Just over 12 hours since the polls closed in Oldham East & Saddleworth, much commentary has already been written – so I thought I’d add my own ponderings to the list, before I get distracted by something else.
Having spent 10 days over 3 visits up in Oldham, I am naturally disappointed that the Liberal Democrats’ Elwyn Watkins lost. I met him on a number of occasions and got the impression that he would have made an excellent MP for the area – something I had already guessed about from the fact he chose to stand up to Woolas’ lies and take him to court (contrary to what Labour have been saying, it wasn’t about him being a “sore loser”, but about drawing a line which political attacks should not cross). Indeed, it was what made me come up to Oldham in the first place – and then return; the friendliness of the campaign staff and local party members helped with the latter, too (a particular thanks to Ben & Shan Alexander, Martin Dinoff and Kevin and Linda Dawson for putting me up!).
Staying for the moment with the negatives, it was also disappointing that Labour were more effective at getting their vote out (especially in the evening); although I suspect the timing of the announcement by the Labour-run Manchester City Council that it would be cutting 2,000 jobs may have helped Labour’s “wrong cuts” narrative (Oldham isn’t a million miles away from Manchester, for anyone as weak on Northern English geography as I was before coming up here!).
It is also a sham that we were not more effectively able to counter Labour’s misrepresentations – some might call them lies – about what the Coalition were doing. Labour’s campaign – “a vote for fairness”, sadly devoid of actual policies for what was meant by ‘fairness’ (unlike the Lib Dems’ similarly-themed General Election campaign last year) – ran on two main issues, at least looking at their literature: tuition fees, with the idea that voters should “punish Nick Clegg for breaking his promise”, and police cuts. Let me explain why I think both could have been made more of by us.
I’ve blogged before why I think the new system is fairer and thus meets the second limb of the pledge, and when people raised the issue on the doorstep, I tried to repeat the arguments – with some success. People were also receptive to the letter from a local student which made the case for the new system very effectively – on one page of A4; unfortunately, this went out relatively close to the poll, allowing Labour to make a lot of noise about tuition fees in the preceding weeks.
On police cuts, Labour ran a “Save our Police” campaign, I think before they even selected their candidate, which was quite effective at stoking up fears that front-line police will be cut, particularly in the Greater Manchester area (which Oldham is a part of). But since the overall thrust of the Coalition is to cut back-office police (by reducing the amount of paperwork police have to do, and trimming things like HR departments), this was closer to a lie than a simple misrepresentation.
Moving on to the more positive things, though, there is much to be said for the fact that our vote didn’t collapse. In fact, it went up by 0.3%, and was only slightly down on the historically good 2005 election (useful data and interesting analysis from the must-follow BritainVotes here). Given the national media narrative, it will be a relief for activists all across the country – though admittedly not quite the massively invigorating boost that a win would have been.
BNP also lost their deposit, unlike in past elections in Oldham. This is certainly a positive result for British democracy; much though I value plurality of opinion, I have little sympathy for modern-day fascism (or, indeed, fascism in any day and age), so another blow to their already over-stretched finances is welcome.
British democracy also benefited from the fact that people turned out to vote, and in higher numbers than was expected, too – at 48.8%, it was higher than some historic by-elections (Brent East in 2003, for instance, only had 36.2%). Whether or not that hurt the Lib Dems remains questionable; there were reports of higher-than-expected turnout in the Saddleworth part of the constituency, which was perhaps more favourable to us (though I have little reliable information on what the actual impact of that was, if it indeed was the case).
A final positive was that the strategy of the Tory squeeze – which was explicitly at work in the last week of canvassing, even before last weekend’s polls came out – clearly paid off. But the point should perhaps be made that a lot of voter contact in the last week was aimed at exactly that – whereas a lot of the literature that went out to persuade people back into the LibDem fold (or against voting for Labour more generally) clearly wasn’t successful.
I shall ponder these points about campaigning strategy – and perhaps more broadly the implications for the Coalition and politics in the near future – in another blogpost, hopefully later tonight or in the next few days.
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