister, known for her successful campaign against payday loan sharks, said huge changes were needed to make Labour electable and to reignite enthusiasm about participation in politics across the country.

She said the party’s methods of campaigning needed to be thoroughly overhauled. “It is not that a particular group of people didn’t vote for us, it’s not that a particular type of campaigning didn’t work,” she said. “What is so challenging for us is that you look at that election result and it says everything is broken, everything has got to be contested and challenged because none of it connected.”

Creasy is one of the two favourites for the deputy leadership of the party along with Tom Watson, another campaigning MP who helped uncover the phone-hacking scandal.

Others in the crowded race include John Healey, Angela Eagle, Caroline Flint, Rushanara Ali and Ben Bradshaw. Unlike some others, Creasy is not backing a particular candidate to be leader, saying she could work with any of them, and does not come from a particular wing of the party. She is not standing for leader because she believes her particular skillset is in organising and motivating people, which would be more suited to a role in reforming the party’s campaign strategy.

Giving a damning verdict on the party’s failure to interact enough with voters, Creasy cast doubt on the effectiveness of the 6m conversations on the doorstep hailed repeatedly by then leader Ed Miliband as evidence of the party’s superior ground war.

“Five and a half million of them could have been: can you go away please, I’ve got the washing on,” she said.

“One of the central things for me is that we are asking people if they vote Labour, but I think we need to understand why they vote Labour or why not … It wasn’t a conversation in the sense that anybody else would understand because it was about telling us something we want to know. It wasn’t ‘can you talk to us about this?’ A lot of activists were trying to give us intelligence but we don’t have a way of capturing that and thinking about that.”

She said there was now a “sense of shock and fear that we were doing what we thought was the best thing and it was found wanting”.

Rather than blame the messaging on leaflets or Miliband himself, she said the party should realise it was “in an age where people want politics not to be broadcast at them, but interactive, where they don’t just want to be told this group of people can make their lives better, they want to be part of it.”

However, she made it clear she believes Labour is not simply a pressure group and needs to be more than a series of campaigns on important issues.

“The thing for me is: how do we become a movement rather than a machine? People think of the Labour party as a machine that turns up at election time trying to harvest votes, rather than a force for good. That’s what we’ve got to be again to win again,” she said.

“We will all know people in communities who are changing things. The issues they care about are issues we care about. Somehow along the way that has become separated from our political process. We wait for them to turn up, and join and then go to a meeting. Rather than waiting for them to come to us, we need to go to them.”

Creasy said one of the challenges of the position would be motivating the party to change but she warned there could be severe consequences for Labour if it did not do more to enthuse people before the next election.

“We’ve had false starts before,” she said. “We’ve had processes where we’ve said maybe people should work in different ways and it has culminated in ‘maybe MPs should have coffee mornings’. That is not what this is about. This is about all of us. This is about how do you get people who are passionate about social change to be passionate in politics again, and use that in their communities to inspire other people.

“My fear is if we don’t, what we’ve seen in parts of the country about people feeling Labour doesn’t speak to them and with them, that will become the story about us, rather than that we are a movement that at its best changes the world.”

Asked whether membership should be made free, she said funding was one of the questions that needed to be looked at, as some new members said the first thing that happened after signing up was they were asked for money.

“Of course there is an argument about how you fund a political movement, but the thing we’ve got to get right is how to turn the first spark into a flame for social justice,” Creasy said.