I was very late to the Corbyn Party. Like many of my peers, I had never canvassed before the 2019 election, and I started doing so for a Party of which I wasn’t even yet a member (I rejoined so recently I wasn’t eligible to attend my Constituency Labour Party’s nomination meeting), and for which I’d felt only the barest, most grudging electoral loyalty prior to 2015. My support for previous incarnations of the Labour Party had been so nominal and half-hearted that it had never occurred to me to spend time persuading others to vote for it too.
Yet with the unlikely rise of an openly socialist leader whose authentic, seemingly egoless iconoclasm formed such a refreshing contrast to the personally ambitious, ideologically shape-shifting type, and whose unexpected electoral gains in 2017 seemed to put a genuinely left-wing government within reach, I felt impelled belatedly to join the legions on the doorstep. Not that I was at all convinced that canvassing worked (with reason, it turns out). Like physiotherapy, it is a long-term undertaking, the incremental benefits of which can be difficult to believe in. But everyone seemed to be doing it: not just seasoned activists or political aficionados, and not just one circle of friends, but everyone.
Canvassing isn’t a wholly feel-good activity. I was initiated into the art by a more experienced friend one November Sunday afternoon in Battersea. At first, I just followed him around, trying to memorise his openers and copy his doorstep demeanour, hardly speaking but grinning indefatigably. It felt unnatural – illegitimate, even – and often uncomfortable. Most people didn’t answer our question about how they would be voting, and many didn’t want to talk at all, so having any conversation – even a negative one – was a relief.
One gains confidence quite quickly – perhaps too quickly: soon, I was initiating others. But you begin to feel less self-conscious at the cost of feeling a bit less like yourself. You develop an artificially undaunted and insufferably polite manner to override your misgivings, while the sense of purpose and mild sacrifice can lead you to acquire a regrettably chipper, officious and self-satisfied attitude (after all, you are giving up your Sundays to traipse around for the Greater Good).
In the weeks building up to the election I didn’t stray from local London marginals – Putney, Battersea, striking out to Hendon later on – but on polling day itself, informed by Momentum that constituencies in the capital would be over-subscribed and volunteers were needed elsewhere, I took a train to Shoreham-by-Sea, which I knew a little because I have family nearby. My canvassing mentor had some friends in Brighton who had been canvassing in the Tory-held East Worthing and Shoreham constituency for weeks, and the local organisers were optimistic (in the event, the Conservatives increased their already healthy majority by over a thousand votes).
As it was all over the country, the weather was spectacularly grim and unpropitious, but the resulting hardship only heightened our sense of adventure and perception of our own valiance. There was a particular road perpendicular to the seafront – you could look down it and see big, grey-brown waves frenziedly crashing into the shore – where the wind was extreme, aggravating the rain. We had to shelter beside garden hedges to write on our madly flapping sheets before plunging them back into a plastic bag so they wouldn’t become illegible.
After an hour or so battling the weather, we would return to a house whose owner had offered it as a makeshift base camp. There, we were fed home-made soup and sandwiches and cake, and made cups of tea and coffee; we could use the bathroom and plug in our phones, sit down, get warm, let our legs dry off a little and generally recharge before heading back out to the front. The intense but also purposeful sociability of the experience gave me that intoxicating sense of strangeness to myself, of distance from my everyday personality – a rare, life-affirming feeling I associate with the otherworldly collectivity of music festivals. But this immediate sense of community was also underpinned by a broader atmosphere of imagined solidarity: one was perpetually buoyed by the thought of the thousands of passionate volunteers who were doing the same thing in similarly dreadful conditions across the country.
We finished up at about 7.30 p.m. – the Shoreham organisers told us that there were no more doors to knock on. Feeling triumphant, we got on a train that was due to arrive at Victoria at 9.58 p.m. As we neared our destination, I received a text from a friend who had been canvassing in Battersea; they were heading to the Labour HQ to watch the exit poll results come in. I looked it up on Google Maps and saw it was right next to Clapham Junction, where our train was pulling in. We jumped off and raced out of the station to the HQ. Arriving, I recognised it as where I’d been for my first ever canvassing session. Everyone was crowded into a glass-walled conference room, sitting on the floor, eyes glued to the big screen at the front. The room was extremely tense; I was nervous too, but also undeniably – dangerously – elated.
We can skip reminiscences about what happened next – the evening’s events are no doubt seared into everyone’s memories anyway. Some days later, once the initial winding shock had begun to subside, there was a feeling of bathos and quasi-embarrassment at the apparently deluded futility of the campaigning effort – an effort that had felt all-important, pivotal. Perhaps also the faint feeling of having been misled, or led on.
I go into the detail – the gory arc – of my election experience first because it is a memory that would be easy to misrepresent. The analogy that comes to mind is the self-loathing that can greet you the morning after a party at which you were too chatty. But self-analysis in the throes of a hangover is not known for its lucidity or fairness; I think of that kind of cringing retrospection as the affective opposite of nostalgia, no more trustworthy than its idealising counterpart. If one’s sense of the efficacy of door-knocking was inflated at the time, it can be equally distorting to hyperbolise one’s earlier benightedness and the pointlessness of the activity in retrospect.
