The Fabian Society’s question time event at Labour party conference made for a lively debate. Tony Blair’s former staffer John McTernan joined Tim Montgomerie, Labour’s Kate Green and the Guardian‘s Ellie Mae O’Hagan to discuss the future of the Labour party now Jeremy Corbyn is leader. With McTernan criticising Corbyn for a leader’s speech which ‘gave no indication’ that the party had just lost an election, it fell on O’Hagan — who works for the Centre of Labour and Social Studies — to fight Corbyn’s corner.
To kick her argument off, the Guardian writer — and Corbyn champion — explained that after the election result she had realised that in order for Labour to win the next election they needed to discover why people had voted Tory. To do this, she sent an email to her friends organising a trip to a constituency Labour would need to win in 2020:
‘I want to talk about May 8th – the day after the general election because of what I did on May 8th. I got up, I burst into tears and then I emailed all of my friends who I know are lefties, and I said we need to go to a constituency and we need to canvass, maybe a constituency like Thurrock or Nuneaton.
We need to go there and canvass and we just need to meet as many people as we can, and we need to say to them: did you vote conservative? Why did you vote conservative? What do you think about politics? And without judgement and without wanting to have an argument just hear what they have to say and then talk about and think about the results with an open mind.’
O’Hagan said that given her own mission to discover why Tory voters voted as they did, she could not understand why Labour members aren’t doing the same canvassing among Corbyn supporters in their own party:
‘Where is the curiousity about why that happened in your party? Why aren’t you going out there and meeting people who voted for Jeremy? And saying why, why did you do that? Why are you instead calling them morons? Why is there such a lack of curiousity?’
Happily one member of the audience was feeling curious. They asked Ellie what she had learned when she had canvassed the Tory voters after the election. Only there was a small catch: she hadn’t actually gone canvassing:
‘Unfortunately we haven’t actually done the canvassing yet. I only said that we were going to, it’s still in the offing and obviously it got swept up by a massive leadership election and put on a back burner.’
Despite the admission, O’Hagan still managed to win the biggest audience cheers at the event. Vive la Revolution!
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