A Political Punch In The Face: From a Labour Campaigner
I have a deep love of the Labour Party. Remember the Labour Party, it has brought you great hits such as the NHS, the Welfare State and the picture of Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich.
I want you to think about that picture, google it if you need to. It is a picture used to show that a candidate was too buffoonery to be Prime Minister. Instead the nation chose a much safer candidate in a man who ran off to hide in a shed when things got difficult. And now the country has given a landslide majority to Boris Johnson. A man who steals phones, hides in fridges, lies on buses and doesn’t know how many children he has.
At 10pm on the twelfth of December I sat in front on my computer watching a BBC news live stream sobbing. This is not been the first time an exit poll has brought be to tears, I vividly remember 2015’s exit poll having similar effect, watching Iowa go Trump in 2016 and waking up earlier in the year to see that we have left the EU.
Listening to Andrew Neil talk about the fall of the Red wall was unbearable. For these are the Labour heartlands in the North-West that I had canvassed in. I like many others had knocked doors and spoken to people in areas such as Wakefield, Oldham and Bury. I truly believe that I learned more about British Politics canvassing on the doorstop than during the three years of my degree. When you speak to people you understand that it is very difficult for them to care about the partisan heckling in parliament when they focus on what is in front of them. Lack of jobs, lack of affordable housing, queues at foodbanks and homeless people lining their morning commute. As a Labour campaigner you remind people that this is due to austerity and Tory cuts but if they have a Labour MP and a Labour council it is difficult to look beyond what’s in front of them to an overarching tale of destructive Tory policies.
An anecdote that sums up how that Conservative landslide happened came from a friend who door- knocked in the North. They met an ex-miner on the doorstop living on Attlee Close in Rother Valley who was voting Conservative. Rother Valley is the sight of Orgreave, an incident of one of the worse abuses of power by Thatcher’s government towards the Miners and an incident that is still being covered up by the Conservative Government. Therefore, this is an ex-miner who lost his livelihood due to the Conservatives, living on a street named after the Labour Prime Minister who introduced the welfare state and all the safety net policies we take for granted and he voted for Boris Johnson.
When you canvass you meet all sorts of people who feel left behind by partisan politics. You can study Brexit in class all you want but until you speak to people who feel that they are not being listened to, you can’t really understand. It is the nature of a first-past-the-post system that people are always going to feel ignored and not listened to. I am a Remainer through and through, but I can understand that the turmoil around Brexit after the referendum made people feel even less listened to. Brexit resulted in a nation of people feeling afraid and a bit humiliated. People voted Brexit when they felt left behind by politics and the chaos and squabbling of the last three years made them feel ever more left behind and ignored. By voting for the governing party they would finally feel listened too and for something, no matter how disastrous, would finally be seen through. While this result is terrible from my perspective, I have come to understand that the underappreciated value of democracy is that everyone’s vote is equal. For better or for worse. In this case much, much worse
I had convinced myself that Boris was a buffoon and since he was unpopular within his Parliamentary Party he must therefore be unpopular with the electorate. But I had convinced myself that the global trend of outwardly buffoonery right-wing populist leaders such as Balsonaro, Trump and Duterte would not be repeated in a country known for its bland politicians. I was in denial of a trend I was well aware of, had studied, a trend that doomed to be repeated since 2016. It was doomed because Johnson was also familiar with this trend and knew exactly what he was doing. The bad haircuts, pictures of him looking ridiculous on a bike and wearing strange clothes was to obfuscate his privileged background, make you forget the picture of him wearing tails in the Bullingdon Club. He brought out mugs of tea for reporters to soften the fact that he had the day before written the most outwardly racist article in a mainstream newspaper by a governing party in over a decade. It made him seem a lot more harmless than his track record should indicate. I am (perhaps falsely) hopeful that his hard-right policies are also an act to attract voters from the Brexit party and he will use his majority to pass a more moderate Brexit deal. However, I am not optimistic.
When I woke up this morning and saw messages from canvassers, I expected the blame game for why we lost that the left is known for. In the upcoming days and weeks, you will see many of these takes on what went wrong. What I actually saw was strong messages of determination and the suggesting of acts to protect the most vulnerable. Such as donating to a foodbank and joining a union. With this I am adding my own plea. During times of Tory majorities keep supporting the most vulnerable members of society. They are always the ones who suffer the most when leaders believe inequality is beneficial to society or simply do not care. Think of those at Grenfell, the Windrush generation and the 130,000 who have already died due to austerity. While you may survive to fight another election, others may not.
Lastly, I would like to pay tribute to campaigners for the Labour Party. You worked so hard and did the best you could, and we are so grateful. People underestimate how mentally, and physically exhausting canvassing is, so to spend your spare time doing something that can feel so pointless and thankless is amazing. To the phone bankers as well, you are incredible. It is because of these people, the ones who spend every spare moment talking to the electorate in December in the cold and the rain, that the dream of a Labour government can never die.
Written by Zoe Williams
Zoe is 22 and originally from Bath but currently residing in Manchester. She just graduated in Politics and therefore loves a good rant about Brexit and Boris Johnson. She is currently working for a Coffee chain that shall remain nameless, but they pay far too little tax and keep their staff’s tips. Unsurprisingly she is on the market for a new job. She is also a textile artist when she finds the time.