The Problem: When your party doesn’t win the election, you don’t get the policies you want.
The Solution: Join the opposition party en-masse and change them from within, so whoever wins the election will implement the policies you want.
This is a pretty straight forward idea but one that oddly does not seem to have caught on.
The conventional approach of politics is to join the party whose policies you broadly support and campaign for them, hoping that they will win the next election. This can be seen with Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and the Momentum support he has achieved as well as with anti-Trump supporters in the Democrats in the USA.
However, it doesn’t always work very well, particularly when you have a seemingly unelectable individual such as Jeremy Corbyn at the helm. Even if you have a strong leader and party, there is still a risk that you will lose an election.
So the best way to win is to stack the deck – infiltrate the opposition party membership and mould that party to your will.
This requires some organisation, and a bit of clandestine manoeuvring as well to prevent the process being identified and stopped in its process, but is achievable.
The Labour party membership growth to vote-in Jeremy Corbyn is a good example of the potential for this – he has become seemingly impossible to dismiss from leadership of the Labour party because of the new members backing him. The problem with the strategy is that it is not winning elections – it’s only half the solution.
If Momentum and their ilk really want to change the country, they need to become members of the Tory party. They would then get control of the party’s mechanisms and could mould more of their policies to suit their own needs, dragging the party to the centre if not to the left. Then whoever won the election would implement a lot of the policies they want – it could not be too blatant, otherwise an alternate party would spring up, but it could certainly reduce the risk of electing a party whose policies people fundamentally disagree with.
Similarly for Remaining in the EU – if people really want to see it happen, they should join the Tory Party and Labour party en masse and use their membership strength to push both parties towards remain. Yes, there is a risk another party will emerge as the opposition, but it will take time and resources, and then can be infiltrated in future as well.
Ultimately, it comes down to the old phrase, ‘better to be inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in’. Get rid of dogmatism and realise if you want to change you have to work with your enemy and mould them to your will, not simply shout at them about how awful they are. It's how wars are won, after all.
Success is all about a competent and clear intent made into effective strategy combined with effective organisation to target key influence points. The Extinction Rebellion campaign could learn something – rather than get a million people to go on a march, get them to join the Labour and Tory parties and demand they introduce the Net Zero pledge in parliament.
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