British canvassers start every doorstep conversation with “Sorry to bother you.”
Knock, ring a bell, wait. No answer, stick the leaflet in the mail slot or wedge it in the doorway, move on. If someone answers? “Sorry to bother you, I’m a volunteer with the Labour Party here to ask if you’ve given some thought to how you’re voting in the election December 12?”
The answers vary. Polls have tightened, but still show the Conservatives with a lead, and every single voter counts for Labour, which is depending on its thousands of volunteers to make up a clear disadvantage in money and media. Some people want to talk; on the street in Morley, in a Conservative-held swing district in Yorkshire north of Leeds, one woman gives a canvasser 15 minutes’ worth of her mind. She’s angry about Brexit, and everything, really. I overhear her saying, “Whoever we elect will do a shit job once they’re in.” The Labour volunteer stays with her the whole time, and listens. At the end, she says she’s still undecided.
Dave Aldwinkle, a member of Momentum, a group that grew out of Jeremy Corbyn’s first campaign to lead the Labour Party, in a bright-red knit hat, greets everyone with cheer, and says that people have been grateful to see volunteers canvassing. “Someone told me last week, ‘No one ever comes around here,’” he says. The neighborhood he’s walking, he says, has been bad for Labour in prior local elections. The candidate, Deanne Ferguson, says that they decided to send canvassers to previously uncanvassed turf, and they’ve been getting good results. A trade union official by day, Ferguson and her volunteers have been working the doorsteps for over two years, and that morning in the Morley Labour building, there are 40-some people gathered. The group in Yorkshire was as diverse as I’ve seen at a Labour organizing event anywhere in the country, despite the repeated stereotypes of the area as white people angry about migration and Brexit.
Morley and Outwood is the former constituency of Ed Balls, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2011 until his 2015 defeat, and his reputation lingers over the district. Some of the voters on the list haven’t been contacted since 2015, and a couple of them complain about Balls—he was parachuted into the district, wasn’t from here. One woman says she hasn’t bothered paying attention to the election because Labour’s gotten more like the Conservatives every year (which would come as news to Corbyn).
The canvassers I walked with describe a district that has tuned out. “The reason for the Brexit vote was disillusionment with politics,” says Sam Atkinson, who grew up in North Yorkshire. “That’s also why seats like this are hard to win—it’s not because of Brexit, it’s because they’re still pissed off at politics, we have to reset stuff from the Brexit vote.”
Aldwinkle agrees. “They’re voting ’cause they’re fucked off and they’re right to be fucked off, the North ends up treated as a parachute area where any [politician] can get bused in, the investment’s been horrendous, and then they’re shocked when everyone votes and doesn’t quite agree with what people in London want.”
Sarah Jaffe
Labour candidate for Morley and Outwood Deanne Ferguson and her volunteers have been working the doorsteps for more than two years.
Days earlier, Philip Proudfoot, a Labour activist from County Durham, had crystallized this argument to me, saying that for many people in the North, voting for Brexit was the radical project. Getting them to see the Corbyn project as something viable and compelling is a challenge, because they’ve already voted for something that feels like radical change.
Yet activist after activist who spent time on the doors echoed the same line: Once you get people talking, what they care about is the NHS, their homes, and the schools. Labour’s manifesto contains radical offerings like a four-day workweek, free college, and renationalizing major industries. Some activists were disappointed that the radical policies weren’t more visible this campaign, but they serve to motivate the vast army of volunteers taking hours-long journeys to places they’ve never been or places they left years ago. The radical politics ripple outward; perhaps they sound diluted on the doorstep, but the splash they make is still the core of Corbynism, delivered to overworked single mothers and underemployed former miners and retirees afraid of losing their homes.
I ASK FERGUSON, the candidate in Morley, how the manifesto plays on the doors. She responds, “It’s been about how do you make the Labour manifesto announcements actually fit to your local community.” The proposal for a National Care Service, which would create thousands of good-paying home care jobs, Ferguson says, appeals to her district, with a lot of older people; she sent out a communication to the district just about that one pledge.
In London, meanwhile, I spoke to Sam Björn (the collective pseudonym) of Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants, a group that fights deportations and raises money for refugees, as well as raising political consciousness among LGBT people. It takes its inspiration from the miners’ strike solidarity committee Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners in the 1980s. The group decided to focus for the election on the Conservative Party’s agenda and particularly the bigotry of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his cabinet.
“We decided to have the group called Bum Boys Against Boris,” Björn tells me. “That’s in reference to Boris Johnson referring to gays as bum boys in tank tops, so in the grand queer tradition we decided to take that slur and turn it into our name,” he says. On the last Saturday before the election, Bum Boys Against Boris and FckBoris, the equally gleefully obscene collective dedicated to beating Johnson, held an action outside of Conservative headquarters.
“We were talking about doing a protest outside of Downing Street and then one of our members said, ‘Why don’t we have three men marrying a dog?’” Björn says. The action too echoed something Johnson wrote in 2001, likening gay marriage to three men marrying a dog. “It’s in the great tradition of Situationalist protest,” Björn explains. “We’re doing something absurd and obscene and making a bit of a fuss because it’s alarming how little the LGBT agenda has actually been focused on when it comes to what the Tories have said.” So in the street outside of the Conservative headquarters, in front of a massive sign reading “Boris is a bigot!” with a full band playing, three men walked down arm in arm and “married” a dog. The bride wore a pink tutu; one of the grooms sported a “Bum Boys Against Boris” tank top. Speakers from various communities joined the event to bring the point home.
