Showdown at the P.O. Corral

WE WON! We won! Not the election of course, but rather the fight to save Essex Road Post Office from the ravages of a Labour Government bent on ruining anything of benefit to the poor & vulnerable. A concerted effort involving the local community, our PPC Bridget Fox and the Lib-Dem run Council had produced an agreement with Royal Mail Ltd. to allow a franchisee to take it over.

This was a tremendous victory for Bridget. She’d campaigned for over a year to keep it open, and had gathered thousands of petition signatories and organised hundreds of people into protests. I’d taken pictures of lots of them and put them into exciting leaflets. And so we marched down Essex Road early on Wednesday morning to proclaim our victory before the media.

Unfortunately, Labour had had the same idea. The local MP and champion pie-eater Emily Thornberry had been given a roasting in the press over the hypocrisy inherent in voting in favour of post office closures in Parliament while simultaneously campaigning to keep an Islington branch open. A few minutes after we arrived a rather aggressive man in a red t-shirt appeared and started shoving a piece of paper with ‘Emily saved the PO’ scrawled on it in marker pen into the faces of passers by. We took advantage of this by introducing Lib Dem Councillor Emily Fieran-Reed to the same passers by. He then scrawled on the reverse ‘Local MP saves Post Office’, and given that an awful lot of Islington residents think that Bridget is already the MP thanks to our campaigning and Thornberry had chickened out of turning up, was again quite amusing.

More Labour activists showed up, and after an initial period of studiously ignoring each others’ existence we started to exchange accusations of lying. I nearly got into a fight with the aggressive red t-shirt, although to be fair he did become distinctly more aggressive after I tickled him to get him to lower the sign. It all got rather ugly. The lady from the Gazette took pictures of each set of politicos, then one of the avowedly ‘neutral’ people, which was quickly swarmed by Thornberry’s lackeys. So I pushed into the middle. Unsurprisingly, the neutral photo was used.

Politics shouldn’t have to be like this. Instead of coming together to celebrate a victory for the community, we spat at each other like children fighting over a toy. This is especially a shame, as one of the Labour activists was quite pretty. But it leads to an interesting question: would the Post Office have been less likely to be saved if two separate groups of people hadn’t been quite so determined to beat the other in terms of campaigning? Demonstrating that your party is better equipped to represent local people is a big spur to activism, and I am not convinced that either party would have put in quite so much effort if everyone had agreed to share the PR spoils equally. But then, that’s why socialism doesn’t work, isn’t it?

Post-Election Thoughts

Selling pre-packaged opinions is part of my trade. You know when you’re at a dinner party and the political discussion is at the level of assertion - when people are merely repeating sentences at each other without any form of engagement? Well, that’s what I do. I sell those sentences, those forms of proto-opinion that are far too common around the dining tables of Britain. How does it work? It depends on three factors: the relationship between an opinion and a person’s own interests, the form in which the opinion is received and the number of times it’s repeated.

Of these factors, repetition is by far the most important - people can be persuaded to act against their own interests if they hear the same opinion frequently enough without anything to counter it. Just look at my aunt - a former left-winger in the grand Grant clan tradition now, after ten years of repeated exposure to the Daily Mail, believes immigrants are taking over the country and there’s a Muslim waiting in every shadow.

I find the process of opinion-forming fascinating, and this election has provided many wonderful examples of the art. By far the best-conducted campaign has been by the Evening Standard - the form and content of their opinion-forming has been simply superb.

For example, the Standard ran an analysis of Paddick’s policies about a week before the election. On his plan to switch the management of the Tube to a concession model, the paper wrote: “This would only add another level of bureaucracy. The unions would have a fit.”

