Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
‘I knew we’d won when the villages turned red’
The mastermind behind Labour’s general election campaign in Canterbury and Whitstable believes a long-term strategy of building support for the party and the “right candidate at the right time” secured a historic victory for candidate Rosie Duffield.
Campaign co-ordinator Mike Bland says that the moment he thought Labour could win was on the last Saturday before the election when the party held a street stall in the Longmarket on the same day that the save the hospital march passed through the city.
“It was then that I thought the tectonic plates are shifting,” Mr Bland said. “The street stall was buzzing. There were so many people coming to Rosie because they wanted to talk to her individually.
“We didn’t have to reach out to them. They came to us. There were people saying they had voted Tory in the past, but were switching to Labour.
“Our manifesto spoke to them. They said it met their family’s needs. But they were also talking about the mess that the Tories have left the NHS in.”
The protest through Canterbury on June 3 saw several thousand people march in support of the Kent and Canterbury Hospital which is facing serious reductions in staff and services.
But Mr Bland recalls that the night of last Thursday’s count in the Westgate Hall also proved a defining moment – when a Conservative was overheard to say that the vil- lage of Chartham had turned red. Littlebourne, too, had voted Labour – another area regarded as a Conservative shoo-in.
In the end, Ms Duffield’s victory over the former Conservative MP Sir Julian Brazier was a mere 187 votes. But the truly astonishing statistic to emerge is that Labour had managed to double the number of votes the 2015 candidate Hugh Lanning polled.
Mr Bland describes this as part of a long-term plan to build support.
He said: “Getting the villages was a real shocker. We worked hard in Chartham, for exam- ple – we canvassed the whole area. Elsewhere we found that people on the housing estates were coming out for us. Thanington come out for us – as did London Road and Spring Lane. In the past, these were people who had not voted for a long time, people who had become fed up with politics and politicians of all parties.
“None of these people thought there were policies which would change their lives. Then they saw our manifesto. It went down a storm with people – especially those who felt they had been left behind by politics.” In addition to persuading people to get out and vote, the Labour campaign team also encouraged voter registration among students at Canterbury’s universities and among young people more widely.
Mr Bland made a calculation that if turnout reached 70%, then Labour would have a good chance of success. Turnout was 72.7% and Ms Duffield polled 25,572 votes.
Sir Julian polled 25,385 – an increase of almost 2,500 on his result of two years ago. The Lib Dem and Green support fell away.
Mr Bland said: “Hugh Lanning had a good campaign two years ago and what we wanted to do from then on was build a broad coalition of support for Labour in Canterbury.
“Yes, undoubtedly the students helped.
“The Kent Labour students helped mobilise the student vote and we did a lot of work to try to encourage students at Kent and Christ Church to vote. A lot of students who come from constituencies which had either safe Labour or safe Conservative candidates decided to vote here instead.
“But it wasn’t just the students. There has been movement to Labour from the Lib Dems and Greens from people who recognised that voting Labour was the best way for change.”
Mr Bland denounced the Conservative campaign as complacent in a seat which has always returned a Tory to Parliament.
And he points to the personal allure of the candidate herself. He said: “Rosie was just so appealing to so many people. She was the right candidate at the right time.”