Labour Activists Canvass in the Cold in Britain

×

Expand

Gareth Fuller/Press Association via AP Images

U.K. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, with Labour Party parliamentary candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green Faiza Shaheen, during a visit to Chingford, September 28, 2019

Faiza Shaheen, the Labour candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, is standing at a doorstep in skinny jeans and fleece-lined boots and her multicolored winter jacket, talking to a woman about Brexit. It’s dark out, though it’s only about 5 p.m., and the street in Chingford, far in London’s northeast, is lined with two-story row homes and trim front gardens. As she stands there talking, the shades at the house next door peel back, and two hands tape a red poster to the window. It reads, “I’m voting Labour.”

The general election in the U.K. is December 12. The election was called in response to the deadlock in Parliament around Brexit, but is turning out to involve many things beyond the European Union. The Labour Party trails the Conservatives in the polls, but it has something that the other parties don’t—a legion of enthusiastic members and volunteers who are coming out day after day to canvass, hoping to reverse a decade of austerity and make socialist Jeremy Corbyn prime minister. And in a few districts, those committed volunteers could make all the difference.

Shaheen’s is one of them. She grew up nearby; the school she attended is around the corner. A group of uniformed teenagers walk past as she stands, coaching the volunteer canvassers on how to knock on a stranger’s door and have a political conversation, and cheered “Labour, yeah!” This neighborhood, she says, is “historically very very Tory,” yet the canvassers I speak with are ebullient, finding lots of people who say they’re with Shaheen.

“To find any Labour voters here, we were kind of surprised, but actually we’ve found quite a few,” she says. “What’s happened is that the older generation is passing away or moving outward, there’s younger families moving in here. It’s still in London, there’s a direct rail train here, so what’s happening is young couples in Hackney, they want to have kids, they’re moving down the line, so as a consequence of high house prices, I’m benefiting from the huge drop in the average age of the voters.” The people who’ve felt the squeeze, she says, are more inclined to hear her message.

When canvassers find an undecided voter, Shaheen joins them at the doorstep to introduce herself personally and tell them a bit about her politics and why she’s running. She’s warm and funny but also, as an economist (she’s currently on leave from the Centre for Labour and Social Studies, the think tank where she’s director), well prepared to delve into policy details. She defends Corbyn’s leadership but is also willing to point out where she differs from him (on Brexit, she’s strongly pro-Remain, where Corbyn has pledged a second referendum on a potential deal and promised to remain neutral).

Mostly, Shaheen draws the contrast between herself and Iain Duncan Smith, the current MP for Chingford and Woodford Green. A former leader of the Conservative Party, Smith was chair of Boris Johnson’s campaign for leadership and like Johnson is a hard Brexiteer, something that doesn’t sit well with many Londoners. He also served as secretary of state for work and pensions under the 2010 coalition government, meaning that he oversaw many of the cuts to the welfare state that came during austerity.

The enthusiastic volunteers in Chingford believe in Labour, but they also believe in Shaheen. For over a year now, she’s had a group of them who come out weekend after weekend with her; because of this, she says, “We’ve built up quite a good idea of where the vote is and I’ve spoken to a lot of people. Which is why I’m saying, take a little bit longer to speak to people, we are trying to get them over the line and we’ve got the time, unlike the Tories—they’ve got a few people out while we’ve got 40 people. We’ve got to take the time to really get into what their issues are, for me make the personal pitch.” In the group that arrived for the 4 p.m. canvassing shift, I spotted a man I remembered from the Labour community organizing event in Chingford this past June, who’d told the crowd he wasn’t a Labour Party member “yet.” Today he’s here to canvass in the cold.

In a parliamentary system, the individual MP’s campaign is a question mark. If Shaheen wins, will her vote be because of the popularity of Corbynism, of a radical campaign manifesto that promises a green industrial revolution, a new National Education Service, and a shift toward worker ownership of companies, or will it be because she’s a daughter of the district, went to the same school as undecided voters’ kids do, and can speak to the problems that they experience?

IN BRISTOL NORTH WEST, the question is somewhat reversed. Momentum—the group that formed alongside the Corbyn leadership to push Labour leftward—is large and active here, and holds mass canvassing days several times a week in the neighboring marginals. Bristol North West is one of those; it swung to Labour in 2017 with the election of Darren Jones, as part of the Corbyn wave of gains for the party. “Basically, the national party said, don’t campaign there. You can’t win it,” says Isaac Hopkins, a local activist with Momentum and Bristol Transformed. “Momentum said no, this is a marginal, we’re going to go and campaign. So it’s one of those seats that was flipped just because Momentum went and campaigned there.”

