Well the dust has settled, the counting machines have been locked
up, the pundits have crunched their numbers (and much has been said about that
elsewhere so I’ll not repeat it) and all over the land politicians’ cars are
returning to a state of normality. Talking of cars I was most impressed how
Alison Thewliss managed to get two of us in the back of hers at one stage, as I
feared we’d need to hail a passing rickshaw, of which there are more in John Street
than Bridgeton I have to say, to get us to our leafleting area.
Having bravely dipped my toe back into the political water
at last year’s Scottish Parliament elections by stuffing some letters into
envelopes, I felt inspired, for a variety of reasons, to do a little more this
time round. Having once, long ago it now seems, lived my life fully engrossed
in politics, it felt more than a little strange standing at Bridgeton Cross one
Saturday afternoon, having dragged along my friend Allan for moral support,
waiting to see who would turn up. After what seemed an eternity the two
candidates and a couple of others arrived and off we went, into parts of
Glasgow I never knew existed, although as it turned out we were probably never
more than half a mile from our starting point at any stage.
One of the problems explaining my lack of political involvement these days is
that I have never identified myself with Glasgow in the same way I did with
Hamilton all those years ago and even yet I have no real grasp of the area
covered by the Calton ward where I now stay. It’s a very diverse area and some
of the flats we delivered leaflets to were seemed worlds apart from the
affluent pocket of housing I stay in on one edge of the ward. Having been
challenged to use two words in this blog (and I’ve used one already) I think I
could safely say that some of the gardens we trudged through to deliver our
leaflets through worn out letter boxes, in even more worn out front doors, could
safely be summed up by that excellent Scots word “midden”. It was distressing
in the second decade of the 21st century to see filthy children’s
toys languishing in unkempt gardens in what had clearly once been if not quite “des-res”
then an improvement on the tenement slums of the area in the 1950s.
Council elections, perhaps strangely for a Nationalist, are
always what have interested me the most, partly I think as back in the late 80s
and early 90s, the era of my previous political involvement, they were the one
area where with a big of hard and concentrated work it was possible for the SNP
to do well.
My first ever election campaign was helping out in Bellshill
where a dedicated team of workers saw Duncan McShannon win the seat in a
council by-election. I stood as a candidate myself in 5 council elections,
twice for the now thankfully dismembered Strathclyde Regional Council, twice
for Hamilton District Council, and lastly and the time I finally got elected, for
the new South Lanarkshire Council. And I have to say I really enjoyed the
campaigns and all the organisation that went into them.
There’s a lot of work involved in an election campaign, much
of it unseen by the voters, whether of the planning variety of which splitting
a ward up into manageable leaflet runs is but one, and that’s the main
difference I think between Hamilton and the area we were in. There were no
manageable leaflet runs – a hotchpotch mixture of lanes and alleyways,
tenements with and without controlled entries (I’m sure the Labour candidate at
the polling station swore that 2/1 was the lucky buzzer to get in), and all in
all nothing like the leafy suburb of Silvertonhill with its mass of Wimpey
houses.
Then there’s the STV voting system itself with all its
nuances, not least of which is the influence played by the alphabet on your
chances of election. Calton was one of the few wards in the city where the SNP candidate
with a surname starting with T beat the other one whose surname had the fortune
to be nearer the start of the alphabet. I do think that is something that
should be looked at, whether by grouping candidates of the same part on the
ballot paper, or my totally randomising the order the names appear in.
Well having survived my first venture back onto the streets
I managed to help out another couple of times before Polling Day itself. Now back
in the day I’d have taken a fortnight off work for the whole thing, but I’m not
quite back at that stage just yet. But I still found myself out at 7am
delivering, or rather failing to deliver (those dreaded controlled entry doors
again – clearly the postmen have long since stopped arriving at that time) a “Good
Morning” election leaflet. Then it was off to work, and I have to say that by
mid-afternoon I was twitching to get away and both vote (it’s always been a
recurring nightmare of mine that with our antiquated voting system I’ll arrive
to discover someone else has already done so in my name) and stand at a Polling
Station.
And that was an experience and a half. Having divested poor
Alison of her rosette I spent the next three hours representing the party to
those few electors who actually bothered to turn up. There were the usual
smiles, growls, winks and nods as I handed out our reminder leaflet as they
went in leaving me I have to say with no concept of how we’d done at all.
The independent candidate and his hand-held megaphone were
the light entertainment for the evening and I have to say that the Labour
candidate and her father were pleasant company and full of friendly banter for
what became an increasingly chilly evening, and by the back of nine were
winding me up no end when anything remotely looking like Alison’s car came
along the street, as by then I was in desperate need of a quick dash home to
collect the jacket I should have brought to begin with.
I also had the pleasure of meeting our SNP MSP John Mason
for the first time, although I didn’t quite know what to make of him saying, “Ah
you’re Nic – I’ve heard all about you”!
But before long Alison did appear, a jacket was obtained in
time to avert hypothermia, and the polls closed. And that was that. The
counting wasn’t to take place till the next day so off home I went to put my
feet up after what I have to say was an enjoyable experience.
Will I do it all again? Roll on the referendum in 2014 – I’ll
be taking 2 weeks off work for that one!
