Sunday Times exposes Curran

[Scottish_Republican]

A pretty fair assessment from a non-partisan source

They would have employed a monkey - Times Online

From The Times Literary Supplement
July 20, 2008

They would have employed a monkey
Brendan Perring suspected Labour’s election machine had spun off the tracks. What he saw at campaign HQ proved it has Brendan Perring

I’ve never been a member of a political party and I’ve only voted once, in the 2005 general election. Until last week, I’d never set foot in the east end of Glasgow. I was brought up in Swaziland, where my parents were little concerned with politics, and I only moved to the UK five years ago to study at Edinburgh University.

So my knowledge of west of Scotland Labour politics is nil. But that’s still more than enough qualification, it seems, to entrust me with a role in fighting for the party in the Glasgow East by-election, and, by implication, to help save the prime minister’s career.

I spent a good part of last week posting flyers and canvassing at the doors of the constituency’s beleaguered populace. For several weeks they’ve been at the eye of the latest political storm to rock Gordon Brown, following the surprise resignation of David Marshall, the sitting Labour MP. I’d read, like everyone else, how the once-slick, surefooted Labour spin machine had spun-off the tracks and crashed, and how the party’s campaign was laughably shambolic. I wanted to see for myself.

An air of desperation was apparent as soon as I went to offer my services at the Shandwick Centre, the drab campaign office of the Labour candidate, Margaret Curran, in the centre of the constituency. As I walked in unannounced, I was braced for a battery of cross-examination. Who was I? Where was I from? Was I a member of the Labour party? What were my views on Scottish independence?

None of these questions were asked. Instead I was welcomed into the open arms of the handful of volunteers and immediately sent out canvassing.

There’s an oft-repeated dictum that if you were to pin a red rosette to a monkey, it would get elected in Glasgow. I suspect that, had I been a monkey, I’d have been handed a pile of leaflets and pressed into action. Such is the sense of desperation in the Labour camp at the prospect of a Scottish National party victory next Thursday, that frankly, they can’t afford to be choosy about who campaigns for them.

It should be a sure thing for Labour. With a 13,500 majority at the last election and poverty and health rates among the worst in Europe, the people’s party regards it as its own. The seat hasn’t slipped from its grasp for the past half century. Yet something is happening. With a recession brewing and a resurgent SNP, suddenly Labour is no longer trusted in Scotland. Last week the nationalists polled higher than Labour in Westminster voting intentions for the first time and the only by-election poll to be conducted — last week-end for two Sunday papers — showed a 15% swing from Labour to the nationalists who need a 22% swing to capture the seat.

Maureen Burke, one of Curran’s personal assistants, ushered me into the cramped office with smiles and effusive thanks and introduced me to “the team” — three parliamentary assistants and a couple of bemused octagenarians making up canvass packs. She lead me through the campaign headquarters to the hub of the operation. From what I’d seen so far, my expectations were modest — a couple of computer screens, a telephone or two, perhaps a coffee machine to keep the troops sustained during the long nights ahead. Not for the last time was I to be disappointed.

Walking through the door, I met with a sea of rickety tables, dirty plastic cups and piles of promotional leaflets covering every available surface. On one wall a supposedly motivational plea penned by Curran smacks of desperation. It is flanked by two more posters, reminding activists that “Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance” and “Team Work Makes Dream Work.” Some chance!

Charts covering the dingy off-white walls showed every registered voter in the constituency for the purposes of voter ID planning and leaflet drops. On the wall next to them was a list of the areas covered — only a few paltry ticks at this stage.

I learn that canvassing now all has to be done manually after it was discovered that the English computer system, which produces printouts of constituents who have voted Labour in the past, doesn’t work in Scottish constituencies with tenements because it doesn’t recognise the slashed, double-digit addresses.

This was hardly the Mandleson-esque efficiency I had come to expect from the party’s early years in power, when it was at the cutting edge of election technology and organisation, spin and rebuttal were elevated to art forms. I was handed a large bunch of flyers and a map and despatched out onto the streets to save Brown’s skin.

The mood among my fellow, largely inexperienced canvassers, dressed in hoodies and grubby jumpers — most of whom have been drafted from constituencies south of the border — was defeatist and downbeat. Of the three staff I went out with, the eldest was just a year out of university, their only taste of a by-election before this being the disastrous Crewe and Nantwich contest of last May, when the Conservatives snatched the seat from Labour in a by-election, overturning a 7,000 majority.

There is little Braveheart spirit on this side of the political divide. One of our first tasks is going into a “difficult” area of the east end, which a previous team gave up on. The young volunteer plotting our course through the tenements and former council houses describes the experience as “a living hell” and seems hopelessly out of her depth. A young twenty-something leading another expedition simply gave up on whole streets after being unable to make sense of the map issued by headquarters.

“Talking to people on the doorstep over the last few days, I was sure that this one was going down the pan as well — nobody even knew who the candidate was going to be,” says one.

