13,000 Conversations

10 April

 

• SNP’s campaigners concentrate on winning new support rather than getting committed voters to the polls.

 

• Labour’s technique of ‘getting the vote out’ has been overtaken by events.

 

• The new Labour leadership will have to find ways of gaining a better understanding of their electorate.

 

 

THE SNP IN Edinburgh East fought a predominantly ground campaign. There were high-profile visits, and three campaign shops where anyone could just drop by, but largely this was a street-by-street fight.

And the SNP felt they had the better weaponry. Partly as a result of Labour’s historical dominance of central Scotland, their canvassing operation had been geared towards ‘getting the vote out.’ So the focus of the effort was on identifying where Labour voters lived, checking if they were still Labour, then cajoling them to go to the polling station and giving the elderly amongst them a lift. The operation wasn’t planned with a dramatic shift in voter allegiance in mind. Indeed there wasn’t much wrong with a system that delivered 41 MPs and more than 40 per cent of the vote at the last general election. The only flaw was that it wasn’t fit for purpose when voters en masse changed direction.

At the previous Westminster election, the SNP got a little under 20 per cent of the vote and six seats. So just ‘turning out the vote’ would never have been an option for them. Their whole approach to canvassing was different. Their canvass cards measured the degree of likelihood that someone would vote SNP and allowed the bulk of the work to go in to persuading people who were on the brink rather than simply ensuring the die-hard bravehearts got to the polling station.

So when SNP activists went on the doorsteps they put voters in one of eight categories, building on an already sophisticated database. Category one would be those who said they had voted SNP at the last three elections, and the electoral roll would be checked to ensure that they had indeed voted. In the second category were those who identified with the SNP, but hadn’t necessarily voted in the three previous elections. Category three were SNP supporters but with no record that they had previously voted. The gradations continued all the way to category eight, which contained those who were against voting SNP. Because the party was already doing well in the polls, it was able to concentrate its efforts on those in the middle categories… those who were undecided or wouldn’t say how they would vote, or on whom the SNP had no data at all – and in the end, the activists were also able to have conversations of persuasion with those who had previously opposed the party.

The assumption was that those who had previously voted SNP would do so again, so they got less attention. The state of the art database had filters which would take out regular supporters, or those who were eligible to vote in EU but not general elections, and leave those who required the most effort to bring them round. Tommy Sheppard said politics was about priorities:

There was debate within the party because some of our supporters would say ‘we haven’t seen you’, so for some we also needed to make sure they got motivational material, the leaflets, and so on – but they didn’t get canvassing effort. You can’t talk to everyone, it’s a tactical decision.

Canvassers were instructed not to get into arguments on the doorstep but conversations with the candidate were arranged and some people were won over in this way.

In the end, the ambitious target of talking to 20,000 voters in the constituency wasn’t met – but the success rate amongst those who were approached was high. 13,000 were contacted and the party had data on a further 15,000. Combining this information, the organisers assumed 14,000 voters would back the SNP. In fact, 23,000 did – nearly 50 per cent of those who voted, and not the 40 per cent the organisers had originally hoped for in what had been a Labour seat. ‘In the end,’ Sheppard admits, ‘we thought it would be close – but the national swing was unstoppable.’

Labour campaigners say the SNP also had an advantage as they were better at ‘pavement politics’ – taking up and reflecting local issues in their campaigns. But Sheppard insists his focus was very much on the big picture: ‘Our campaign was about the people of Scotland taking control – not about how often the bins were collected.’

As a former Labour official, the message that his old party had let its traditional supporters down played well in working class areas. But he also felt that the SNP was seen as a more acceptable vehicle for social democratic policies than Labour amongst some voters in the more affluent parts of the city.

The SNP in Edinburgh also managed to put the squeeze on the Green vote. Although the Scottish Greens also favoured independence, left-wing voters who were disillusioned with Labour and who voted ‘No’ in the referendum were likely to find them more acceptable than the ­Nationalists. The SNP benefitted from such defections as this reduced the Labour vote. But there was considerable ‘churn’ in the Green vote as the SNP campaigners attempted, with some success, to persuade long-standing Greens to vote tactically for them to keep Labour out. The SNP already had reliable information on voters’ party preferences and whom they would back if, in theory, their first choice wasn’t available – so they could target those Green voters who had said they might opt for the SNP in the absence of a candidate of their own. Sheppard said: ‘For years Labour made the ­strategic assumption that their voters had nowhere else to go. Well, in Scotland they have.’

Three months on from the election, on 12 August – the day she was elected as Labour’s new leader in Scotland – Kezia Dugdale appeared to back this up this analysis:

Having spent the summer thinking this over, I think there are two reasons that led to so many people losing faith in us. Firstly, a large part of the population have simply switched off from us. It’s not so much that they don’t like what they hear – they’ve stopped listening to us altogether. And secondly, those who are willing to give us a hearing tell us they don’t know what we stand for anymore.

She has promised to give her party a new determination and to be clearer about whose side it is on. But some of Labour’s most senior figures in Scotland are warning colleagues that the crumbling of traditional loyalties could become more dramatic across the UK. Certainly there is no social-democratic competitor to Labour in England (if the Lib Dems were ever that, their five years in coalition with the Conservatives has left them on life support). But the party was far less successful there than the Conservatives at bringing potential defectors to UKIP back in from the cold. And if people break with their traditional voting habits once, they are likely to do so again.

Voters seem more willing to look for alternative options. Although UKIP and the Greens ended up with just one seat apiece at Westminster, between them they garnered five million votes – so their level of support can, at the very least, greatly influence the outcome even in constituencies they don’t win and in an electoral system that doesn’t do them any favours. Andy Burnham has suggested that Labour may not yet have reached a nadir, and a senior Shadow Cabinet colleague of his said to me: ‘My message to the party is don’t believe it can’t get worse. It can.’