At least, it is in Ecclesfield. Formerly a rural village that got eaten by the Industrial Revolution, this North Sheffield suburb is again, constitutionally at least, considered a rural village. Lumped into Penistone and Stocksbridge by whim of the Boundary Commission, it’s something of a bellwether seat for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
Within seconds of me sitting on a wall to wait for the other canvassers to arrive, a smartly dressed older woman walked past and vented anxiously about traffic levels, speculated on the possibility that something had happened on the nearby M1 and complained about parking outside the takeaway/barber/bridal shop/café combo which makes up the modern high street. This is the modern equivalent of small talk about weather, it seems.
Where local and national issues collide
This is where local and national politics meet in the raw: the contest for the seat is very much a two-horse race (Marie Tidball (Lab) v Miriam Cates (Con)) but Sheffield council (the people who’ll have to come and bring about bollards/traffic-calming/a ceasefire in Gaza), is a more nuanced mixed bag of LibDems, Labour, Conservatives and Greens.
For canvassers, this means ‘GET-THE TORIES-OUT-VOTE-LABOUR’ isn’t a shot that’s on the board, especially as Sheffield’s Labour group alienated many by engaging private contractors to resurface roads, which resulted in chopping down thousands of trees.
It gets more complicated still when you factor in that ‘voters-who-previously-voted-Labour-in-general-elections’ is by no means guaranteed to be a pleasant chat about whether or not they’ll put a poster up.
Reactions from this cohort ranged from “I’m voting Green because of the way Starmer treated Jeremy” (note the use of forenames and surnames), to an older chap down as Labour who shouted at me about how Reform “are the only people talking sense on climate DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND, YOU PEOPLE ARE STUPID WHY DON’T YOU GET IT?”
It takes all sorts, I suppose.
Leadership questions
All the disillusioned Corbyn fans were at least nice people with whom you could have a natter and disagree pleasantly. Mind you, I almost fell over when one said they thought Sunak came across better than Starmer, which would be classed as out-of-kilter, even amongst diehard Tories.
Perhaps it’s symptomatic of our times that so many are genuinely fond of leaders who, in times gone by, would have been considered unelectable and unfit for leadership.
Welcome to the Church Of The Self-Styled Maverick Wishful-Thinker, the three-ring circus of free speech, where Katie Hopkins can call herself a comedian, a man can own a political party, and Joey Barton has 2.8 million Twitter/X followers.
While we’re on about clowns, there was no mention of Farage’s fag-packet politics either, although one canvasser did encounter a bloke who just kept saying the word IMMIGRATION over and over and over and out.
However, all these examples were at least honest. It’s the polite ones you’ve got to watch for. Genial old ladies in blue cardies in the ‘undecided-but-thank-you-for-the-reminder-about-postal-votes’ group always went down on my card as Conservative.
No, scrub that. The ones you’ve really got to watch for are the wonderful old ladies who risk life and limb just to make it to the door. The worst was one who gamely attempted to REVERSE a wheeled Zimmer frame into a porch as unsuitable and narrow as it was dilapidated while I yelled “PLEASE NO, IT’S OK, REALLY, NO, YOU’RE FINE, I’LL LEAVE A LEAFLET!”
At such times, your worry isn’t re-electing a 2019-intake oddball who thinks the pressing issue of our times is that people aren’t having enough babies, but the very real possibility of causing the death of a potential voter.
Ethical compromise – let’s try to avoid defamation
The other worry is that I desperately needed to pee and there was nowhere to go.
Checking my phone to find out where I might find relief, it transpired that Joey Barton’s version of free speech can’t legally extend to calling Jeremy Vine a “bike nonce”, “pedo defender”, a “raving bacon”, creating defamatory hashtags or advising his followers that “If you see this fella by a primary school call 999”.
(Bacon bonce = nonce: Aren’t Cockneys clever?)
Dear Reader, I can hear you telling me that you could have told me the above for nothing, and you’d be right. But it cost Mr Barton £75k plus costs and the grovellingest of ‘do-I-have-to-say-this?’ apologies to find out.
In such a world, where Barton’s lawyers argued that a reader would have to be “‘careless’ and ‘unsophisticated’ to think Barton was alleging paedophilia” it’s no wonder people struggle with the concept of ethical compromise.
Mind you, their closing argument, which stated that the comments “would be seen as abuse posted in the heat of the moment which no one would take seriously, and which has no meaning”, did at least have a nice Shakespearean ring to it which Barton – with his 10 GCSEs, six months for common assault, ABH on a team-mate and three FA bans for violent conduct – would, I’m sure, appreciate.
Tax avoidance and parking dramas
Such dramas would also have appealed to the first bloke I canvassed in Ecclesfield. When asked for his top issue for the new government, he reckoned that it was: “People with no f*****g car tax!”
I must confess, this caught me out. I asked him how he could tell, given it’s all online these days and there’s no visible sign in your car. He then gave a quick summary of the wide range of websites which enable the concerned citizen to check whether or not a neighbour’s car is taxed.
“Like her at number 9: her bloke’s not had no tax for twelve f******g months and he always parks in front of my f******g window and all.”
So there we are. Back to parking again, but these things matter, it appears, as much as the economy, climate crisis, Gaza, party discipline, or the lack of kids’ playgrounds.
“They’ve got one in Grenoside”, I was repeatedly told, about skateparks, traffic calming, bollards, double yellows and all manner of tangible reminders that politics does make a difference somehow. These things local or global, don’t just happen by some inevitable working out of the natural order. Instead, it means that, rather than spouting online, somebody has to go out, listen to people and then try to make stuff happen.
Canvassers need civic amenities too
When I was sweating round Stocksbridge in the blazing sun, still bursting for a wee, I’d been asking myself why people do this. I drove home, bladder still lobbying hard for wider access to civic amenities, in a thunderstorm that glowered over us like a problem, to find my neighbour was still persevering with their barbecue.
My shouty Reform friend’s logic seemed to be that doing the right thing was pointless unless it made a massive global difference and, for good measure, that I was THICK IF I COULDN’T GET IT.
Maybe I am thick and he’s right, I thought, as the deluge added steam to the oak-smoked fiasco across the road. If only there were something I could do about injustice, local traffic or this funny weather we keep having …