Their despondency was understandable. The first weekend of the campaign passed with Labour still struggling to find a candidate, when local councillor George Ryan failed to turn up for his selection meeting and mysteriously withdrew from the contest. When Curran, a hard-edged, machine politician schooled in the rough-house tactics of Scottish Labour, agreed to take on the challenge, she slipped-up almost immediately. Seeking to ingratiate herself with her prospective constituents, she described herself as someone who has “lived all her life” in the city’s east end. In fact she and her husband Robert, a former council official, live in a £600,000 villa in the exclusive Newlands area of the city’s southside.

Subsequent gaffes have included mailing a personalised appeal for support to the SNP candidate John Mason and enlisting the support of John Michie, an actor in the detective series Taggart, who was later revealed to have filmed a television appeal for Scottish independence.

The following day I was sent out to canvass with Cathie Craigie, the MSP for Cumbernauld and Kilsyth, and Greg McClymont, the party’s prospective parliamentary candidate for the same area. We piled into my car and set off, but things started to go wrong almost immediately. We drove around for 45 minutes trying to find the area in which we were supposed to be canvassing but the maps supplied by the party were blurred and inaccurate. Exasperated, I grabbed the map from Greg and had us finally at our destination, a bleak housing estate overlooking Glasgow.

During the journey, the subject of Wendy Alexander’s recent resignation as Scottish Labour leader following a donations scandal was raised. McClymont conceded it was having impact on the campaign, adding: “In all the time I have been doing this I have never had so few people be home or not want to speak to canvassers on the street. The vote in this area just isn’t quite as safe as it was before.”

[Scottish_Republican]

Back at campaign HQ, the team was totting up the canvass returns. With just over a week to go until polling day, 42% of the vote were weak-to-medium Labour supporters with a few die-hards. But with 30% of voters still undecided, there was everything to play for. Nerves were tight, and Martin Rhodes, one of the campaign organisers, was predicting that the result would be “scarily close”.

He added: “Gordon [Brown’s] leadership has been disappointing — they should have had an election straight after he got into power. There is a strong anti-Labour vote which we saw form in the general election. It’s not that the SNP are strong, it’s that people just don’t want to vote Labour.”

The Labour Party was increasingly pitched as a straight choice between its responsible unionism and the reckless separatism of the SNP. There’s a visceral hatred of the independence movement with the nationalist candidate depicted as a hardliner. I was sent out with Willie Bain, a party staff member, to chase up “proxy votes” — constituents who have called the campaign HQ to request voting forms because they cannot make it to the polling station on the day.

When we arrived at their doors, the people who had supposedly requested the forms didn’t know who we were or even what a “proxy voting form” was. Willie sighed and explained that this was, in all probability, a destabilising tactic used by the SNP campaign team to waste Labour time and resources. Katie, an aide to a London MP, later revealed that a car belonging to one of the party’s MSPs had been wrapped in duct tape and had had “SNP” stencilled onto it. The SNP denied responsibility for both incidents.

After five days of campaigning, I finally got to meet the candidate. Spotting her in the campaign HQ, I sidled up and complimented her on her performance on Newsnight Scotland the previous evening, when she was generally regarded as having bested Mason. “He was desperate to make the most of certain opinions I have, and I think that’s a bit distasteful,” she says. “He kept nipping at me — I need to calm down a bit.”

I struggled to make smalltalk with her. The only thing we had in common was her most recent campaign leaflet, hundreds of which I had been shoving through letterboxes on her behalf — a personally signed letter in which she declared her commitment to the area.

“I am Glasgow born and bred. I have lived here through good times and bad,” it stated. “I am proud of what so many of us have done to improve our community, but we all know there is more to do.”

I congratulated her on the heartfelt commitment she had demonstrated to the people of the east end: “I really liked the new letter I was handing out the other day.”

She replied: “Somebody said, ‘Oh Margaret, I got your letter, thanks very much, it was brilliant.’ I don’t know what the letter says, but I’m sure it’s very good.”

A short time later she was handed a large stack of the draft of a new campaign letter by an aide, which she plunged into signing without further ado.

The difference between her carefully spun image as an irrepressible street-fighter in total control and willing to tackle neds — even if she has to hunt them down herself — and the reality seemed glaring. While she can engage candidly and animatedly with voters, she looks tired and weather-beaten by political storms, the stress lines and posture ill at ease with her strained smile as she tries to stir up enthusiasm among activists fearing the worst.

She can also be difficult to get along with, as Christine May, the former Labour MSP attested: “She’s nice, just don’t get on her wrong side. Scary woman.”

I went back on the campaign trail with two staffers from England who had worked in Crewe and Nantwich. On my travels I came across an SNP canvasser. They vastly outnumber Labour volunteers on the street — they have a team of almost 1,000, compared with 200 on a good day for Curran — and they are rewarded with free food and drink. I’d walked about 10 miles a day, knocking at doors, delivering flyers, posting letters, and had never been offered so much as a biscuit. When I sat down in the campaign HQ for five minutes to eat a lunch I’d bought from a nearby bakery, I was handed another bunch of flyers and told to hurry along. I’d also spent £100 on petrol driving party members around the constituency in my own car, but when I asked if I would be reimbursed, I was told Labour didn’t do that.