In the mind’s ear, you can hear people repeating those sentences back to you across the dining table. It doesn’t matter that they don’t have anything to do with the policy, it only matters that they’ve been associated with it. This is the end goal of politicians’ soundbites, the focus of the messaging of our literature - to lend the listener or reader an easily embedded opinion. It’s about identifying whose interests will be best satisfied by which opinion, then using an appropriate form to transmit it repeatedly. But this is a game played at every level - every single person has their own interests and their own need to communicate them with others. Unlike what some Marxists would have you believe, the populace are not generally docile and receptive to the opinions of the intellectual elite. They’re players too.

Now that I’ve given a explanation of what I’m talking about to those of you who don’t spend all their time trying to mindfuck the voters, what went wrong with the Lib Dem campaign in London?

The slightly glib answer is that we were heavily squeezed between Boris and Ken. But why did this have to be the case? Are there things which could have been carried out differently which may have changed the final result? I don’t believe we ever could have won - but we could have and should have polled higher than we did. What went wrong?

Put simply, I think we failed to take into account the role of particular interest groups in this election, and the way in which our opponents were able to portray them as being uniquely under threat unless they cast their ballot for Boris or Ken. ‘Opponents’ doesn’t just refer to our political opposition - there were multiple political actors who had influence over this result. Let me give a couple of examples.

A large part of our vote comes from slightly better off public sector employees - people like teachers, junior managers and their ilk - the sorts of people who don’t fully agree with Labour’s policies, but aren’t vicious enough to vote Tory. During this campaign, the workers in the many and varied quasi-public sector organisations nominally under the control of the Mayor - like Transport for London and the London Development Agency - were told by UNISON, PCS, and the other unions that if they didn’t vote for Ken Boris would embark upon a purge as soon as he entered power. We had a significant number of people who may have otherwise voted for us with a strong economic incentive to vote for Ken. How did we attempt to counter this? We did nothing - indeed, we allowed our opponents (see above) to portray our policies as almost as damaging as those of the Tory party.

The rise of the BNP during this campaign also cost us votes - but it did so invisibly. This is because of a separate under-the-radar campaign ran by various interest groups and sponsored by the Daily Mirror. In Hackney, two tabloids paid for by the Mirror were delivered to nearly every address. While ostensibly politically neutral, this tabloid was full of scare stories about the implications of the BNP coming into power. Since not being ethnically cleansed is a pretty fucking good incentive to vote, the combination of this campaign with the newspaper stories about the BNP backing Johnson meant that all of a sudden an awful lot more black people had a big reason to vote than last time. This came out in the results - Jeanette Arnold’s vote doubled since last time. What did we do to try to take some of these additional voters for ourselves? We talked about the importance of the police not excessively focusing on young black men - which, while important, rather missed the issue.

We were thus abandoned by a lot of our traditional support, and failed to capitalise on the increased voter turnout. This is because our campaign was insufficiently sophisticated to take this into account. Focusing on crime was important to overcome what has traditionally been perceived as a weak issue for us, and indeed we started getting the signals that this was working (people calling us up to tell us to stop just talking about crime). The problem was, we started getting these signals two weeks before election and didn’t start diversifying our message to take this into account.

I would argue that what we can take away from this is twofold. Firstly, we must resist the temptation to retreat to our comfort zone and focus exclusively on the local interest groups in council wards that we can already deal with. We will never win big if we do that. Secondly, one of the roles of the London campaigns department must be to identify these London-wide interest groups and develop a strategy and materials for targeting them. In essence, we need to find ways of doing street letters on a far bigger scale - partly through media work but also through ground war operations co-ordinated across multiple boroughs.

There are, of course, lots of other reasons why we didn’t win - two prominent personality politicians turned the contest into something more presidential, which Brian as a newcomer had a difficult job to break into. But the lessons we can learn from this contest will help us do better next time.

Human Rights & Lap Dancing

There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to accept that someone he’s admired from afar simply isn’t as magnificent as he believed. That for all their marvellous qualities, their all-too-human weaknesses render them so disappointing that he must turn his back on them, and pray silently for their redemption. That’s pretty much how I felt when I found out that Konnie Huq was going to carry the Olympic flame. How can one so pretty, and I’m sure in possession of other qualities, support the repressive Chinese regime? Needless to say, I was distraught, and felt I had to make a stand against attractive people being in favour of tyrants. So I braved the first snows of April and took to the streets along with thousands of others to protest the arrival of the Beijing Olympic Flame into London.

