Anger, apathy and hope: the great British election diary

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/04/anger-apathy-hope-great-british-election-diary

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Liverpool, 26 February

Latest Guardian/ICM poll: Con 36, Lab 32, LD 10, Ukip 9, Gn 7

• Jack Straw and the Tories’ Malcolm Rifkind face cash-for-access revelations; the Greens’ Natalie Bennett reels from her on-air “brain fade”

Like a lot of worthwhile things, it all starts with fear: not just about the 11 weeks we’re about to spend pinballing up and down the country, the number of times we’ll hear the phrase “hard-working families”, and the efficacy or otherwise of Premier Inn’s Good Night Guarantee – but the incredible complexity of what we have to cover, with the aid of only one video camera and a succession of notepads. This, after all, is the nobody-knows-anything election, with no easily predictable outcome nor any sense that, in the age of seven-party politics, most of the country is following the same basic electoral plotline.

So what to do? The first task is to establish what might actually be at stake from the perspective of two very different places, both the kind of ultra-safe seats the mainstream media tend to ignore: Kensington in Liverpool (poor, bleak, Labour), and its namesake in London (rich, luxurious, Tory).

We spend three days in the former, among shuttered shops and minimal human traffic, having regular conversations about what’s happened to the benefits system. “We’re getting beggars back again in Kensington, because people are being sanctioned,” says Steve Faragher, a longtime resident who gives the area a voice via a small-scale setup called Liverpool Community Radio. And the election? “No one’s mentioning it, because it doesn’t touch on their lives in any remote way.”

Five minutes away, though, we get a bracing sense of what this place still has to lose. Thanks to the coalition axe that has cut away 58% of Liverpool city council’s funding from Whitehall, Kensington’s Sure Start centre is under threat of closure. Four women – respectively from Malaysia, Portugal, Cameroon and Liverpool – explain how their kids have been helped by the centre’s staff and their expertise with what officialspeak calls “special and complex needs”, and there are tears (from us, not them). Without missing a beat, all of them say they are voting Labour.

In the other Kensington, local MP Malcolm Rifkind will soon stand down under a cloud of disgrace, but it matters not: a majority of people here will support the Conservatives out of pure instinct, and Ed Miliband’s plans for a mansion tax and the abolition of non-dom status have surely hardened the area’s deep-blue tribalism. That said, when we take the temperature here the following week, it takes no effort to pick up disquiet about some of the aspects of a thriving London economy that the Tories very rarely mention.

“What was really a family neighbourhood isn’t a family neighbourhood any more,” one woman tells us. “What’s happened here, essentially, is that London’s turned into Monaco.” In the pristine streets to the north of Kensington High Street, one thought instantly occurs: whereas Liverpool’s Kensington is full of the silence of poverty and crushed hopes, its namesake in the capital has the very different quiet that comes from absentee property-owners and lives spent making huge amounts of money elsewhere.

Coatbridge, nr Glasgow, 14 March

Latest YouGov Scotland poll: SNP 46, Lab 27, Con 18, LD 4

• Vince Cable says new Tory-Lib Dem coalition “inconceivable”; Ed Miliband assures public “we only use the smaller of our two kitchens”

In Scotland, the Tory-Labour dogfight barely registers. Obviously, what matters here is the uneven scrap between what remains of the Labour party, and the insurgent, all-conquering SNP – and if you want some sense of how mind-boggling things have gotten, Coatbridge is a good place to start. Since 1982, the seat of Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill has been represented by Labour’s Tom Clarke, who’s now 74. In 2005, his 19,000-vote majority made it the safest seat in Britain.

Now, recent polling by the Tory peer Michael Ashcroft has put the SNP 3% ahead, and their candidate – 51-year-old Phil Boswell, a locally born and raised contracts manager in the oil industry – thinks he could pull off the truly miraculous and win.

The town’s once-monolithic politics were traceable to its large Irish-Catholic population, and that community’s deep bond with Labour (whose people once maligned the SNP as the “Protestant party”). Coatbridge’s renowned St Patrick’s Day celebration, then, is the perfect backdrop to a day’s campaigning in truly Baltic temperatures: the SNP doing its thing at a street stall in a shopping precinct, while round the corner in the town’s St Patrick’s Hall, Clarke attempts to work the room in the manner of a big-hitting US congressman.

