Posts Tagged ‘#Labourdoorstep’

A big Labour win, or even a solid majority, will show once again that the ground game is wildly overrated in modern politics

22/06/2024, 09:34:47 PM

by Atul Hatwal

Heresy! Burn the unbeliever! Is someone really blaspheming against the hallowed environs of the #Labourdoorstep?

Yes dear reader, I am and if you too want to be damned by the high priests of political organising, read on.

Door-knocking, phone-banking and leafletting are the performative rituals of politics as a religion rather than practical activities that make much difference to the election result.

They provide a communal focus for activists. They give the candidate something to do (normally far too much, both in terms of time and financial commitment) and generate a faux flow of data during those frenetic few weeks of a campaign, cloaking local endeavours with the appearance of quantitative rigour.

But in truth, most of it is futile, certainly in terms of the overall election result.

How have I discerned this untold wisdom? By dint of remembering the 2019 election, the 2017 election, the 2015 election, the 2010 election and… well, you get the point.

Here are a few examples.  There are many more.

In 2015, Labour was wiped out in Scotland. The SNP was in the ascendant but they did not have an activist operation on anything like the scale to actively work and secure 56 out of 59 seats, constituency by constituency. But somehow, without a full ground operation, they still succeeded.

David Cameron’s Tories did similar to the Lib Dems in the south, once again, without any sign of a comprehensive ground game that extended across all of their target seats.

In 2019, the Tories smashed Labour across the Red Wall. These were not seats with huge, bustling Tory activist formations which had been assiduously working each constituency for years. Once again, in most of these seats there was no substantive Tory ground game, yet still, even without lots of social media posts about the #RedWall doorstep, the Tories managed to reduce Labour to its worst result since the 1930s.

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Jack Lesgrin’s Week

13/04/2021, 10:46:47 PM

In a new regular feature, Jack Lesgrin gives a wry perspective on what’s caught the eye over the past week

A shepherdess speaks

In a fluff piece to promote her new Channel 5 documentary, celebrity Yorkshire shepherdess Amanda Owen opined in The Times about how “the snowflake generation, they can’t do anything”. Laying the blame at the door of parents, and not knowingly affected by self-awareness, she noted of her own situation that “living here gives you a different mindset, a can-do mindset.” I imagine her motivational tips will go down as well as a tank full of slurry among the millions of parents who do their best to bring up children in small houses or flats in our inner-cities, with tiny or no gardens, limited outdoor space, low incomes, high crime levels, and sky-high property prices due to a planning system that favours rural NIMBYs. After all, not everyone is blessed by living on a 2,000 acre farm, or having lucrative second jobs such as presenting a hit Channel 5 show or being a best selling author. What next, tips on entrepreneurship by someone who inherited the seed capital from a rich relative?

Add Fennel for the flavour of success

Speaking of which, your correspondent was intrigued to gain yet more insights on the magic of success during BBC Radio 4’s Profile of the obviously talented Emerald Fennell – who readers may know as The Crown’s Camilla and who is currently Oscar-nominated for her film Promising Young Woman.

It is important that the world understands the elixir that could explain her mastery of more career roles by the age of 35, than most provincial towns could muster across their entire population during two centuries (actress, novelist, television writer, screenwriter, film director, television producer, film producer, and playwright).

Could it be the bohemian household of her childhood, which welcomed the great and the good from showbiz? I guess had most people been asked by family friend Andrew Lloyd Webber to re-write Cinderella for him, it might have boosted their confidence, too.

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Oi journalists! Stop complaining about MPs tweeting campaign pics. It’s called democracy and it’s great

20/01/2015, 05:11:28 PM

by Ian McKenzie

There is currently a deep and widening fracture between the British people and their political parties, apparently. The chasm is so big that the political party as a concept is in terminal decline. The main two parties are in particular danger because their joint share of the national vote has fallen dramatically in the last 6 decades: it’s all over now, baby blue and baby red.

These assertions have become truths all but universally acknowledged; it’s all a bit boring really.

People do not join parties in large numbers any more. The electorate has slammed its doors on the main parties after saying “you are all the same”. People feel alienated and disenfranchised, believing that politicians are only in it for themselves and only come round at election times when they want votes and are nowhere to be seen during the rest of the electoral cycle. Yada yada yada.

I know all this because I’ve read it, and endlessly repeated variations of it, in newspapers and on Twitter.

It’s pervasive: explicit in opinion columns and covert in the news. The articles are written by political journalists and others and then tweeted and re-tweeted by them and their colleagues. These reports of widespread disconnection from the political process usually include expressions of regret; the demise of the parties is often celebrated. The theme is usually the same “you politicians had it coming, you’ve taken the electorate for granted for decades, the system’s broken and it’s your fault, you feckless, lazy reprobates.”

But the last couple of years have seen a little twist: Twitter has gone mainstream and not just in Westminster either. Hundreds of MPs and thousands of activists, in most constituencies, have continued doing what they have been doing for decades, knocking on doors and staying in touch with electors, only now they are doing it on Twitter.

In fact, Twitter has helped motivate and mobilise activism. Any Labour organiser will tell you there’s nothing like a bit of peer pressure and leading by manifest example to get people off their sofas and onto doorsteps. These days, hundreds of MPs, even those who once swore they would never stoop so low, and their campaign teams post thousands of tweets from, say, Acacia Avenue. We know it’s Acacia Avenue because the team is usually snapped in front of the road sign.

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