Why Listening matters.
the jam lady Sun May 04, 2008 at 04:40:02 PM GMT 
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Today we are getting a strong committment from the party leadership to listen effectively.
Getting this right matters, and we need to work on ways of improving the listening process, right through from from the door knockers like myself to the inner circles of Government.
Doing it right will give us the early warning systems we need to deal with problems quietly, rather than in the middle of a media frenzy.
Getting this right matters, and we need to work on ways of improving the listening process, right through from from the door knockers like myself to the inner circles of Government.
Doing it right will give us the early warning systems we need to deal with problems quietly, rather than in the middle of a media frenzy.
I suppose that one advantage that I have over some of the relatively new friends I have made in the Labour Party is that I joined only last year, with the succession in doubt, and at the point when the Labour Party was entering one of its periodic episodes of trying to rip itself apart. So whatever I was expecting it didn’t involve any sunlit uplands, or roses.
On the face of it my reason for joining could appear perverse. I was just coming to the end of 10 years of caring for my mother, who suffered from severe dementia following a stroke, and I was pretty disillusioned about the quality of care, the interface between social care and the health service and the whole structure of care funding.
Initially this experience was so bad that it made me seriously doubt that I had been doing the right thing in voting Labour for the last 30 years. It wasn’t until I had researched the background to the problem for several months that I could see that it went back far beyond this Government to the Community Care Act of the 1990’s and to the low tax economy of the 1980’s. This Government certainly deserve some criticism for not having got to grips with the problem over the last 11 years, but like many other things that they have to deal with, it is an enormously complex and challenging issue.
What my MP did, which turned my very real anger into a strong commitment to help him, and also to try and do what I can to strengthen the democratic process, is something very simple. He listened, he thought about what I was telling him, and he accepted that there was a real problem. We have been working together on this now for the best part of 2 years, and I have seen all the delicate background work that he has had to do, and have finally seen the commitment to the Green Paper on Care Funding.
We now, in the wake of the 10p turmoil and the May day massacre, have Gordon’s renewed commitment to listen. It is crucial, but also difficult. One of the other factors that played into my decision to join the party was watching some of the committee sessions on “the Role of the Backbencher”. This was a highly revealing series of interviews which really showed some of the difficulties involved in being an MP. It showed something of the reason why 1997 did not bring about the golden age we all hoped for. A landslide election throws together a crowd of ambitious, intelligent, idealistic people, all hoping to change the world. It gives them very little in the way of training, and the culture of the commons really does not encourage people to ask for support. There is no effective infrastructure to help them to work collectively to identify where problems might exist, and then there is the endless tide of mail. The better and more approachable and effective the MP is the more mail they get.
Getting the Listening right really matters. I do this at the grass roots level. I am on the phones or knocking doors week after week, because I am trying to support my MP in his highly marginal seat. I have set up effective systems for capturing the issues that I am encountering and feeding these to my MP, and I know that his case workers do something similar with all the mail that comes through, but it needs to go beyond that. We need a simple system, which does not make any big demand on the time of MPs or their staff, which allows the collective logging of issues. If we can do this it would give us an effective early warning system, which would flag up potentially dangerous issues whilst they are still small. And then, it we really do have a listening Government this would allow us to deal with matters quietly and carefully, rather than have to do it all in the middle of a media frenzy.
Why Listening matters. | 7 comments (7 topical)
Why Listening matters. | 7 comments (7 topical)