Jones, though, is not exactly a Corbynista; he’s called Tony Blair his political hero, campaigned for Hillary Clinton, and was a part of former deputy leader Tom Watson’s centrist Future Britain Group within Labour, seen as a challenge to Corbyn’s leadership. Unlike the candidates in the neighboring marginal districts—Nicola Bowden-Jones in Kingswood and Mhairi Threlfall in Filton and Bradley Stoke—Jones has a testy relationship with Momentum, and worried about being deselected from his seat. Yet on a damp Saturday two weeks before the election, Momentum activists were playing text-tag to figure out where to meet up with the campaign’s canvassing operation so they could go door-knocking to keep Jones in his seat.

It’s chilly and everyone is wrapped in layers; Charlie Owen-Caw holds the clipboard with the voter information, directing the other canvassers to doors and noting the responses from voters. Their way of canvassing, she tells me, is different from how Labour did it in the Blair years. In those days, canvassers simply knocked on the door and asked how people were voting, noted it down, and sent canvassers back on the day of the election to get out their identified voters. “The new strategy for Momentum that’s spread through everything is to do the persuasive conversations, to be convincing people,” she says. Jones, she says, didn’t encourage that kind of campaigning in 2017 and isn’t now, but they do it anyway. “It’s strange that part of the strategy that is probably going to keep him elected is something that he doesn’t necessarily approve of.”

The electorate is split strangely in 2019 because of Brexit. Hopkins has a long chat with a woman who’s a Conservative but wants to Remain and is torn between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Another voter is traditionally Labour and likes Jones—who is acknowledged even by his critics as a good constituency MP—but is voting Tory because he wants Brexit. Several are still undecided; public transit comes up a lot as an issue. “People are talking about being cut off from society in one of the richest cities in Britain,” Hopkins says.

Earlier that morning, Owen-Caw, a teacher who confides that she’s not sure if she’ll stay one if the Tories are re-elected, had joined her union in leafleting outside a shopping center in the Filton and Bradley Stoke district. The teachers union doesn’t endorse a party but is campaigning against education cuts and is sharply critical of the current Conservative MP. People whose eyes glaze over when greeted by a canvasser suddenly react when the teachers say, “cuts to schools,” and come back for a leaflet. Schools, like the NHS, are a common concern for voters; people who are skeptical of both parties’ leaders will stop and listen to a teacher.

ON SUNDAY, CANVASSERS headed to Severn Beach in Filton and Bradley Stoke, a lovely stretch of land along the body of water that separates England from Wales. It’s cold but sunny; the weather and the view improves moods, even though many of the people who answer their doors are brusque and don’t want to talk. Momentum has organized a mass canvass for this area, and activists have piled into cars and hopped on the train from Bristol to campaign for Mhairi Threlfall, a local councilor and activist who, unlike Jones, has won trust from the activists for prior opposition to the Iraq War and austerity.

Hopkins is invited in by one woman who suffers from osteoporosis and doesn’t want to stand at the door. The woman tells him that she’s worked since she was 15 and had planned to retire at 60, but health problems (she had cancer), a divorce, and the constant raising of the pension age has meant she’s still hanging on. “She said she spends all Sunday just laid on a bed in her living room with a hot water bottle on so she can do the rest of the week working,” Hopkins says. For people like her, the promise of a National Care Service of home care workers from Labour could be a lifesaver. It could mean the difference between selling her house, the only asset her family has, and being able to retire with dignity.

For voters like her, the choice is obvious—more austerity means more misery, as a viral social media campaign of #torystories makes clear. But one of the hardest things on the doorstep, Faiza Shaheen tells me, has been convincing people that a better world, to paraphrase the old protest chant, is possible. “There’s a sense that it’s too good to be true. It’s quite interesting from a policy perspective that we’ve got this incredibly ambitious and exciting program, and people just can’t imagine we can do it,” she says. “We’ve been told for so long that it’s not possible that now we’re sort of stuck with this mentality and you can’t undo that in a five-week election when people think this is as good as it gets, there is no alternative.”

But for the canvassers who join Shaheen night after night, as well for the Momentum activists campaigning for a candidate who might wish they’d go away, the campaign itself offers a vision of that better world in the moments of collective joy on offer. In Severn Beach, the activists stop to pet a dog in a little red jacket, whose human is excited to see Labour canvassers in the area. One canvasser puts a “Vote Labour!” sticker on the dog’s coat, and for a moment everyone is all smiles, the grumpy Tories forgotten. It is cold, everyone is tired and their feet are sore, but moments of solidarity keep them going, as well as watching the polls inching upward.

After all, Shaheen says, the stakes couldn’t be higher. “It’s not just that we can do it. We also must do it.”