"Write what you know" they say.

Even of what you know is benefits advice work and writing stories about it only pays enough to keep your colleagues in biscuits!



Thursday 23 February 2017

Daphne's Dilemma - A Floating Voter in Stoke Central.



If you make one of your principal characters a resident - at least occasionally - of the City of Stoke-on-Trent and give her a political journalist as a side-kick, it's inevitable that the question "What would Daphne do?" arises on by-election day.  Here she is, the evening before polling day, trying to decide.


    As the sun sank behind the Bet365 megalith and twilight fell over the marina where she once again made her home and moored her narrowboat, Daphne Randall decided to use her second Who Wants to be a Millionaire lifeline to complete her postal voting paper.  She would have to deliver it in person the following day, going out into Storm Doris to do so, having dithered over her decision for too long to send it.
    She had tried 'ask the audience' earlier that day, with a Facebook post, which initially demonstrated that she didn't live her online life in a bubble of like-minded liberal lefties.  A series of testy exchanges and several unfriendings later and her 'friends' were now slightly less diverse a group, if only politically.  Opinions among even those who remained were still split.  She needed someone thoroughly level-headed to advise her. 
    Daphne picked up her phone.  "Hi Hils!  Are you busy, pet?"
    "Hello Daphne!" 
    Hilary sounded reassuringly relaxed.  Daphne pictured her in her elegant Hampshire sitting room, probably with a glass of red at hand.  Although that image might suggest she would have little insight into life in The Potteries, Hilary had spent much of her life as a welfare rights worker and had looked more than most into the face of modern British poverty.  The North/South divide was, like many other supposed divisions between those suffering under austerity, a convenient fiction of the political right; being low-paid, jobless or sick was as much of a challenge in the southern shires as the north Midlands.  To dismiss people like her friend Hilary as 'metropolitan elite' and an enemy of working class people was an equally devious deceit.
    "How funny you should call!" said Hilary.  "I was just thinking that I should phone you, to catch up with the latest news in the by-election.  Have they arrested Paul Nuttall yet, or are they waiting to see if he'll manage a hat-trick of electoral offences?"
    "Don't joke!  That might be all that saves us from a depressing misrepresentation of the people.  He certainly thinks there are enough mugs in the Potteries to elect him, lies and crimes notwithstanding."
    "I expect you've been very busy canvassing to stop that, though."
    "I left the Labour Party four years ago, pet," Daphne reminded her friend.  "After a massive argument, a rebellious speech to full Council and a spectacularly indiscrete encounter with a political journalist, if you recall."
    "Of course!  How silly of me!"  Hilary giggled.  "How is Harry?"
    "Ridiculously busy and as happy as a lark.  He says he cannot believe his luck with a national news story to cover and both main party leaders in Stoke.  Before Christmas, he had been talking of retiring!" 
    "You haven't fallen out over it, I hope?"
    "Hardly.  The way the candidates line up, we're practically on the same side, pet."
    "But you're always teasing him and calling him a Tory!"
    "He is a Tory - or near as dammit - but the thing is, Hils, that's centre-left in this race!"
    "I suppose it is, if you have that ghastly man from UKIP hoping to get in."
    "Believe it or not, there are three candidates to the right of him."
    "Sweet mercy!  How can that be?"
    "Well," Daphne explained.  "There's a BNP bloke, someone else who wants to scrap Magna Carta and give the Queen the right to rule as an absolute monarch, while the guy standing for the Christian Peoples Alliance is going for more of an Old Testament approach to government.  The poor lad from the Monster Raving Loony Party is struggling to keep with the pace."
    "At least that splits the right-wing vote," Hilary observed.  "If the bigots are spoilt for choice, with a half-decent candidate Labour should be quietly confident."
    "With a half-decent candidate they probably would be."
    "Don't they have one, then?"  Hilary laughed.  "Don't tell me they've sent another Tristram, Quentin or Algernon up to you?  Surely they know better than that!"
    "I'd take a Quentin or an Algernon, as long as he had the sense to stay off Twitter!"  Daphne sighed.  "Their man's a menace at the keyboard; he's upset the Brexiteers and the Corbyn camp, and he's done a grand job of offending women voters too.  On a scale of one to Trump, he's a good seven and a half!  The Kippers don't think he was being enough of an arse to turn off their idea of the traditional Stoke voter, so they've been doctoring his tweets.  They even photoshopped a shot of him campaigning with Jeremy Corbyn, replacing Corbs with a fully veiled woman."
    "That's quite funny, with Corbyn supposedly such a turn-off for voters, but I hope your candidate had a real go at them for being so prejudiced."
    "He's playing the nationalism and nostalgia game himself.  His manifesto has a St George's flag and a bottle kiln on the cover."
    "Oh dear."
    "It's not so bad inside but I have to be honest, Hils; if there wasn't the risk of the Nuttall man stealing the seat, I wouldn't even consider him."
    "If Labour don't win, that would be awfully bad news for Jeremy Corbyn and the left of the party, wouldn't it?" Hilary suggested.
    "No question of that, pet.  His opponents will cite it as vote of no confidence in the leader if they lose but, if they win, they'll be quick to remind everyone that their man was virulently anti-Corbyn and attribute his win to that.  Sometimes I even wonder if they picked a weak candidate to embarrass him." 
    Hilary didn't seem convinced.  "So if you don't vote Labour, what are your alternatives?"
    "There's a cardiologist at the local hospital but he's a LibDem and, much as I think a vote for him would make a point about the importance of the NHS and a shout out to the Remain agenda, I'm not sure I'm ready to forgive that lot for the Coalition any time soon."
    "Fair point."
    "There's an earnest little fellow for the Greens too.  Talks a lot of sense and not afraid to speak up for migrants and refugees, but I'm far from sure they did the right thing putting anyone up at all."
    "You're worried that if you vote for him, that's one less left-of-centre vote for a candidate likely to beat the odious Mr Nuttall?"
    "Spot on, Hils, though there's another thing too.  Like the Labour guy and the Tory, he's making much of being 'Local'.  I know it's a useful stick to beat the opportunist Kipper with but, as someone who chose this city as home rather than being born and bred, I feel more than a little excluded by that and I'm only from another part of England!  How any of them plan to appeal to anyone from further afield, I cannot imagine.  It's an insult to immigrants and incomers alike to suggest you have to be born here to understand the place or represent it.  It's supposed to be a modern city, not a local shop for local people in Royston Vasey!"
    Hilary laughed.  "Poor old Daph!  You seem to be running out of options.  If you can't get enthused about any of your League of Gentlemen, is there a female candidate, or at least someone who would promote women's rights?"
    "The only woman candidate is the one arguing for Her Maj to run the show again and she actually got herself arrested for her racist views.  Promoting the rights of one particularly wealthy white woman hardly seems to fit our agenda!"
    "Good heavens, Daph!  At this rate, you'll be left with nobody to vote for!"
    "I have to vote, Hils!  I have to do something to stop Nuttall."
    "Isn't he sabotaging his own cause rather well with the Hillsborough issue?"
    "It's not just that.  He's had friendly fire locally from his own people too.  One of his canvassers pissed up a pensioner's wall the other day."
    "Always a vote winner!" Hilary laughed.  "Goodness me, you don't want to upset the pensioners!  After all, that's been Conservative strategy in recent elections.  Are they trying to woo the older vote in Stoke?"
    "Funnily enough, pet, I suppose they might be, if they think pensioners will vote for a candidate who reminds them of their smuggest grandchild!"
   "That's a bit cruel!"
   "I know.  Actually, their candidate doesn't come across as a bad lad and they must fancy his chances as he's had Theresa the Appeaser up here backing him this week.  However, after all we've suffered through their austerity policies, even if I thought he could beat Nuttall, I couldn't vote for him."
    "I should jolly well think not!  He is a Tory!"
    "So who do I vote for, Hils?  Head or heart?  Labour or Green?" 
    Daphne was down to her last lifeline; it was fifty-fifty time.
    "Who do you most agree with?"
    "Probably the little Green fella."
    "But he can't win?"
    "I'm afraid not, pet."
    "Then how certain are you that either your Labour candidate can beat the UKIP candidate - or that he absolutely can't?"
    "Labour's lad should do it but, to be honest, it's a bit too close to call.  The latest polls are pretty much neck and neck and the weather forecast for tomorrow is diabolical.  Turnout will be right down with the storm too and every vote will count."
    "Then I think you already know what you have to do, Daph," said Hilary gently.  "I know they gave you a hard time and probably don't deserve your support, but hold your nose, dear!"
    "You're right.  I cannot bear the thought of that lying carpet-bagger representing me in Parliament.  He needs to lose and he needs to lose heavily!"
    Daphne made her mark.
    "Keep your fingers crossed for us, pet!" she said to Hilary.  "It's forecast to be a very stormy day."