“All of our different communities have been targeted by Boris and we’re really going to be allowing, if we don’t campaign against it, our own bigot-in-chief,” Björn says. “He’s our Trump. We have to stop it.”
The media coverage has been less splashy than in 2017, but the party atmosphere still lives in parts of the campaign. There have been street raves in Uxbridge, where 25-year-old Ali Milani is close enough to Johnson in the polls that “Lord Buckethead,” a familiar parody candidate who usually runs against the sitting prime minister, has even called for tactical voting. FckBoris brought an open-top bus and dance music to Johnson’s constituency to register young voters and draw attention, and like other London-area marginals—like Dagenham, where I joined canvassers Monday afternoon, and Kensington, where I was last week—the district has been flooded with volunteers.
Edith Whitehead
In London, on the last Saturday before the election, LGBT activists demonstrated against Prime Minister Boris Johnson outside of Conservative Party headquarters.
It’s all been organized a bit ad hoc, through WhatsApp groups and texts and Momentum’s “mycampaignmap” tool. I find my way to stories by asking around. People I know make introductions and offer me trust in an election where Labour supporters feel like even the BBC, to say nothing of the newspapers and tabloids, is against them. As we walked through Dagenham, where a chunk of the Ford factory was demolished in 2016, the canvassers checked Twitter to see that BBC reporters had uncritically reported as fact that a Labour supporter had “punched” a staffer for Health Secretary Matt Hancock. Video revealed the “punch” to be the man walking into an upraised arm. The same night, Labour shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner was interrupted by a BBC reporter who asked her, unbelievably, “Will you nationalize sausages?”
The news coverage might be verging on farcical, but the dance parties and live-streamed concerts are a way to reach one of Corbyn’s core constituencies: young people turned off by traditional news sources. DJ Logan Sama of Grime4Corbyn tells me, “It puts, if not a message, at least awareness into the consciousness of a demographic of people that are just not watching the news or reading the newspapers.” Sama describes the grime scene as “up-tempo, British electronic rap music,” born out of a specifically British immigrant culture and inflected with European dance music. Its audience, Sama says, stretches “from other working-class people that are also living on council estates, or projects as you call them in America, to upper-working-class kids that are upwardly mobile and in university studying to middle-class kids that are growing up and enjoying something different to what they’re used to and finding the sound and the culture exciting.”
Reaching out to young people through the music genre they relate to presents the election as something relevant to them. “We all have a social reach greater than the average person,” Sama says, “and we want to use that to spread a message that we feel would be to the benefit of the people that need it most. There’s people that rely on all of the public services, that rely on the state to help them live from week to week. There’s greater disparities that there’s ever been between the wealthy and the poor. It hasn’t been this bad for a very long time.”
AS THE ELECTION ticks closer, the feeling on the ground with Labour activists is very different from the story told in the news. It’s something you have to go digging for, though you’ll find photos on social media of mass audiences turning out to canvass with Corbynista celebrities like Owen Jones of The Guardian or Ash Sarkar and Dalia Gebrial of Novara Media or author and economist Grace Blakeley. While BBC reporters breathlessly retweeted unfounded tales of violent Labour supporters on Monday, Jeremy Corbyn was speaking to a massive rally in Bristol, outside of three important marginals. A quick Google search of the Labour leader’s rally turns up the headline, even from the left-leaning Guardian, “Corbyn Plays All the Old Favourites in Bristol but No One’s Dancing.” The BBC appears to have barely covered it at all.
Sarah Jaffe
Labour is depending on thousands of volunteers, many young and new to political activism, to make up for a clear disadvantage in money and media coverage.
There is still dancing in the Corbyn movement, though, even if it is often coupled with a feeling of embattled determination that does seem different than 2017. This time around, the stakes are higher, the climate crisis a ticking clock that makes everything more intense. Still, the supporters make videos of themselves singing Christmas carols rewritten about Corbyn and post them to @ChantsLeft and #lyrics4labour; they go door-knocking and then to a FckBoris dance night; the teens make TikTok videos; they share tea and fish and chips or arguments over pints after a long canvassing session in the cold; they get up early to go knock doors hours from home and sleep on couches until it’s all over. The process is exhausting, it’s draining, but it is also in its own way the continuing production of collective joy.
I can’t tell you that Labour is going to win this election. But if they pull out a shocking victory, it will be because of thousands of people like this, who built a movement around an unlikely leader and were, like him, just stubborn enough not to quit when they were told over and over again that it was impossible, that no one wanted to hear “radical” ideas, like that everyone should have a place to live and enough to eat and maybe even some time off and nice things besides. They built something much bigger than Jeremy Corbyn, and if they don’t win it will outlast him. And if they do win, their fight will go on, but they will be able to rest, briefly, knowing they did what they could to send a message that ordinary people deserve and can have a better world than the one they’ve grown up in.
