Last night I returned home from a Downing Street reception for the Sheila McKechnie Foundation which was celebrating the work that campaigners have been doing over the past year.  Sat in front of my computer screen I found the event had made the headlines.  But not entirely in the way I expected.

One award winner had literally tried to glue himself to the Prime Minister - unsuccessfully, I should say.  I was surprised to see the BBC had elevated the story into a major happening.  Today’s Metro has taken it even further, carrying the story on the front page.

Which leaves me asking some real questions about my attitude to the business of campaigning.  At the time, my immediate reaction was to dismiss the stunt as a piece of inappropriate attention seeking, a piece of amateur posturing that will do more harm than good.  Certainly it’s possible that the net effect of it could cause damage to the relationship between campaigners and politicians. If I were Gordon Brown, I would think very seriously about whether I should be inviting into Number 10 people who may simply use it as an opportunity for a piece of cheap publicity.

At the same time, I have to wonder whether I am not just showing all the symptoms of the sort of middle-aged prissiness I criticise in others.  One of my regular tropes is about the conservatism of campaigners.  I strongly believe we should all show some imagination and be unafraid of taking risks.  Yet here am I worrying that our access to those who operate the levers of power may be damaged by just that sort of behaviour.

Who knows where the truth lies?  But one thing I do know.  There is every difference between stunts and influencing, between protest and campaigning.

Getting coverage is not difficult; it is easy to build a career on outright opposition.  What is far more difficult is making an impact and getting things changed.  Stunts may have their part to play in effecting change.  But they carry a high price - the restrictions on campaigning around Parliament, restrictions which Gordon Brown himself lifted just months ago, were put there because of such stunts – and the price is only worth paying if it is in pursuit of a greater good.  Stunts, which are not part of a serious, considered campaigning strategy, are mere self-indulgence. 

Like everyone else it seems, I too had a fair idea of what was going to be in the new Work and Pensions Green Paper.  However, unlike most of the politicians and commentators whose views have been scattered across the media outlets for the past three days, I am not celebrating the dawn of a great new era in welfare provision.

I have always been suspicious of the rights and responsibilities agenda.  Not that I have a problem with both concepts, or even – conceptually at least – the notion that there may be some linkage between them.  It’s just a suspicion, born of experience of Blair as shadow Home Secretary back in 1992, that what we are seeing is the use of one constructive concept (rights/tough on the cause of crime) as a piece of progressive window dressing for another, more punitive concept (responsibilities/tough on crime).

It’s this sort of linguistic sleight of hand which so destroys trust in the political process.  Take the word ‘incentive’.  To you or I, that would commonly mean rewarding someone for doing something you approve of.  In the Green Paper, however, an incentives-based regime actually means a regime which punishes people for non-compliance, usually by taking away their benefits.  Drug users, for example, will be given an incentive to seek treatment.  What is the incentive?  It is the threat of benefit sanctions if they do not.

But linguistic criticisms are scarcely compelling.  What is more concerning is the intrinsic unworkability of the whole package.  The measures in relation to drug users, for example, will only work if users are willing to admit their use.  But why should they if the result is the threat of sanction?  And the promise of greater sharing of information about users between various state agencies will not mean greater knowledge and, therefore, greater treatment; it will mean instead that users will be even more reluctant to admit their usage to anyone in the pay of the state.  The Green Paper may well make good politics.  But it makes appalling policy.

So the DCLG is coming out with yet more announcements on housing.  Two things are clearly going on.  First, there is now (perhaps at last) a recognition that its housing policy is in trouble and that new measures are needed to get supply back on track and save the home ownership market from further pain.  But more profoundly, what we are clearly seeing is the results of the recent changes in Number 10, with an overhaul of the communications team and a concerted attempt by Gordon Brown to seize the political momentum back from the Tories.
 