At Queensway the protesting bourgeois triplet of myself, Mark and Hannah got our first glimpse of the Olympic flame. Some poor young television presenter was separated from an angry crowd of Free Tibet protesters by a slender metal fence which did nothing to deflect the cruel barbs of, ‘Shame on you!’ and ‘What about human rights?’ that were flung her way. At one point she cowered away from the crowd while she waited for the relay team to arrive carrying the flame, hiding the torch between her legs to deflect the crowd’s ire. I nearly felt sorry for her, but this was tempered by the fact that she was supporting a dictatorship for self-promotional reasons and claiming it was all about the sport.

We pursued the flame via the Tube, with a brief pause for cappuccinos (one has to maintain appearances, even at a protest). It was much quicker than running while pursuing a torch, after all. However, I was somewhat caught out upon climbing onboard; a nice Christian gentleman had offered me his seat next to my companions and had started to move over. At that moment the train started with a jolt, and while my right hand futilely groped for a post that was several feet away I was thrown back into the gentleman’s lap.

While I extricated myself and apologised to the terrified looking chap who clearly thought he’d just been violated, the whole carriage burst into laughter, and Mark and Hannah reassured me that they would never let me forget this. I believe them.

At Bloomsbury Square, the torch was hidden from view and the athletes cowered inside the canopy of the official buses, as though that would stop us yelling out their shame. A special burst of shame was reserved for the float of the official sponsor, Samsung, who had cleverly decided to put dancing girls into the middle of a very angry crowd of protesters. The tone of the shouting changed to, ‘Shame! On so many levels!’

It was as the torch hit Whitehall, however, that the lack of organisation on behalf of the, well, organisers became apparent. The metal fences meant to separate the procession from the angry people hadn’t been brought in sufficient quantities to cover the route, and so we ran out into the street, pursuing the mob of sinister Chinese security forces surrounding the torch. The police reacted by linking their arms and forming a circle around the Chinese, like some Orwellian version of the Gay Gordons.

Running and dodging the police along Whitehall was exhilarating, and it spurred the previously peaceful crowd into new heights of non-violent protest. Banners were bashed on the sides of buses, and the screwed-up-coffee-cups that symbolised the angry bourgeois was thrown over the police line onto the torch bearers. This inspired a certain amount of brutality on the part of the police; Mark received a vicious kick from a copper wading into the mass of people, and one policeman forced his way into the crowd by driving a motorbike through it, nearly running Hannah over until she was yanked out of the way. The chap in front of us wasn’t so lucky, and had his leg crushed beneath the copper’s wheels.

When the police started manhandling people off the road, I urged us back before things got nasty. The torch was away, and Brown had demonstrated his cowardice in front of the Chinese by greeting it. So we did lunch.

However, when leaving the restaurant we found that the tables were turned. The imported Chinese demonstration had taken over the street, and five of us now stood alone in a Whitehall full of reds. So I started shouting ‘Shame!’. It seemed to be only the proper thing to do.

Marching on one’s stomach

What with people still being shot in Tibet, it seemed only appropriate to attend another protest on Saturday. This time, instead of staying in one place and being angry, the cause was due to march from Park Crescent to Trafalgar Square whilst being righteously indignant.

I was feeling rather full of cold, but resolved to go along regardless in case I missed an interesting riot. I did manage to miss the start of the protest, and had to walk hurriedly after the riot vans to make sure I found it again, protests being surprisingly easy things to lose. I caught up with it on Regent Street, and attempted to sidle in.

