08.05.2002

Doorstep politicians

Mark Fischer talked to the four CPGB May 2 local election candidates in London and asked them for their impressions of the Socialist Alliance campaign

MF: Okay, so what did you think of it? Was it a good campaign? Lee Rock (Waltham Forest, William Morris ward, 9.3%): Canvassing worked. No question. And 27 hours out of the 40 done in my constituency was done by the CPGB. We couldn't get SWPers to do it. But it really worked. On the doorsteps we didn't get any real hostility to the Socialist Alliance. The key problem we came across was obviously apathy - a lot of people made it clear that they were not going to vote, that the parties were 'all the same'. Of course, we could counter arguments like that pretty effectively, but nevertheless it was a real factor. Bob Davies (Newham, Wall End, 6.7%): My SA did sterling work leafleting the wards where we were standing (four in total). But we really didn't do enough canvassing, much less than some other London boroughs I have heard reports from. Canvassing would have bumped up the vote, I think. That said, we were pushed for people to do the work on the ground. For instance, I saw nothing of Workers Power during the campaign. Did anyone? Anne Mc Shane (Hackney, Stoke Newington Central, 7.0%): They seem to have gone awol for the duration. I haven't heard reports of them putting in work in any ward and they had no candidates, of course. BD: Despite some sloppy organisation and the canvassing problem, we should be pleased in Newham. SA candidates averaged 12%, a big jump forward for us compared with the 2001 general election, when we scored around 2%. Marcus Ström (West Greenwich, 7.1%): We did get some help from a Workers Power comrade in Greenwich actually. But, on canvassing, it is good for two reasons. You do make real contact with real people. If you simply leaflet, you have no idea where your areas of support actually are. Secondly, it's good for your cadre. Often they will not be used to going out, meeting 'ordinary' people on the doorsteps and arguing with them as to why socialism is of relevance to their lives. I had people saying to me that they would vote for me if I got a speed bump in their road. How do you broach the subject of a new world after that? (Nevertheless I had no problem replying that we could launch a campaign to ensure road safety and that by getting an SA councillor elected such campaigns would be greatly enhanced.) Standing in a local election you have to have the debate on the 'small' questions as well as the big questions in society - it develops comrades as more all-rounded politicians. Like Lee, I found a lot of people would be telling me, 'You're all the same'. I'd tell them that we were not in power and not looking for power for ourselves as a career option, but cynicism is still a powerful sentiment amongst wide swathes of society. MF: Did you get the impression that people were actually reading the political literature being poked though their doors? MS: I did. The only people campaigning in my ward were the Labour Party and us. The Liberal Democrats did nothing, the Tories did next to nothing and the Greens - who got almost three times more than us - did almost nothing. They stood paper candidates. That's also a lesson. Talking to some of the mainstream candidates at the count was interesting. The idea that some people still cling to in the alliance that you can't stand candidates unless you have a solid base of activists on the ground and a consistent record of work is nonsense. The mainstream parties stand a lot of 'paper' candidates in order to create a high-profile electoral presence. We should have stood more candidates throughout the country, even though we would still have concentrated our work in particular wards. LR: We stood eight candidates in Waltham Forest. For four of those, we just leafleted the constituencies. We still got 95 to 120 votes for those candidates. In the other four, we did two lots of leaflet drops, with the second one combined with as much canvassing as we could. The 'token' four were definitely worthwhile doing. It builds your vote across a whole area. You asked whether people read the leaflets. I have no idea about the first one. But with the second one, after people had spoken to you on the doorstep, you got the definite impression that they were going to take that leaflet away and read it. MF: Hackney got the biggest SA vote in the country with Paul Foot's 22% in Clissold ward. What are the lessons? AMS: There were difficulties for us in Hackney. It was a postal ballot and the papers were sent out over a week before the poll. So some people had actually voted a week before the day of the election itself. This made speaking to people, to influence them before they cast their vote, harder. We made a similar mistake to other areas. We focused the first weekend that the ballot papers came out on leafleting, instead of making efforts to actually speak to people. But things did pick up and towards the end of the campaign we were having a dialogue with those who had left it late to vote, some of whom were giving in their ballot papers by hand. Hackney is a very political area. The SWP has got its biggest concentration of members there. The SA has a real structure in Hackney " more to the point people are very disillusioned with the farce that is the local council. The Independent Working Class Association got over 600 votes in Haggerston ward in the south of the borough. I was surprised that the Green Party didn't pick up more votes. The