400 people paid a penny to join Labour, so they could have the honour of having Ed Miliband voice their concerns to the nation. Now, I'm pretty confident that the admin on 400 new members is going to cost more than the £4.00 that Labour have made this week. And that these bargain hunters may prove fickle when they get asked for the full £39.00 next year. It's also made me more certain than ever that Labour's claim to have had 50,000 new members since the election is likely to prove an exaggeration.
I wonder why people didn't take up the offer? Maybe it's because although the 'young' are perceived to be against some of the coalition's policies, they still realise that Labour are not yet a credible alternative. These young people also aren't quite young enough to have missed the fact that Labour were the ones that introduced tuition fees in the first place. And they won't have missed that Labour itself has absolutely no credible policy for higher education. They will also be suspicious that having Ed Miliband as a spokesman isn't necessarily the best thing, given that he can't seem to get any media coverage at the moment and the PLP thinks he's useless.
Which begs the question: why now? A reduced membership rate is a great one-off gimmick that has the very real potential to raise membership numbers. But you have to already have forward momentum. A cheap membership rate when you've no policies, have just been beaten in an election and have a weak new leader will not turn things around. Now they're in an even worse situation, because this poor response has just confirmed to the public that no-one wants to join their party. If they'd done it in three years' time then it could have been hugely successful. But I really think they've jumped the gun.
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