On the campaign trail. Part 1

This year's local and General elections are now just weeks away and doubtless all parties are hitting the streets to find new supporters and remind the existing ones to vote on May 6. So, I bring you tales from the campaign trail, a series of regular installments baring all about what it's like to run for election (tough, but worth it) and how easy it is to actually make a difference when you put your mind to it.

For part one, I'll explain why I decided to get involved in the first place.

My tale begins with my first day as a wet behind the ears fresher at the University of Nottingham, getting hopelessly lost as I wandered round the vast campus for the first time. After stumbling upon the Freshers’ Fayre, I eventually came across the stalls of each political party lined up beside each other. Still seething at Tony Blair for depriving me of the right to vote the year I turned 18 by calling a surprise election in 2001, I decided to console myself by joining one of the parties instead. I looked left and thought ‘no’, looked right and thought ‘hell no’, and thus my love affair with the Liberal Democrats began as I signed over my allegiance to the party I disagreed with the least. The rest, as they say, is history.

Skipping forward four years, a by-election in Kentish Town marked my first encounter with the Camden Lib Dems, ultimately culminating in my decision to put myself forward to run as a Lib Dem candidate myself in Swiss Cottage ward. For those not so familiar with the minutiae of local elections, London is divided into boroughs which are in turn divided into wards, each of which is responsible for electing three representatives to the borough council. My home ward, Swiss Cottage, is a leafy suburb comprising three districts that each used to be part of three different wards before being cut and pasted together in a series of local boundary changes. One of the largest wards in the borough, it consists (roughly) of 1/3 council estate tenants, 1/3 middle income renters, and 1/3 super-rich mansion owners.

At the various training sessions the party offers to prospective candidates, chaired by the leader of the council himself, the first thing they tell you is that if you cannot afford to devote a minimum of 20 hours a week to the job, you needn’t bother apply. Considering the average councillor is unlikely to earn more that £10k per year from the role, it quickly becomes apparent that these 20 hours will be in addition to the 36 hours or so you already work just to pay the rent and (in my case) keep my monolithic student loan at bay (hats off to Labour for that one).

As a prospective candidate, I spend most of my evenings during the week and pretty much all day Saturdays campaigning, which amounts mostly to writing and delivering letters and leaflets to several thousand people and then knocking on their doors, asking for their support. Of course, it doesn’t stop there though. To know the area is to know its issues and to know its issues requires (in part) joining any number of community groups filled by local activists with their fingers firmly on the pulse. So, in addition to the delivering and the door knocking, I sit on the board of governors of a local school, a Metropolitan Police Safer Neighbourhoods Panel, and the committee of my local residents’ association. In other words, a lot of those 20 hours are spent sitting in meetings, lots and lots of meetings, the number, frequency and length of which only increase if you are actually elected. Full Council in the Town Hall, for example, lasts an average of 3 hours.

So, why do it? Everyone has their own reasons, often stemming from the same desire to take a lead in protecting and improving the community they live in. Mine is the rush you get from actually seeing a real change take place before your very eyes, with real tangible benefits for many people, and knowing that you were the one who made it happen. My moment was seeing a petition campaign I started to fix the faulty street lights in my road result in the wholesale replacement of each and every lamp-post. It was hardly a sweeping change to be sure, but it was real and it made a lot of people feel that little bit safer walking along a road that had, in parts, once been shrouded in near total darkness. It felt good and it certainly made all the hours (far more than 20) of trauling door to door for signatures in the cold Winter nights worth it.

If there is one thing I have learnt so far from running for election it is that, with enough will, anyone can do it. And at a time when young people are one of the most under-represented groups in society (just look at the lack of political will to do anything about tuition fees) simply because so many of them fail to exercise their sacred right to vote, it has never been more important to stand up for what you believe in. Young people can bring an energy and idealism to public office that many councillors and MPs lack, as the expenses scandal has so clearly demonstrated. So, go join your local party now (whoever they are) and put your 20 hours where your mouth is.

If not, come help me instead.