The weekend saw the tenth Labour party Summer School, a residential retreat organised for the Labour party by Young Labour each year.
It's a chance for party members to think about the long term challenges of social democracy away from the drivers of day to day reaction, self-censorship and organising imperatives. It isn't cut off from what's happening day to day, but tries to be a bit detached and reflective.
There were a whole slew of interesting sessions which tabled a range of policy and ideological issues, and a discussion of Labour's organisational review chaired by party president Moira Coatsworth.
The rewarding parts of the event as always were the chances to meet new people, and to talk about politics in the absence of time pressures and with new ideas floating around.
Compared with the last few, there was a higher turnout and more new faces. Both very welcome developments.
From my conversations, there is a strong recognition that Labour needs to be doing things differently compared with what we have done in the past few years, to establish more clearly in the public mind what Labour stands for, and to reach out to and include pools of potential Labour voters who do not vote for us at the moment.
The election result is primary evidence of this, but so is the tone of voter and campaign feedback and of the attitudes of friends and family to Labour today.
We are too often seen in a way that doesn't feel real to us, but does to too many voters: detached, self obsessed, negative, without a plan, economically non-credible, captured, and essentially backward looking and irrelevant.
Perceptions like that aren't only caused by outsiders or by 'the media'. It takes two to tango. Things we have done that seem minor or irrelevant to us sometimes symbolize a much bigger deal to people we want to support us, not to be pissed off by us.
It's a big challenge to undo all that. We have a good new team in the leadership roles, and still fresh people at the party council leadership, to do that rebuild. But it can't be just down to them.
That's why summer school was fun, really: a chance to spread the news about change, and to face up to the fact it will be scary, fun, challenging, inspiring work that will leave Labour more fun to be part of, and more electable to public office.
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