Middle-aged women are assured of how young they look while Clarke repeats one of his stock lines: “There’s not a family in this town Tom Clarke hasn’t helped.” Every time we stop at a table to talk politics, he hovers just out of shot, apparently trying to make sure that everyone stays on message.

Clarke and his comrades claim that the polls are wrong, and that they’re confidently on course to win. When we return for a second bite on 21 April, we’re allowed to follow him and his campaign team around the former pit village of Moodiesburn, where we ask an innocent question of a man sitting on his doorstep, about the SNP claiming to now represent the working class.

By way of a reply, he mutters something about the renowned Scot and first-ever Labour leader, Keir Hardie (who died in 1915), before Clarke jumps in. “This man’s trying to get you to say things that are anti-Labour,” he advises the fella on the doorstep, before turning to us. “He told you from the very beginning: he’s voting Labour.”

“Don’t promote the SNP,” advises a Labour canvasser and, as we walk down the street, Clarke pipes up again. “I thought you were observing,” he says, sternly. “I didn’t think you were intervening, or I wouldn’t have agreed to it.”

In six years of making political videos, no politician has ever asked us to refrain from talking to the public. Clearly, it must be a sign of his imminent victory.

Boston, Lincolnshire, 18 March

Latest Guardian/ICM poll: Con 36, Lab 35, LD 7, Ukip 9, Gn 4

• David Cameron agrees to a seven-way debate; Ed Miliband rules out coalition with the SNP

Four days later, we arrive in a completely different universe: Ukipland, that great expanse of eastern England that stretches from the Kent coast to the pancake-flat fields of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire.

Our first day begins at 5.15am, watching through the morning mist as droves of predominantly migrant workers are picked up from the town’s car parks and ferried to nearby fields and food-processing plants (around 75% of the UK’s vegetables are grown here). Boston feels tense, and prickly – swirling with concerns about the nefarious, abusive end of the local job market, pressure on schools and hospitals, and an impossible combination of high rents and low wages. Everybody we meet needs no persuasion to talk at length about immigration and who they’ll vote for: when it comes to the loudest voices, it is Ukip – who, one market trader tells us, “talk Boston’s language”.

There is a kind of political tragedy afoot here. In 1997 and 2001, Labour came within 600 votes of taking the seat of Boston and Skegness from the Tories. But in 2004, when much of the old eastern Europe was incorporated into the EU, immigration became the focus of seething local anger – and as the Labour vote dropped, Ukip arrived to fill the void.

As in 2010, Labour’s candidate in this election is Paul Kenny, a furrow-browed native of Birmingham who has lived here since 1991 and has a deep, forensic knowledge of immigration and the issues – wages, contracts, housing – around it. Ukip’s hopeful, by contrast, is a 22-year-old law graduate (and “local man”, as their leaflets call him) called Robin Hunter-Clarke, who says the town’s problems could be solved at a stroke by the imposition of the “Australian-style points system” that he and Nigel Farage hold forth about until it has the same hollow ring as most of the other cliches we’ve heard for the past three months (the sitting Tory MP, one Mark Simmonds, has decided to stand down; his replacement is a technology journalist from the Daily Telegraph, suggesting the Conservatives have given up).

We squeeze in a second visit on a balmy Wednesday, three weeks later. Farage is in town to address two back-to-back public meetings at the local Haven High Academy, both of which are rammed. Volunteers in hi-vis jackets usher cars into spaces like at festivals; twice over, a long queue snakes from the main entrance around the schoolyard. One man – 30-ish, by the look of him – tells us he hasn’t been in work for months. “Wages are cut,” he says. “Gangmasters are exploiting everybody, and you can’t make a living on the land any more – which people have been doing for hundreds of years.”

“Probably no town in England has been more fundamentally changed by open-door immigration than Boston, and I’ve seen the impact,” Farage half-roars from the platform. That relatively innocuous line gets thunderous applause, as does a defiant reprise of his comments about HIV patients from overseas being treated by the NHS. We leave with a very strong feeling: round here, the supposed Ukip slide in the polls has yet to happen, and they may well win.

Sheffield, 26 March

Latest Opinium/Observer poll: Con 34, Lab 33, LD 7, Ukip 14, Gn 7

• Tories claim Alex Salmond has “sinister” plans to put Miliband in Downing Street; at last PMQs of current parliament, Cameron rules out putting up VAT

“Don’t go into politics if all you want to be is perpetually liked by everybody,” a somewhat knackered-looking Nick Clegg tells us, just after he arrives for our interview at his constituency office. We were last here the day after the first big leaders’ debate (remember those?) of 2010, when Clegg fleetingly tasted universal(ish) popularity, only for the coalition to make him a byword for the very thing he had briefly embodied: an impatience with mainstream politics, and all the backsliding and compromise it tends to involve.