It’s remarkably tricky to join a protest in midflight without looking suspicious. You start off on the edges and slowly saunter towards the centre as it marches along, all the while slowly increasing the volume of your chanting in order to fit in. One of the things I like about the Free Tibet movement is that it’s small enough for everyone to loosely know everyone else, and indeed I met someone I hadn’t seen for seven years in the middle of the four-hundred-strong throng.

There were speeches at the end, telling the marchers about all the terrible things that were happening in Tibet, exhorting them to write to their MP and indeed MPs saying we were all very good for coming out and doing this marching. I never thought I’d hear myself cheering on Kate Hoey, but some things do transcend party divisions.

At the end of the speeches, the Tibetans in the crowd started singing their national anthem, while the white people looked on in an encouraging and slightly mystified fashion. The sonorous sound of Tibetan singing filled the air, and in my mind I was back in the temple in Sonada at sunset, watching my monks spin the wheels of Dharma. Snow began to fall, and for a moment, Trafalgar Square became a little piece of the Roof of the World.

In other words, YOU SHOULD’VE BEEN THERE.

Anyway, why is all this happening? I think an analogy would be helpful here. Izzard teaches us that a more authoritarian Church of England would force its adherents to choose between tea and cake or death. In many ways, that’s a lot like the situation in Tibet.

Bear with me while I squeeze metaphors to make a mildly amusing analogy work. In the 1950’s in China, the Tea Party, fresh from victory in World War 2 and over the Kuomintea, turned their eyes to their mountainous neighbour to the south. Despising the Tibetan practice of making butter tea with yak’s milk, the Chinese invaded and imposed both the Tea Party and Collective Cake Baking on the Tibetans, believing them to superior. While previously most baking in Tibet had been very small scale and mostly on the back of a horse, it had, at least, been under the control of the Tibetans. Deprived of their tea and of their cake by the Chinese they chose death, which the Chinese gave to them in abundance.

Once the rebellion was over and the Tibetans’ Tea Master had fled, the Chinese continued to choose death on behalf of an awful lot of Tibetans, particularly during the Teabag Revolution. It eventually became apparent to the Chinese that Collective Baking wasn’t producing cake in enough quantities to satisfy their own people, let alone rival the mighty bakeries of the West. They began to gradually import the Western notion of Free Baking, while making sure demand for the typically associated idea of One Man, One Cup was repressed.

To facilitate this, across China and its conquered territories the ideal of having one’s cake and eating it was promoted. More and more Chinese began to bake for themselves, and the bakeries of the West started to eye China’s iced buns with relish.

In Tibet, the Tea Party still retained control, and any butter tea that was drunk was done so only under its auspices. The younger generation of Tibetans, knowing little of butter tea, lusted after the cake the Tea Party promoted. But there was a problem. The Chinese still considered all Tibetans to be fundamentally butter tea drinkers, and thus quite unsuitable for eating cake. They could help in its baking and perhaps even catch a whiff as it came out of the oven, but they would never be allowed to eat it.

The Tibetans were once again faced with a choice. They could not drink their tea, and they could not have any cake. Their only remaining option was ‘Or Death’. And so they chose it. But they chose it in different ways. The recent protests can be divided into two stages, in accordance with who took part. The ones that chose the tea, frequently the monks and the older Tibetans, took part in the initial peaceful protests. The Chinese very rapidly chose death for them, as this is the year of the Great Tea Dance, when the Chinese hope their bakery will be accepted amongst the great bakeries of the world. The younger Tibetans saw this, and in their anger at not having cake and, indeed, not having cake where their ancestors were once free to drink butter tea, took out their anger on those that did have cake. And so the Chinese chose death for those too.

To claim that all Tibetans seek a kind of Himalyan Arcadia, as many Westerners seem to, is to grossly oversimplify a nation of many different people with many different desires. Many young Tibetans seek economic success - and why should they not? We cannot keep an ideal of Tibet as a kind of spiritual playground, a last bastion of adventure - that sort of thinking led to our invasion of it. It is worth fighting for Tibetans to be able to have tea, certainly - but it is also worth fighting for them to have cake.