But I also wanted to revisit my experience because I know it is not remotely unique or extreme – quite the opposite. People like me – late arrivals with no prior experience of, and very little exposure to, sustained activism – have been lightly touched by Corbynism, our participation tardy and modest compared to the many who joined or re-joined the Party punctually, in 2015, and to those who devoted hundreds of hours to organising and campaigning. In a sense, we embody some of the paradoxes of the mobilisation Corbyn inspired: fleeting but intense; narrow, demographically and geographically, but numerous; shallow but spirited. In another sense, I take myself and those like me – mild cases – to be encouraging litmus tests. Though inevitably the energy and intensity have faded since last December, I felt, and still feel, affected by what happened: both inspired and traumatised, activated and numbed. I don’t yet know – I suppose I’m waiting to find out – how deeply or lastingly, and in what ways, this personal change will manifest in future.
This question about what will endure from that frenetic period and what it portends is, of course, one of the questions we are used to putting to leaders, to those in the Party with power and influence. One scrutinises them in an attempt to sound out their real attitude to the political energy released by Corbyn’s tenure – whether they intend to protect and expand it or to oversee its petering out – in order to decide whether, or how much, to trust them, and what one’s relation to the Party will be in future. This searching scrutiny of those at the top can be a fraught and painful activity.
Hence it can be a balm – and a productive, rather than avoidant one – to ask the same question of oneself. I take heart from a couple of sentences I came across in Tribune’s ‘After Corbyn’ issue:
People are changed through their involvement in projects like the ones around Corbyn and Sanders. The process of trying to build a party that can transform a state itself creates a broader capacity in people to look at the world differently.
On the one hand, it is clear that, in strictly political-strategic terms, 2019’s electoral mobilisation was a failure. It felt shallow because it was. Secular trends – regionalised economic neglect, the dis-embedding of political parties from civil society, the neoliberalisation of the ideological field – cannot be reversed overnight, or solely with doorstep conversation. But shallow was not all it was.
Canvassing actually reminded me most of all of my time as a Deliveroo rider. The differences are obvious – not least, the difference in reception when you’re handing over a miraculously hot takeaway versus brazenly attempting to extract an electoral commitment – but the parallels are perhaps not trivial: going into neighbourhoods one would otherwise have no reason to visit and getting to see where, and to imagine how, other people live, many of them people you would not ordinarily encounter. This remains valuable and edifying.
There is also the common fact of being part of a decentralised group being sent to different locations by a data-driven algorithm. Canvassing prompted the same realisation I’d had Deliverooing in my local area of London a couple of summers ago: I know so little of where I live, let alone of where I don’t. Apart from a brief interlude at university, I’ve lived in the same square mile my entire life, but what is my relationship to my neighbourhood and its community? Such thoughts about late-capitalist urban experience are not new, of course, but they are newly urgent in the wake of a political defeat that has brutally exposed the long-term withering away of social infrastructure that had helped to provide the opportunity and enticement to associate with others – the convening that prepares the ground for organisation around a specific political purpose.
Tribune’s reminder that people are changed through involvement evokes something else I hope I have learned from the heady final months of 2019, a lesson I regard as an experiential confirmation of one of the axioms of the socialist worldview: its acknowledgement and celebration of the radical sociality of human consciousness. The experience of having been swept up in a collective project, in a fleeting, superficial but nevertheless impressive mobilisation – not just door-knocking, but meeting, talking, reading, self-educating – has helped to activate dormant politics, which were previously assumed, untried, often inarticulate. Once awakened, these politics were tested, and shaken, by the devastation and disorientation of defeat. In the immediate aftermath, especially as splits and differences emerged between generations and within friendship groups about the nature of the mistakes, the lessons, the solutions, this disorientation tended to express itself among new recruits such as myself in the form of anxious self-probing, an attempt to overcome the rattling sense that I didn’t know my politics after all.
The sense of disorientation abides, but recently the question has begun to form itself rather differently: how to relate one’s awakened politics to the new conjuncture, the new and continuously evolving reality? This seems to be a question of engagement beyond mere introspection, a question of knowledge and strategy, but most of all one of practice: of how to behave, how to adhere to one’s values, so that one can live in the world – help make it a liveable place – and live with oneself.
If one of the fittingly socialist lessons of the 2019 experience is that one’s activity with others can initiate inner change and precipitate evolutions of political consciousness and behaviour, the other half of this dialectical truth is that the legacy of Corbynism – the future of what Corbynism was – is not entirely in anyone’s hands. One cannot wish a movement into being; one must also wait for it, but not passively. Perhaps one must lie in wait for it, ready oneself. And as with those at the top, the proof will be in the practice of those on the ground – in what I do, you do, we do next.