Clegg’s Labour challenger in his Sheffield Hallam seat is the locally raised Oliver Coppard, who according to his promotional blurb, “went to the Scouts on Botanical Rd and learned to swim at King Edward’s pool”. Two recent polls have put him narrowly ahead, though caution seems pretty sensible: Labour has never held Sheffield Hallam, and Clegg has a 15,000 majority. But Coppard wants to give the impression of a man who fancies his chances, and claims to have an almost moral cause. Predictably enough, in a seat where students make up 10% of the electorate, the lingering odour of Clegg’s tuition fees climb-down hangs heavy. “We’re fighting hard here because I feel like we’ve been let down,” Coppard tells us. “I’m standing because I don’t think it’s good enough to have an MP who says one thing and, when he gets into parliament, does something else.”

Among other things, we’ve come here for the only hustings in which Clegg is going to take part. But as has been clear for a few weeks, it’s a surreal event that highlights the contrast between parts of the country that are often in a state of angry tumult, and senior politicians – like the Lib Dem leader – who want to remain as far from the fray as possible.

On 4 March, protestors from a group called the Free University of Sheffield briefly occupied Clegg’s Sheffield office (but “left when police arrived”), which may partly explain the rum do that has ensued. A one-off debate, including Clegg and five other candidates, has been organised by the Sheffield Star, but its staff won’t tell us where it’s happening, let alone allow us or any other media in. When we ask Clegg and his people if we can tag along, his reply ends in a tactical coughing fit.

Via Labour sources, we find out the location – and our satnav leads us up and down an array of roads and lanes, until we end up at the very edge of the constituency, at a secondary school whose buildings nudge the craggy expanse of the Peak District. Coppard emerges into a ferocious hilltop wind around 90 minutes after the event apparently started, and tells us what we’ve missed: six candidates arguing in front of 14 sixth-formers – who, he says, were not allowed to talk, and whose questions were asked on their behalf. Amid the ashes of Cleggmania, it seems, Sheffield has been pushed a few political inches towards Pyongyang.

Bristol, 30 March

Latest Populus poll: Con 34, Lab 34, LD 8, Ukip 15, Gn 4

• Diane Abbott says new Labour “controls on immigration” mugs are “shameful”; Nick Clegg launches Lib Dem campaign saying his party is too “male and pale”

The current MP for Bristol West is another Lib Dem, Stephen Williams, who in 2013 made it to the dizzying rank of parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department of Communities and Local Government. A recent local poll put him in third place, behind Labour and an apparently thriving Green party, whose city-wide membership has recently increased from 250 to more than 2,000 and whose plush campaign office has been paid for by that renowned rebel Dame Vivienne Westwood.

Welcome, then, to the Green surge – this time minus the “brain fades” and general air of mishap that has plagued Natalie Bennett, and overseen by a pretty credible candidate: Darren Hall, a former member of the RAF (“Was I in any wars? Not really, no,” he assures us) and ex-civil servant, whose conversion to green politics came via the experience of snorkelling, when he realised that climate change was going to ruin coral reefs, and the effects of reading the famous anti-inequality screed The Spirit Level.

In some of the more affluent parts of the constituency, playing spot-the-Green-voter is a cinch: we just sidle up to bohemian-looking people, ask them how they’re going to vote, and manage a 100% success rate. But if the Greens are going to increase their support further, they’re going to have to appeal to parts of the city where politics – of whatever hue – cuts very little ice. A good example is Redcliffe, where we spend two hours following a Green team around some threadbare low-rise flats. One twentysomething mother-to-be doesn’t know there’s an election on; neither do a group of young men crowded around a stairwell, though their spirits are lifted by news that the Greens support the decriminalisation of weed.

The most interesting encounter comes when a door creaks open, a herbal aroma drifts out, and a woman looks with interest at one of the Greens’ leaflets. She usually votes, she says: last time, she supported Ukip, only to have her nerves jangled by their policy of cutting benefits spending.

“This seems a bit better,” she says. And might she support the Greens? “I might, yeah. It’s a new way to vote. It all needs something else.” A pause. “A bit of hope to vote for.”