In one sense, that is very positive for those of us who are interested in keeping housing at the top of the political agenda.  Brown used housing as one his key messages when he launched himself as leader a year or more ago and he is using it again now to re-launch himself as Prime Minister.  As I have argued before, housing is one of those touchstone issues which allows him to talk simultaneously to middle class aspiration and to social justice, to economic efficiency and social mobility.  It also helps put clear blue water between him and a Conservative party which is still some way short of being able to articulate a fully worked-up housing policy.
 
But talking about housing and solving the housing problem are two very different things.  18 months ago, I shared a platform with former Cabinet minister Charles Clarke MP, who was arguing that the major reason why housing had been neglected for so long was that it was in the “too hard” box.  The timescale for action was too long and the price too high; the Government who took the right decisions was rarely around to reap the political credit.  Add to that the implications of the credit crunch, with the consequential drying up of the flow of private capital into building and buying residential property, and the timescale gets longer and bill even higher.
 
So the challenge for Brown is to come up with solutions which will deliver both immediately and in the long term.  They are not easy to find and those that exist often come with high price tags.  But solutions there are – there is no need for outright fatalism.  The Government has just to be brave enough to reach for them.

Interesting hints from Housing Minister Caroline Flint in the papers over the past few days about the possibility of local authorities being encouraged to buy the houses of people in trouble with their mortgages and then renting them back to the former owners.  No details - certainly no indication of the funding stream to pay for the idea - but Ministers don’t usually float those sort of ideas without some serious forethought.
 
Shelter has spent much of the past six months campaigning against sale and leaseback schemes (of which this is clearly a variant), you might expect me to wade into the proposal.  And when you have spent a morning sitting on the GMTV sofa trying to comfort a crying grandmother who had been conned into selling her cheap house to a get-quick-rich merchant who had promised she could stay there until she died before promptly going bust leaving her homeless, you tend to take against such ideas.
 
But we should be very careful to distinguish between an idea and its execution.  It’s true, too many of the people currently operating sale and leaseback schemes are con artists.  But there is absolutely nothing wrong with the basic concept; in fact, it is a great idea.  The problem with repossession is not that people lose their status as home-owners, which is a deep psychological blow (to say nothing of the financial cost).  It is that this blow coincides with them losing their home.  If we can find ways of allowing people to exit out of ownership without having to endure the trauma of moving, that cannot be a bad thing.
 
So all power to Caroline’s idea - it is something we have been urging on her for some months.  Let’s hope it comes off.  We in Shelter now need to work out what we can do to make sure it does.
 

Speechifying is one of the standard parts of my job.  One of the key skills I have had to learn is to remember what speech I am making to what audience.  Most of the time I get it right.  But occasionally I slip.
 
A case in point was my performance at our recent Parliamentary event to launch Shelter’s new campaign “Now is the Time”.  A room full of 150 or so peers, MPs and researchers.  Scones, and cups of tea.  The swanky but stuffy surroundings of the Members Dining Room.  Everything establishment, everything sober.
 
It all started off so well.  A really passionate and uplifting welcome from Karen Buck, one of my very favourite MPs.  Two Ministers also in close attendance.  And then a few minutes of Shelter’s new campaign film, a really well put-together series of interviews, images and stats. 
 
Trouble is: this was the very film we’d spent four days road-testing the previous weekend at the ‘John Peel Stage’ at Glastonbury, with me periodically wandering out between acts to encourage the crowd into signing up as campaigners.   
 
That tempted me down a very dangerous road.  Before I knew it, I was standing there drawing parallels between the challenges of addressing a muddy field full of teenagers, high on music and who-knows-what, and a room full of tea-drinking MPs.  Suffice to say, the comparison did not go down well.  Not one of my finest moments.
 
But politicians are a forgiving lot and the cause is a good one.  By the end of the afternoon, we had 50 or so photos of MPs and peers in full campaign mode and many promises of more signatures to Karen Buck’s Early Day Motion on the need for more affordable homes. 
 
The campaign is launched.  Now is the time drive it home.