Archive for May, 2017

Election 1997 20th anniversary: “North West Labour party, leaders of a new generation, can I help you?”

01/05/2017, 12:33:14 PM

In a series of pieces, Uncut writers look back at election day 1997. Tristram Brown was a volunteer at the North West regional office.

You could touch the build up to polling day in 1997. Everywhere we went people wanted to talk about labour being in government. Flags, posters, banners everywhere. We were also supremely organised (but probably less so than my imperfect memory will allow me). We had an answer to every question we were going to be asked, we had a leaflet, a pledge card or a manifesto for everyone we met.

To this day, that election taught me that if you want to judge whether the party or our policies are popular you can see the ripples of support in the public. In order to penetrate the quiet reserve of public consciousness then there must be visible signs of it in the towns and villages of the country. There is no such thing as a silent revolution.

I spent the night working, collecting results as they came in and passing them on. There were parties everywhere, but the party staff and volunteers worked through the night, including in NW regional office pulling together results and passing intelligence on. This was before Wikipedia or the internet so it relied on networks of staff calling each other (mobile phones weren’t common then – pagers!). I was one of the first up the next morning opening the office and as an act of indulgence I remember answering the phones with “NW Labour Party, leaders of a new generation, can I help you?”

I went back into university the next week and my professor had filled in the paperwork for an extension on my deadlines on my behalf. Happy days.

Tris Brown was a volunteer in NW regional office between 1995-1997 

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Election 1997 20th anniversary: “Who the hell is Claire Curtis-Tansley?”

01/05/2017, 10:50:22 AM

In a series of pieces, Uncut writers look back at election day 1997. Atul Hatwal was a press officer at Millbank HQ and gives a personal take on the day.

By May 1st, party HQ at Millbank tower was almost empty. Most staff had been shipped out to key seats to knock doors in the last week.

The press desk was silent. The morning dragged by with a couple of international press  queries on timings but other than that I wiled away the time looking out of the window at the glorious blue sky and ringing people I knew in committee rooms in various key seats, bothering them for updates on whether the vote was coming out.

This wasn’t official business mind, just curiosity and something to do.

These were the days when pagers were modern and the internet was still called the information super-highway. The equivalent of Twitter was sitting, staring at Lotus notes (that’s what we had rather than Outlook) on a desktop screen, waiting for an e-mail to appear.

I was rostered to work the morning through to late afternoon; then some time-off before coming in for the evening shift at eight, on duty for results and at the party through to the morning.

The time-off wasn’t really time-off though – all staff working these sorts of shifts were expected to spend their downtime knocking up in a key seat.

Earlier in the week the whole key seat operation had been refocused with canvassers moved out to an entirely new list of seats with much higher Tory majorities.

At the time the decision was announced I had committed a minor heresy.

I asked one of the key seats team why we were shifting at such a late stage? What did we hope to achieve with 4 days of canvassing in seats that hadn’t been touched in years.

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