Middlesbrough, 14 April

Latest YouGov poll: Con 33, Lab 36, LD 7, Ukip 13, Gn 5

• Ed Miliband says “I am ready” as he bigs up Labour manifesto; at their launch, Tories offer reheated version of Thatcher-era right-to-buy scheme

In the course of six years of film-making for the Guardian, we have been to many bleak places, but South Bank in Middlesbrough may well be the bleakest. Once known as “Slaggy Island” thanks to the heaps of industrial waste that surrounded it, the area’s collective life once revolved around shipbuilding and steel. Now, it is a mess of closed-down shops and pubs, bluntly described by one local as a ghost town.

We’re in this part of England to watch two Tory campaigns in action, in the utterly no-hope seats of Redcar and Middlesbrough. When a byelection was held in the latter in 2012, the Conservatives got a princely 6.3% of the poll – but their candidate, Simon Clarke, thinks that people here have been let down by politics in general, and is brave enough to knock on doors and make his case.

When we meet him, he is busy trying to sell his party’s new right-to-buy policy to housing association tenants on a street called Granville Road. “Would you be interested in buying your home?” he asks one couple, who look at him as if he has been beamed down from the moon.

“Well, I wouldn’t buy this house,” says the woman, only for her other half to butt in: “It’s full of mice,” he says.

In South Bank, we once again meet a part of the electorate that sits in the midst of this election like a dull headache: those for whom politics makes precious little sense, and the supposed differences between the parties blur into nothing. As the campaign reaches its final stretch, some of the people following events closely might think this is so much exasperating nonsense, but fair play to these people: when you live next to great piles of rubble, and the waxings and wanings of the main parties have made precious little difference to a decades-long story of decline, the parade of highly educated dweebs on the TV must surely emit the same indecipherable sound as the teacher in those old Peanuts cartoons, who never appeared on screen, and was voiced by a muted trumpet: “Mwaah, mwaah, mwaah.”

To be honest, that’s how everything’s starting to sound to us, too.

Nuneaton, 30 April

Latest Ipsos/MORI poll: Con 35, Lab 30, LD 8, Ukip 10, Gn 8

• After an encounter with Russell Brand, Ed Miliband says he would rather not be PM than do a deal with the SNP; polls suggest Cameron “won” three-way leaders’ Question Time on BBC1

After mop-up visits to Coatbridge, Sheffield (our third) and Bristol, we enter the home straight with a trip to one of the 20 or 30 seats that will decide which party forms the government. The first thing we see confirms how surreal this election is becoming: 305 miles from Edinburgh, a huge billboard featuring Alex Salmond, this time dressed in a regulation burglar’s black rollneck, and stealing money – English money – from someone’s pocket. Oh, the subtlety and sophistication of the Tory campaign.

Labour is reckoned to have a 60% chance of taking this seat back from the Tories, but in the midst of the general “Mwaah, mwaaah, mwaaah”, one message seems to have got through: that the Scots are always getting one over on the English, and some climactic Caledonian heist is now a very real prospect. Throughout the day, the same refrains repeatedly come back from people we meet: “They wanted self-rule for their country, now they want to poke their bloody noses in ours ... Nicola Sturgeon’s after as much money as possible for Scotland, and I think they have a pretty good deal already ... If the Scottish get in with Labour, we’re done for.”

Nuneaton – the home town of George “Middlemarch” Eliot, which is four miles from the exact geographical centre of England – is hardly another South Bank. Instead, it bears the same scars from supposed progress as a lot of places: boarded-up pubs, fields making way for Starter Homes, and a town centre trying to make the best of it while neon-lit retail parks do a roaring trade. It all makes for a sense of low-level grumbling, compounded by a lot of complaints about benefit cheats and immigrants – and now, Scottish people. That’s about as worked-up as a lot of people get: a lot of the time, mention of the election simply prompts very understandable sighs of exasperation.

As we drive away, our minds go back to a woman we met in Liverpool, now referred to in all our scripts as the Sure Start Mum. We met her twice: once outside the children’s centre, and again at an impassioned protest against the cuts at the city’s Pier Head – and both times, she highlighted what sits at the heart of this election, but has rather got lost underneath all the shrill noise.

She said she’d never been on a demonstration before, and we asked her if she thought what had happened would put a rocket under public opinion, and raise people’s awareness.

She looked into the camera. “I hope so,” she said. “And I hope they vote.

“That’s the biggest one: vote.”