I won a safe seat from the Liberals in a council by-election. How? Everywhere is different and there is no single panacea, but I think three lessons are key.
First, we took full advantage of our biggest strength: our sheer numbers. Whatever state we are in, we can generally call upon more activists than the Liberals. Given the right motivation – the opportunity to become the largest single group on the council – we were able to persuade local activists (and many others from across London) to help fight our gruelling six-week campaign. Hard work, more than any other factor, was the key to our success.
Second, we ran a tightly targeted campaign. We made an early decision to focus solely on those electors who actually vote, and so didn’t waste our time contacting the almost 50 percent of the electorate who are serial non-voters. Further, we made heavy use of direct mail (sent out to named voters), often on very local issues affecting perhaps only one estate, one road or even just one block.
By localising the campaign, we were seen to be in touch with those people who bother to vote.
Finally, we had just three campaign messages: the Liberal-Tory council was soft on crime (they failed to take full advantage of the government’s tough anti-social behaviour legislation); hard on the environment (they planned to dump Lambeth’s popular green box recycling scheme) and high on tax (they raised council tax by a massive 23 percent). This allowed us, not the Liberals, to set the agenda on the real issues that effect local people.
The result was that I got in by 64 votes on a phenomenal ten percent swing at the height of the government’s troubles – the local Tories called it ‘an extraordinary result’. But what hurts the Liberals more than anything was that we triumphed by successfully using their own ‘pavement politics’ tactics better than them. You can too.