The Ghost in the By-election Machine

The Liberal Democrat campaign in Henley was textbook. It included some of the best literature I’ve ever seen, including an exemplary magazine crushing the Tory’s claims to be a defender of the greenbelt. We had a large army of volunteers out canvassing and delivering throughout the weeks preceding polling day. Our election day operation itself was so well-manned we were able to knock up people who we had no canvass data for, but appeared likely to be our supporters. But, in the end, we were only able to achieve a swing of 1.84% - a swing that, arguably, was more likely to be caused by Labour voters switching to us than necessarily a product of our campaign.

And this has been noticed. So what happened? Out of the five by-elections since 1997 that have resulted in a change of control, the Lib Dems have won four - and the only one we didn’t win was Crewe & Nantwich, less than a month ago. Indeed, the swings we have managed to achieve in more recent by-elections have been down from the heady highs of 2003 and 2004. The last time we managed a swing of over 10% was at the Bromley & Chistlehurst by-election in 2006.

So what happened? While, naturally, the Tory revival played a part here, it’s not the full story - the Tories only raised their share of the vote by 3.4% compared to 16.9% in Crewe, while Labour’s share fell by over 10% in both cases. Previously, we would have expected a lot of that vote to go to us, but it seems to have been divided between us, the Tories, and the BNP. While the issue of Labour voters going towards the BNP is for another day, it’s worthwhile asking what was so different about this election in terms of our capture of the Labour vote. Why didn’t we get more?

To anyone on the ground familiar with our campaigning tactics, the answer would be obvious. The Tories stole everything we’ve been doing in by-elections since 1997, and with their greater money and resources, did it better. They had a magazine, Good Mornings, polling cards, localised newsletters, the works. Their literature had clearly had more spent on its production, and while ours was designed more effectively, theirs had a tendency to look more professional. I suspect that this professionalism played a big part in increasing the efficacy of their literature relative to ours; a leaflet with higher production values indicates a more serious party in the minds of the voters, and not appearing serious is something we can ill afford.

This isn’t just true in Henley - across the country, Labour and the Tories are copying our tactics, sneaky buggers that they are. They’ve started producing imitations of the Focus local newsletter, started campaigning more on local issues, and actually begun to work harder for their votes. They’re doing this because they realise that otherwise that these are votes we’ll be able to take. It’s a good reflection upon our efforts that the public are now more likely to get a better service from their elected representatives, even if the larger parties had to be terrorised into doing it. However, it leaves us with a campaigning quandary: if the Tories and Labour are stealing our thunder on local campaigning, one of our most important selling points is gone. We have a reputation for being effective local campaigners, and this is partly why our share of the votes for Council elections is consistently higher than that of national elections - usually at least 3-4%. If we lose that, where do we go from here?

There are multiple approaches currently being put forward. One of the most popular is to shift the strategy for our campaigning away from ‘messenging’ towards ‘narrative’, as advocated by Neil Stockley. This would involve ensuring our candidate at by-elections has a good story to tell, giving the voters an emotional involvement with his or her campaign. It’s analogous to Obama’s primary campaign: presenting oneself as an outsider bringing hope and change to an ossified political system is very emotive, regardless of its truth. While this will doubtless be effective, every party will contain sufficient Obama-watchers to make it likely that all of a sudden everyone will be bringing hope and change in 2010.

Another approach is to rethink our literature radically, and start taking more tips from the world of advertising. This would involve amplifying a brand - whether it be the party or a candidate - with extremely emotive phraseology and photography. An example is for the front page of a leaflet to consist of a big picture of a happy family with the tagline, ‘Because your family is priceless’, with more information inside about how only the Lib Dems can guarantee your family’s continued prosperity.

I suspect that this would certainly gain us votes, but would require significant volunteer management to ensure that all of our people went along with this - patronising and manipulative advertising techniques are not what our membership in general signed up for, regardless of how effective they are.

The approach I would like to suggest is the following. During the debate about detention without trial for 42 days, several polls were published that found that while the public was in favour of liberty as a principle, in particular cases they were more likely to be in favour of surrendering it for increased security. Other research has emphasised that the public are frequently in favour of our economic policies and the principles behind them - they simply don’t vote for us because they don’t think we can win. What this demonstrates is that where we’ve managed to overcome the credibility gap, or indeed during a by-election where it’s less relevant, targeting literature about relevant principles to relevant demographics could be extremely effective. Our candidate will have the value over and above the opposition of not only being a strong local campaigner, but a strong local campaigner who believes what you believe.

This will naturally only be successful if we can weave into the campaign’s overall narrative, potentially using the advertising techniques mentioned above. Talking about a candidate’s background and how he or she has come to their principles could be devastating - it’s the sort of thing that would work very well in a magazine. It gives us an inbuilt advantage over the Tories and Labour in the current climate, as it’s not clear at all what either party stands for.

Naturally, its success is dependant on its effective implementation, and it is possible to object that we talk about our principles already. But the point is that we rarely do it in any kind of prominent way - while the principles inform the electoral machine, they’re rarely produced by it. We can’t afford this any more. If the Tories and Labour have caught up to us, we need to be one step ahead.

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.