The election is over, and a week and a half later the polling day blisters have healed, my legs have stopped aching and I’ve cleared the last of the leftover leaflets into the recycling bin.
I have visions of Labour activists everywhere going through the same process – emerging from the election bubble back into wider society; slowly readjusting to weekends without canvassing; and eating healthy and nourishing meals at normal times of the day. Conversations no longer have to be focussed entirely on the latest paranoid delusion about what the opposition are doing to prevent you from winning, or how to phrase your eve-of-poll direct mail.
Whilst people who voted Lib Dem are embracing the new politics through gritted teeth, and Labour members try to keep up with how many people called Ed (or people from the same family) are standing to be our new leader, we’ve celebrated our glorious victory in Hackney – we now have 50 Labour councillors – and are ready to get on with delivering our manifesto commitments for the next four years.
The opposition in Hackney spent a lot of the election telling residents that we needed ‘more opposition’, but the results showed that residents were obviously quite happy with their Labour councillors. Because I haven’t quite kicked the election habit of obsessively checking the Hackney Green party website, I’ve been following their post-election analysis with interest. Apparently, Labour won in Hackney because of the boost from the general election turnout and because nationally, we’d scaremongered people into voting Labour to keep the Tories out.
My post-election analysis goes something more like this: Turnout was far greater than you would normally have for local council elections, but this didn’t mean we sat back complacently, assuming this would be in Labour’s favour. After eight years of a Labour council in Hackney, we had to show residents that we still had ideas and a vision for our area, to continue to improve local services and opportunities for every resident in the borough.
Hackney wasn’t alone in gaining seats – vast swathes of the capital are now red again. And from my levels of exhaustion, and campaign lows (for example, arriving home at 1.30am in a taxi the Sunday before the election with 2500 unstuffed direct mails), I can firmly attest that a lot of this was due to sheer hard work and local organisation. The Labour party at its best on the ground, even when the odds were stacking up against us nationally.
We started campaigning two years before the election, building up our local parties so we could draw on the support and help of local members. We delivered local leaflets that were unique to every ward, with our local campaigns, and pledges and priorities for what we wanted to do next. We knocked on doors and spoke to people until they were probably sick of seeing us, but it meant that we knew exactly what issues local residents cared about and what needed dealing with and sorting out. I’ve come out of the election with a big ‘to do’ list, but that’s how it should be.
After our mammoth 25 hour long count, the Town Hall has been restored into an orderly place again. However, those of us lucky to have been elected, are also experiencing the sharp realisation that the opportunity to catch up on sleep is limited, and that evening meetings, induction events, AGMs and the casework you failed to keep on top of during the campaign are more than capable of filling the post election void. More on that next month…
Very much the same in Islington. Here our opponents are the Lib Dems who blame their defeat on people “inadvertantly voting Tory”!
Very well done. We had less success in Witney but had people in nearby Oxford where they rolled back the tide – led by Andrew “Canute” Smith!
The delayed (Local Count delayed until Friday tea time) consulation in my Ward was to see the last remaining BNP cllr in 3rd place only 30 votes off 4th.
Two years ago I had 2 facist companions (only in the sense that we represented the same ward) Now three Labour.
We also, despite the UGOV prediction retained the Parliamentry seat. You are spot on its work that counts.