fact that they lost their councillors and the Labour Party gained a whacking big majority is interesting. More than anything else, the results show the potential for us to build. There is a constituency there for politics to the left of Labour. I agree about canvassing, but it needs to be focused. We need to direct people to ongoing activities after the election. We need to move beyond just asking for people's votes to actually working with them. That requires real organisation on the ground, of course. One small point. The fact that I was prevented from saying I was a member of the CPGB on the electoral material was not a good thing. The compromise was that I was allowed to say I was a communist - and that didn't seem to damage my vote. We have to be open about who we are. We stood 13 candidates, which is a relatively large number. In some areas where we were weaker, we just put out one leaflet. In one of these areas, a Turkish comrade got 13% of the vote. Having a spread of candidates right across the borough - even if we couldn't always run fully rounded campaigns in every area - helped build the vote across the board. You seem like a credible alternative. MF: That all sounds positive, but what happens now? There is no SA paper. If experience is anything to go by, SA branches will once again wither as the SWP moves on to the 'next campaign'. Will local groups be able to maintain any momentum out of this successful intervention? LR: There's clearly a real problem. A number of people who we talked to on the doorsteps said, 'We never see you the rest of the time - just when you want our votes.' Now unfortunately, that's a justified comment. We need to break that cycle. Where do we go now? In the general election in my area, we picked up a huge list of contacts. We've got a mailing list in Waltham Forest of 300 people. But because we hadn't spoken to any of those people since the general election, how can we mobilise them now? It was embarrassing to go back to them one year later and say, 'Remember us?' In some wards we managed to activate some of these people, in others no. But obviously there's a problem here. We have to follow up with activity if we want to keep these people and build. If we had a paper, it would be easy of course. You build around the regular routine of making sure they get the paper every week, or fortnight or whatever. We need political meetings that don't just focus on local issues, but discuss things like Palestine, or the BNP or Le Pen. We need to engage with people on lots of different levels. The SWP want to keep political debate separate, as its preserve. We've got to politicise local SAs. BD: I agree with that, but I'd go further. The stop-start approach to the SA by the SWP leadership doesn't just risk alienating the electorate. SWPers themselves get cheesed off with it. SWP comrades in my area devoted serious time and effort to the campaign. We all worked pretty efficiently together, after a bit of a shaky start. But throughout the campaign, I got the impression the SWPers were going through the motions, that the campaign was actually a bit of a chore for them. When you empty the SA of any real political content between elections, what can you expect? In this context, it was a shame we didn't stand a mayoral candidate. This would have been a tremendous propaganda opportunity. But political and organisational conservatism prevailed - a wasted opportunity. Similarly, there were no SA stalls, no public meetings, very limited use of the media. The campaign was good as far as it went, but with more enthusiasm generated for the project as a whole, we could have taken it much further. MS: We should be fairly modest about what we've done. We did relatively better in London because people had three votes. They could vote for their usual party and give one vote to the SA. But the main thing we have to look at is how to consolidate and build. That's why canvassing was useful. We know what doors we can now go back to and expect some degree of support when it's opened. Sure, going back without a paper is weaker, but better than nothing. As you say, Mark, there are elements of the SWP that are now just thinking about moving on to the next campaign, the next thing to do. Organising what we've got is key. Unfortunately the sort of branch meetings that we have - certainly in Greenwich - are not the sort of event that your average punter who has just voted for you for the first time is going to want to come to. They are dry, technical and apolitical. We shouldn't be against having a meeting on local issues - I don't think Lee was saying that. But at the same time, the idea that all 'local people' are interested in are 'local issues' - potholes, not Le Pen - is nonsense. We have to treat our working class constituency with more respect. BD: Newham SA comes out of the local elections with more coherence and momentum - my worry is how long it will last. Comrades will have noticed already that SWPers in many areas will have dropped the SA again. Will we just go back to a situation of fractured efforts? AMS: I was surprised we got the vote we did. I think a number of people were. We've now got another chance to make the SA real. Of course, had we got a disappointing vote, we wouldn't just have given up. But the good vote strengthens the argument for the SA to move forward, towards become something substantial that can really compete for the loyalty of the class. That's a working class party, of course. That's what these good votes tell us is urgently needed.