What happens next? The Chinese are still giving the Tibetans death, and I suspect that for a while yet the Tibetans will have chicken rather than choose the other. But the Chinese have still removed the other choices from the Tibetans, and the Tibetans will never be able to live peacefully without those choices - not for the all the tea in China.

Flag Waving

I had originally intended my first post on this to be a sweepingly epic analysis of Lib Dem campaigning strategy as viewed from a philosophical perspective, but events have forced me to write about something people might actually want to read instead. Lucky for you.

Yesterday I was driven to attend a protest outside the Chinese Embassy (or, given the police cordon around the embassy itself, outside the Royal Institute of British Architects) by my anger at the violence of the Chinese crackdown on the Tibetan protesters. For me, this is a very emotional issue - seeing people who look remarkably like some of my friends from Samdrub Darjay Choling being beaten up by the police brings the protests to life in very visceral way. This holds true for many members of Students for a Free Tibet, which I discovered at Edinburgh University to be a support group for people who’d spent their gap year with Tibetans.

This connection caused SFT to leap into action as soon as the scale of the Chinese crackdown became apparent, and many events are taking place over the next few days - more protests, hunger strikes and other arrows of the left-wing quiver. But there was a very real need to do something now, and so I dragged my intern to Portland Place.

Protesting, though, is very odd. You agree to meet a large number of people in a particular place to be angry about something. The anger isn’t going to lead to violence, but after a certain amount of milling around people feel the need to do something, and so the chanting begins. I’ve always been uncomfortable with chanting, partly because it makes me feel like I’m participating in Naziesque groupthink, but also because I feel a compulsion to analyse each chant to make sure I agree with it. This is the product of too many marches wherein the Palestinian group has started yelling, “Death to Israel!”, and I’ve begun to worry about our choice of protesting allies.

Luckily, the Tibetan chants tended to be quite nice, and mostly focused around telling the Chinese they should be ashamed of themselves. Inasmuch as one can measure the success of a peaceful protest by the amount of police presence it attracts, we scored six riot vans and one chopper on the Excessive Force scale. There were candles and Tibetan flags, women carrying small dogs and babies, and people in yellow vests. It wasn’t a threat to national security.

The Chinese thought differently though, and had stationed a black-clad photographer on the roof of the assembly to take stealthy photos of the individuals in the crowd for future visa-refusal reasons. Unfortunately for him he forgot to switch off his flash, making him look a bit silly.

I thought it went well. But what does it all mean? Protests don’t make a difference, do they? Not in absolute terms, no - our protest will not lead to the withdrawal of the Chinese from Tibet via a direct causal link. But to look for this is to really misunderstand the nature of this sort of campaigning. Like everything else in this managerial age, it’s about working the odds. This occurs in several ways:

1) Awareness Raising. Large protests generate media coverage, and attention from passers by. This small amount of knowledge about how people feel about a particular issue is unlikely to directly sway the judgement of a particular person, but will become a factor - no matter how small - in their feelings about which way they vote, or the stance they take in political discussions. If there was some way of measuring such things, I would anticipate a (very) small rise in the average positive feeling towards the Tibetan Human Rights movement across London over the next few days, which is directly attributable to the protest as separate from the media coverage of the events in Tibet.

2) Affecting the protested. Seeing many people opposed to what you’re doing has an unavoidable psychological effect on all but the most psychotic. A small wedge of doubt may over time build up in the minds of employees which, with other contributing factors may cause one or two to actually leave government employee and become trampolinists, or something similarly less repressive.

3) Maintaining campaign morale. The last may be the most important. Group activity encourages its members to continue to identify with the group, and thus carry out more actions related to its success, like letter-writing or petitioning. More people are likely to become active in the campaign as a consequence of the protest than would otherwise be the case if it hadn’t taken place.

So, in summary, protest good, Chinese government bad. I plan on analysing the latter in my next post, but in the mean time it largely speaks for itself.