04 July 2019
“I’d Rather Not Say”
Canvassing in Brecon and Radnorshire.
By Richard Pooley
I got an email from my MP, Wera Hobhouse, last week:
… there’s a by-election happening in Brecon and Radnorshire, and the Liberal Democrats are aiming to take the seat from the Conservatives, and beat the Brexit Party in the process.
I will be going up this Sunday to campaign, and it would be brilliant if lots of people from Bath and North East Somerset could join me!
Don’t worry if you’ve never canvassed before, there will be experienced people to go out with, and delivery to do if knocking on doors doesn’t sound like your cup of tea.
Knocking on doors used to be my cup of tea, some forty years ago. I have been a Liberal – capital L – all my life but only became an active party member in my late twenties when I was living in London. I even stood as a candidate at the local council elections in May 1982 in the Conservative Party’s rotten borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Those were heady times for a Liberal. The Social Democratic Party had been formed the previous year and within months the SDP-Liberal Alliance had come into being, winning by-elections and at one stage scoring over 50% in opinion polls. I stood on the Alliance ticket and despite the fact that Church Ward, Chelsea, had never elected anybody other than a Tory in living memory, my SDP colleague and I could see from the canvass returns that we were going to win. Until the Argentinian generals intervened. On 2 April their soldiers invaded the Falkland Islands. On 5 April the British Task Force set sail to take them back. And the sweet old ladies who had promised us their vote a week before told us that they now had to vote for “Her”. In my case this meant a vote not for Margaret Thatcher but for James Arbuthnot, who went on to become a Tory MP. He now sits in the House of Lords, his ennoblement not hampered by the discovery in 2009 that he had thought it right for the taxpayer to pay for his swimming pool to be cleaned, his trees to be pruned and his summer house to be painted. The latter two and other expenses totalled £15,000. He paid it all back. So, that’s alright.
I’m not bitter. I would have made a lousy politician. And my years knocking on doors had taught me a lot; lessons I put to good use later when selling my company’s services.
So, why not spend a Sunday afternoon in Brecon, get to know my MP and see how a by-election campaign is run these days? Especially as I have only recently returned to the UK from France and am hence assured by every Brexiteer friend that I don’t know what people in Britain “really think about Brexit” (i.e. those who don’t live in London or… er… Bath).
The small and ancient Welsh market town of Brecon, population 8250, sits at the southern end of the largest and surely one of the most rural constituencies in England and Wales. No town has more than 10,000 people. Danny, the young man leading our canvassing party, drafted in from Lib Dem HQ in London until polling day on 1 August, told me that the “leaflet postal burden” was the heaviest outside the Scottish Highlands. No amount of party activists will be able to deliver leaflets through every door. So all parties have to decide whether they can afford to spend a portion of their limited financial resources on postage. I pointed to the smartphone into which he was tapping the information we were giving him as we went from door to door in suburban Brecon. He didn’t wait for my question. “The signal is fine here. But try getting one on the upland farms. Hopeless.” Selling the candidate to farmers and their families via social media is often not possible. Much more effective is to get their attention at one of the many livestock markets held in the constituency. Mind you, the Brexit and Conservative Parties’ candidates are unlikely to get a warm reception. There are ten sheep for every person in the constituency. Upland sheep farmers are only kept solvent by EU subsidies. As Jeremy Hunt has pointed out, a no-deal Brexit will result in a 48% EU tariff on a leg of lamb. The Tory ex-MP, Chris Davies, whose fraudulent expenses claim – £750 for photographs of himself – led to him being recalled by 20% of his constituents, will know this at first hand. He used to be a rural auctioneer. He is also a member of the Tory Party’s European Research Group and an ardent Brexiteer. Perhaps that’s why he was reselected by local Tories to be their candidate, to the astonishment of journalists and the delight of the Lib Dems.
None of this is to suggest that the voters of Brecon and Radnorshire are unlikely to elect the Brexit Party’s first MP. The EU Referendum result almost exactly mirrored the national one; 51.86% voted to Leave. And the new MEP for Powys, in which the constituency sits, is from the Brexit Party. However, the Lib Dem candidate came second and the combined Lib Dem/Green/Plaid Cymru vote was nearly 3000 more than the Brexit Party/UKIP one. Conservative and Labour, fourth and fifth respectively, each got under 4000 votes. The Greens are not putting up a candidate in the by-election and Plaid Cymru may not either. The bookmakers currently have the Lib Dems 5 to 1 on to win, with the expectation that they will get around 40% of the vote; the Brexit Party are 6 to 1 against.
Did our canvassing results confirm this? No. But then, as I discovered long ago, they seldom reveal even half the truth about voter intentions. That’s partly because they are not supposed to and partly because the people doing the canvassing are often not up to the task.