There is a problem with the women in this culture. Yes, I know, there are problems with men, too. Believe me, I have heard about them for the last forty years. Some of it true and fair, much of it neither. It was a necessary dialogue just the same. So is this. To understand this we need a brief look at history. Women, in the past, were denied voting rights, couldn’t own land and didn’t have much access to employment that would give them the freedom to make it on their own. This needed to change, and of course, did, as can be confirmed with a cursory glance at the world around you. I laud those changes. But the problem was in how we got here. The reality is that the gender roles of our history were traps for both men and women. Women were relegated to home and children; men to sacrificial roles as protectors and providers. It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was just a matter of survival, and for many thousands of years it worked quite well to that end. But once men made the environment safe enough for women to metaphorically “leave the cave,” it was only natural and right that men change and allow that to happen. And ladies, we did. This is the simple but accurate truth of the matter. Men and women developed gender roles that facilitated the survival of the species. And once those roles were not necessary, they did begin the often complicated path to change. The problem here is that your knowledge of these historical events is largely shaped, convoluted rather, by feminism. Feminists taught you that your history with men was of unremitting evil; that you were chattel, slaves to men who held all power and shut you out with extreme intent. They even gave it a name. Patriarchy. It is a word that has become synonymous with oppression. But feminists were loathe to remind you that “Women and children first,” was the patriarchal mantra, and that much of the social norms, even when misguided, were a product of a code adopted for the sole purpose of preserving your life. It wasn’t always fair, but the unfairness wasn’t always yours. Men died by that code, and trained their sons to do the same. The fact that we still do is the subject for another essay. So what happened? As feminist distortions were increasingly embraced, and intertwined with the legitimate need for change, men did what they usually do. They reacted to the message and not the messenger and unblocked the entrance to that cave. Many of you spit on us on the way out. Many of you still do. It has to stop. This isn’t just about decency. And it is not just about the chasm of mistrust that separates us from each other, or the legions of the walking wounded from this godforsaken gender war. It is about our future. The vilification of men that you have accepted as appropriate now translates to catastrophe for our sons, for your sons. The problem is that what we say, think and feel about people invariably translates into what we actually do to them. Nowhere is this more evident than with our sons, in the here and now. If you take an honest look at the academic environment to which our boys are subjected, you will see that their masculinity itself is under attack with ideology that teaches them they are inherently flawed. Christina Hoff Sommers documented this in her highly recommended book “The War Against Boys.” She writes, “The pedagogy is designed to valorize females, such as teaching history in a woman-centered way. Boys are to be inspired to revere Anita Hill and to “enjoy” quilting. At the same time, schools discourage activities that are natural and traditional to boys, such as playing ball together.” She goes on to say, with sad accuracy, “Most parents have no idea what their children are facing in the gender-charged atmosphere of the public schools.” What Sommers didn’t add to that but I will is the fact that most parents have no idea about this because they choose not to. As girls and girls programs increasingly flourish, boys are falling to the sidelines in ever growing numbers. The results of that are chilling. Boys are more likely than ever to drop out of school and engage in delinquency and other problems. They are representing less college graduates every year. With this diminishing education and wholesale marginalization, they are on a fast track to being the “second sex,” that position that so many feminists touted as the greatest evil of human history when they claimed it applied to women. This is the lasting legacy of spitting on men. Your sons will not be the exception. Young men now grow up to be destroyed in corrupt family court systems where women are encouraged to and even praised for using children, their children, like pawns in order to drain the father of assets. And those same children also have their badly needed connection to their fathers severed in the process. When those exploited, abused children start quite naturally to act out and get in trouble, we blame the father who was removed against his will, for of all things, being absent. And the “freedom” women gained on this frenzied path of vengeance and victimization? It doesn’t appear to have settled well. Women are growing increasingly violent. They are matching men in domestic violence, blow for blow, and they are causing the lions share of injury and death to children in the home. But we don’t speak of these things. We are not supposed to. In your position as the identified victim, and mine as the identified perpetrator, there is supposed to be an indelible silence on these matters. For the most part, there is. That silence is destroying us. And it is a silence that is maintained with the collusion of shallow, weak men and misguided, self-serving women, which is to say most of the culture. The only answer I can think of is for men, and for women, to change. Perhaps you will consider this before concluding that men’s rights activists are whiners or woman haters or products of bad mothers. You might actually decide that most men’s rights activists are men who above all else, seek justice. For their children, for themselves, and ultimately for you. I hope that a few of you will read this and consider it the next time you hear someone say “men are pigs,” or when you hear a woman refer to her first born child as “the insurance policy,” or before you nod your head in unconsidered agreement with whatever negatives about men happen to be making the rounds. All of this will be visited on your sons, and their sons. I hope too, that some of you look at your sons and think, and ask yourself what kind of world in which you really want them to live. When your sons choose wives and marry, I hope you consider the agony they will go through when “taken to the cleaners” and robbed of their children in the family courts. You will be forced to stand by powerlessly and watch them have their hearts ripped out. As always, it will look much different to you when the system you help maintain with your silence crushes your son, and not just some obscure, unknown male whom you quietly think is getting what he deserves. It will happen to more than half of them. The best prevention for this last one is to teach our sons to choose carefully; to scrutinize a woman before committing his life and work to her; to evaluate her morals and values as a woman prior to putting a ring on her finger. or even whether it is wise any more to marry in the first place. But how can we do this if we keep teaching them that such evaluations are the stuff of misogyny? Indeed, how can we do this if scrutinizing women at all is such a taboo? And therein lies the rub, ladies. It is indeed time, just as it was for men, for women to be held to scrutiny, and to account. More importantly, it is time for women to do this on their own. I’ll do my best to provide a fair and compassionate mirror in my writings. It is always up to you whether that mirror is a place you want to look.