Philobiblon

Two days before the election, today I canvassed some of the more “difficult” areas of my ward. It had interesting results. I had one man who greeted me with a tirade about how we f-ing politicians were all the f-ing same. (I said “sorry to disturb you” and walked off.)

Then I had an encounter that started as a fairly standard: “what do you want” shouted through the door. I explained “Green Party”, “election” etc, and got the response: “We vote Labour here.”

Fine, free country etc.

I’d knocked on a couple of doors down the balcony, and was in a dead-end, when I heard someone hiss “go”. I turned around and saw, a rottweiler from the “Labour” household, approaching rather quickly, hackles raised, having obviously been sooled on me. (They’d shut the door after letting the dog out.)

It was between me and the stairs. Luckily, it was a soft rottweiler really – I took a couple of fast steps toward it, rather than the away it probably expected, then as it went without great conviction for my leg wacked it, not very hard (the whole thing was not the dog’s fault, and I didn’t want to make it too angry), across the face with my floppy cardboard folder.

It decided it wasn’t really that interested. Luckily.

I left. Not at a run. Quite.
Lest this should discourage anyone from getting involved in politics let me say this is highly unusual – in fact I was talking to some experienced people later in the evening and they’d never heard anything like it.

I’m very tempted to go back tomorrow and stick a leaflet through their door, just to show I wasn’t cowed. Would be satisfying, although bad politics, since it would make them more likely to turn out to vote, I’d judge.

I may not be around a lot this week, since I’m going to be very involved with the final election run-in. For those just joining the story, I’m running for the Greens for Regent’s Park ward on Camden Council, and there is a significant chance that I might be elected.

If you’re wondering what a local election campaign in Britain is like, the BBC has a report on the Norwich campaign, which bears some resemblance to Camden, except they are, from the Green Party perspective, one more campaign along from us. We’re hoping to get at least half a dozen councillors, who could well end up with the balance of power in a NOC (No Overall Control, as the jargon has it) council, which is the situation in Norfolk now.

Campaigning basically involves knocking on lots of doors, or ringing lots of security buzzers, asking people to vote for us, and to put up our posters. (Highgate in particular has a real poster war going – I was in a street there yesterday in which about 25 per cent of the houses have posters, which shows that people will get involved in politics if you try hard enough. No Conservative posters, however – not sure if the Tories don’t do posters, or if being a Tory is so embarrassing that people refuse to publicly acknowledge it!)