Most people assume canvassing is designed to persuade them to vote for the canvasser’s party and candidate. Not so. When was the last time you were persuaded to buy anything from a smiling stranger appearing outside your front door? Okay, okay, only last week my wife and I did buy a ludicrously expensive long-armed cobweb remover from a charming lad called Conor from Middlesborough. But he was well-trained and his ‘I’ve-done-bad-things-but-I’m-now-working-my-way-out-of-it’ schtick was masterful. Even Boris couldn’t have bettered it. Canvassing is chiefly meant to do one thing: find out where your support is so that you can get out your vote on election day. Sure, it helps if the canvasser listens to your gripes, looks pleasant and does all the right things (step back after ringing the door bell; smile; listen more than talk; make sure the garden gate is closed behind you so that no family pet can sprint between your legs and exit the property… and life itself under the wheels of a passing car. It’s happened, dear reader, it’s happened). But our leader, Danny, was only really interested in knowing which party the person spoken to in, say, Number 11, Priory Close, was going to vote for.
My first interlocutor, an old man selling home-made jams and plants outside his front door, volunteered that he was a Lib Dem and told me why. Our candidate, Jane Dodds, a Welsh-speaking social worker had helped him with “housing problems” in the past. He was the only one I spoke to who I was able to tell Danny was a certain Lib Dem voter. All the others, a surprisingly large number on a balmy Sunday afternoon, were either “rather not say” (Danny: “That’s soft Labour in Brecon, a Labour stronghold. Could be persuaded to vote tactically. Depends what their view is on Brexit”), “They’re all the same, out for themselves” (Danny: “Brexit Party”) or, the majority, “don’t know yet” (Danny: “Genuinely undecided; could be worth Jane visiting”). I noticed that a couple of my fellow canvassers, including Wera, were being drawn into long conversations with people. I listened to Danny try to persuade us not to allow this to happen: “It’s deliberate. Almost always someone trying to take up our time. A Tory con trick.” I thought this unfair on the Tories. It had been done to me by Labour supporters too. And I had done it myself.
In fact, the ostensible reason we were knocking on people’s doors was to get them to sign a petition. As I saw when I arrived by car, there are large car parks in central Brecon which charge up to £1.30 for 2 hours, 7 days a week. Not much if you are just shopping. But it adds up to a lot of money for those who work in the town centre. Worse, none of the meters that I saw would accept cards or notes, only coins. Result? The roads in all the surrounding residential areas are choked with cars and the car parks lie almost empty. Our Lib Dem candidate had started a petition to demand that the inappropriately-named Free Street Powys County Council Car Park be made free. “Why the full name on the petition?” I asked. “Because everyone around here knows that it’s the Tory-led County Council which has imposed this on us.” Bingo. The Lib Dems had been first to launch a petition demanding something which all the other parties, including the Brecon Tories, would agree with and which I soon discovered matters far more to the people of Brecon than Brexit. And now the Lib Dems are seen as the ones who care. That’s why the Lib Dems have so often done far better than the pundits expect in local and by-elections. They find out what matters to people in a particular place and get their canvassers to focus on that. As long as the canvasser uses the petition in the right way. In our case I started with “Hello. Do you find it almost impossible to park outside your front door?” and listened to the instant and angry response. I then asked them to sign the petition. Which all bar one person did, often writing in their email address and telephone number (Danny: “That’s great. Just what we need. Have to be careful when asking for data these days though”). They could read the Lib Dem badge on my chest and were happy to take the leaflet which told them what they had just signed up to and who we were. Job done. Perhaps a “By the way, have you decided yet who you will vote for?” as I left. Slowly, softly, catchy monkey (Danny: “Best not to say that out loud”).
Not a single person was rude. This was a relief. I had assumed from the vile and vituperative rants on social and other media against politicians and political parties that I would be on the receiving end of at least one verbal attack. In my young days, in constituencies as different and far apart as Bermondsey and Woodspring ( Somerset), I only ever got such abuse from one small section of the electorate. I have never forgotten the woman who answered the door of her large town house just off Kensington High Street. I knew from a previous election canvass return that the house’s occupants were Conservative Party voters. But we Liberals have to seek out what flowers we can however stony the ground. Anyway, even Conservatives die. She looked me up and down, as if I was something her cat had brought in. Her quizzical “Yes?” cut the night air. I did my brief spiel and asked her if we could count on her vote. “Certainly not!” was followed by a short summary of what she would like to do to all who were not of her political persuasion. No doubt noting my private school accent, she asked me what school I had attended. “Westminster,” I said. There was a snort: “You should be ashamed of yourself. You’re a traitor!” And slammed the door shut.