Monday 13 February 2017

The Best of Times: The Worst of Times

Welcome to Stoke-on-Trent, February 2017.  Suddenly, it seems, the eyes of the world are on my adopted home town again and not for the reasons some of us might have hoped.  At the same time as the campaign to gain the accolade City of Culture 2021 is swinging into action, so is a bitter by-election battle, with the reprehensible UKIP attempting to parachute their newish leader, Paul Nuttall, into Parliament via the protest votes of disgruntled voters in Stoke Central.  With the kind of irony that's almost typical of anything linked to Stoke-on-Trent politics, the by-election only comes about because the seat's former Labour MP, celebrity historian Tristram Hunt, is vacating it to take up the role of director of the V&A, suggesting there's not enough culture hereabouts to satisfy his tastes. 

Much has been made by Labour's opponents that it's not just a prestigious but a lucrative role, although surely it's disingenuous to suggest that someone with Hunt's interests, background and (probably) enviable financial security would have done it for the money.  I haven't always had a great deal of time for his particular style of soft left, let's-not-upset-the-Daily-Mail politics but, frankly, good luck to the lad.  The odds are that one of the three Stoke seats will vanish with the next set of boundary changes anyway, so parachuting out when there's such an exciting opportunity is a 'no-brainer'.  Anyone trying to make anti-Corbyn capital from it (yes you, BBC Radio 4 News!) was, to quote The Last Leg, being a dick. 

Anyway, the upshot from all this is that, instead of being weighed up as a potential City of Culture, Stoke-on-Trent is now being branded "Brexit Central", a small-minded city suspicious of outsiders and resistant to change.  In case anyone from outside the area wonders what kind of a place this is, there's a tendency to trot out an unhelpful reminder of the bad old days when there were nine BNP councillors in the council chamber.  Media coverage reinforces that with sound-bites of market traders backing Trump, or parochial locals claiming to be unaware that a by-election is even happening.  The reaction of any arts professionals viewing is more likely to be to #binthebid rather than #backthebid. 

Those disconnected voices are, perhaps, those of the very people any City of Culture programme most needs to reach.  It's going to be a challenge to do so, however, especially if they do end up electing a UKIP MP likely to dismiss any such proposal as a pipe-dream of the "liberal metropolitan elite."

And, if you're reading this blog, "liberal metropolitan elite" probably includes you.