Manual Labour

Although I don't think much of his final idea in this, Chris Calland writes:

Not too long ago I spent a bank holiday weekend planting fence posts into a field in Somerset (long story …) and something struck me (figuratively, not literally) – For all the toil involved in agriculture, you never really hear Labour taking about the plight of people living and working in the countryside.

‘That’s because they’re all a bunch of Tories’, you might think. Well, sidestepping whether that’s the case, isn’t it true that any political party wanting a parliamentary majority needs to be representative of the country it seeks to govern?

Just look at all the soul-searching going on in Labour over how to respond to urban working-class voters expressing frustration at immigration, the European Union and welfare.

Which got me thinking about what Labour could do to properly engage with rural communities, understand the issues that matter to them, develop effective policies and (shock, horror) maybe even win some votes.

Helpfully, this is ground that Progress has previously covered back in December 2011. In particular, Strathclyde University’s professor of politics John Curtice has written about how Labour may have its best opportunity in a generation to reverse some of its rural decline, if the party can tap into disenchantment among rural Liberal Democrat voters.

Moreover, both Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Loughborough Matthew O’Callaghan and Labour’s shadow Defra minister in the House of Lords Jim Knight have pointed the way towards policy and campaigning for Labour in rural areas.

And perhaps most interestingly, former Young Fabians lead in the south-west Steve Race has pointed to the successes that the Australian Labor party has had with ‘Country Labor’, as part of his argument for the rebirth of the ‘Rural Labour’ wing of the party here in the UK.

So how about it? Why not the launch of Rural Labour (which already has its own unofficial Twitter feed) or a Labour Rural Network?  We’ve already seen great work done by the Labour Women’s Network, the Labour Finance and Industry Group, the Labour Small Business Task Force, Scientists for Labour and Labour Friends of the Forces, so why not another network to reach important constituency (which would also dovetail nicely with Third Place First)?

This then got me pondering about yet another constituency that Labour should think about – men.

‘What?!’, I hear many of you say. ‘Men are hardly underrepresented in positions of power and influence’. But what kind of men? How many men?

Most of my male friends are not members of political parties, but they are interested in politics and they are not averse to Labour. They are your classic floating voters who decide elections. But do they see Labour as for them? No, ‘it’s for political obsessives and minorities’, comes the reply.

And why does any of this matter to Labour? It matters because the party is ultimately in the business of winning votes and donations, now more than ever with the proposed changes to trade union member affiliations, and two years out from an election that the party is by no means at all certain of winning.

Jon Cruddas has recently started to flesh out policies of relevance and importance to men, such as his recent speech which touched upon supporting the concept of fatherhood. Lack of male role models in schools and families is also an issue we still have not cracked.

So why not take the next step and make sure issues that pertain particularly to men have a dedicated space in the party – a Labour Men’s Network? How about it.