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Aidan and I returned to Crewe and Nantwich with our bikes on the Saturday before the by-election and took over a whole table in the Costa Coffee branch in the market square opposite the clock tower to wait for the flood of volunteers to arrive at 10am.
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At 10:45am, thoroughly coffeed out, the two of us cycled north to Leighton Hospital for our first political photo opportunity, and got lost as soon as we went off the edge of the crappy maps I had printed out from google. Roll on route planning by Open Street Map when it comes of age.
We got there by asking directions. The familiar sign which has featured on the website of the Conservative candidate on 4 April, and on the website of the Libdem candidate on 5 May, and again on 16 May (when the so-called "campaign" had been taken to Parliament) appeared in front of us.
Aidan chatted with a nice person waiting on a bench for his lift to arrive, who said that it was doubly unfair because the staff have the car parking charges docked from their wages.
I am fascinated by the flow of politically active information. I should have asked him off-the-cuff how he heard about that. He was also aware that there was no long-term future in this car travel lark as we have come to know it, even though the politicians never bring themselves to say it. In spite of 50 years of ignorant planning decisions to site public infrastructure like hospitals three miles from the nearest town, it's still possible to cycle to them.
We tried to head south to a target housing estate to deliver some leaflets (we hoped it was an up-and-coming middle-class area with good internet access and people who would be willing to type in a webpage URL from a scrappy non-party political leaflet that arrived through their door), but went south-east along the B5076 instead.
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There was a short-cut down some green cycle routes that took us near to an easy delivery new-build estate where we appreciated how the doors faced inwards along the curves of the road, rather than outwards where it would have caused a longer walk around.
The blocks of flats in these estates have an intercom system and separate doorbells so you can speak to the persons inside, and they can buzz the door lock open to let you in... Or you can just press the button marked "Trade" and the door buzzes open anyway, so you can get to the rack of letterboxes inside. I've collected samples of the other party leaflets in these places, where someone has evidently opened their letterbox, the entire lot spilled onto the floor, and they can't be bothered to pick it up. These are being kept for analysis.
Back in Crewe market square, the front window of the Costa Coffee gave us a good view of the action. The LibDem and Conservative candidates were going from corner to corner of the square trailing a wall of signs with their name on it looking for babies to kiss. The exhausted local hack dropped in for a free cup of coffee from Aidan. Eventually he delivered by mentioning us on his newspaper blog without a functioning link.
We repeated the exercise of Aidan standing outside trying to bribe people with a free coffee to come in and experience the publicwhip by-election website. More was learnt, and this was probably the most valuable part of the exercise. Do this enough times and your website might actually not suck.
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There's now a genre of these types of websites, the most recent of which was Unlock Democracy's VoteMatch for the London Mayor election on May 1, and since hidden, so you can't compare interfaces.
User interfaces are critical, and the point of mine is not to tell people whom to vote for (that's just the hook), but to lead people to the agenda-disrupting questions they should be asking of the candidates in the parties they support. In my opinion, the Labour Party has stood for some of the most regressive right wing policies that have been seen on the political scene in years. My theory is it's a Blairite tactic to split the Conservative Party by lobbing political mortar shells right over enemy lines to land in the rear. They win as long as the party sits tight and closes its eyes to the collateral damage.
Yes, I'm talking about compulsory biometric ID cards with a national database, for example. The Labour Party MPs have been voting for it, while the Conservative MPs have opposed it. The fact that most people questioned about it say they are in favour as a convenient way to prove their age in the pub and control illegal immigrants is not important. The actual scheme we're getting is slightly more extreme than most people imagine, and opinion is going to turn pretty sharply once it starts to become a reality and everyone's uncle and grandmother gets hauled into a processing centre to get their irises scanned and fingerprints swabbed.
If there was any justice, then ten years of selling out, taking the country into a large-scale PFI off-balance-sheet debt, lying about war, and funding a PR controlled election campaign on the back of selling seats in the House of Lords which has resulted in the party being severely in debt, should have some consequences. Eventually. You'd hope. Otherwise, what's the point of having any standards?
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We got on our bikes and braved the rain on our way down Nantwich Road. Everywhere we stopped there were Tories ahead of us in the streets delivering leaflets. Boy, these guys were working hard. People must be swamped. One saw us chatting with a local resident as we handed out some of our PublicWhip fliers, and said: "Are you going to vote Conservative? Don't be shy. It's nothing to be ashamed of."
Aidan would always ask, off-the-cuff, what part of the country he'd come from. He knew there'd been a draft by all the parties. I hadn't realized, but they can count on the professionals in the parties -- specifically the counsellors, MPs and other representatives -- to know their responsibility to pull together when they are needed. Big scale organizing was happening, and it was awesome. When we cycled into Nantwich towards the official address of the Conservative Party campaign, Aidan could tell instantly from across the square that this was not where it was at. They must must have had a warehouse in an industrial estate somewhere else where the real business was going on, with volunteers fanning out across the constituency loaded with leaflets and routes on which to do with their canvassing. The place wasn't busy like a hive of bees.
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Even the most run-down and obscure residential areas had men with blue rosettes with that funny scribbly green tree symbol walking up the garden paths. It was difficult to find somewhere that hadn't already been leafletted. We distributed what we could through a few streets of letterboxes until we were cornered in an inescapable cul-de-sac and it was getting late. My fingers had been scraped raw. It took 20 minutes to cycle back along the busy A534 and get to the train station.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested that between all the parties at least half a million leaflets had been dropped. Maybe more. We'd gotten rid of about 1000 in two days. It's not a game we can realistically play. The colour ones have a slightly different URL to that given elsewhere, so it's detectable where the hits on the web-page are coming from. The results will take some time to analyse, but I can reveal that the majority of visitors have been coming from a posting on The Register.
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It was said of the 2005 general election that the big internet/e-democracy story was that none of it made any difference. (There's a big audit in Australia about the situation that needs reading.) Generally, the party political on-line experience in the UK has been stunningly poor. Yet the parties still run the show and fundamentally set the options from which we select the policies and discussions.
Until democratic activists who believe in the internet as the place to make a difference start moving into the territories of the political parties and begin finding out what going down there, nothing will get better. We'll merely get a far more sophisticated state apparatus that's able to account for public opinion more precisely and know exactly how to ignore it. It will collect taxes more efficiently than before, but will continue to blow the whole lot on screaming white elephants and extremely dangerous weapons systems with no strategic or tactical purpose.
And that's not even counting the serious and totally predictable environmental issues that we're going to be encountering in the next 20 years, of which today's food riots are just the beginning.
The people who get elevated by the system into the supreme body of government that is Parliament ought to get there with some basic awareness and understanding of the importance of the job, at the very least. This is just not happening yet. It's still just a game and a sport to them. It's not taken seriously.
And we're really going to pay for it if it doesn't shape up soon.
The associated blog post for this photo-story is here.
Sign the pledge to do something at the next by-election.
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