Once an election is announced, many organisations go into overdrive to urge their members and supporters to lobby and get electoral candidates’ views. They usually offer them wording for an email to be sent to each candidate. This may request the candidate to do a survey or sign a pledge, or even, in one case, take an oath. Organisations doing this number more than 180.
The result is that the candidates get a massive volume of emails on a variety of topics – some 31 topics in the count shown below based on one mailbox. But party discipline means they have to adhere to whatever the policy of their party is. The campaign headquarters of the party will make it easy for standard responses to be sent out, using policy wording from the manifesto or earlier policy statements. There is clear advice on which pledges to sign and which not.
Electoral candidates are volunteers with paid jobs
The volume of mail resembles what a serving MP might receive who would also be required to keep within party policy unless a matter is individual and specific to the constituency. An MP has the resources of their parliamentary office to help him respond to mail. Candidates are volunteers. Although some are retired people or individuals who have taken leave off their paid work in order to stand as a candidate, some might have to undertake some of their paid work even during an election period. Candidates from the stronger parties have more resources and more volunteers to help them.
The general voting public are mostly not active members of any party so have no idea of the organisation that goes into raising the money for publicity (leaflets and social media) and recruiting volunteers to leaflet, telephone, and cover duties on polling day. If there is a mistake, some are disposed to criticise as if for any other service provider:
“Please could you show some competence at this stage in the process.”
Candidates must stick to party narratives
An active electoral candidate is expected to generate the material for the leaflets, answer media calls, attend hustings AND answer all those emails personally. But how personal can a candidate be if they are representing a party? Democracy in our system is locked into parties. It is only a rare old bird (like, in the past, George Galloway) who defies party discipline to battle for election alone. The party issues a manifesto and its candidates have to stick to that narrative. So when a member of the public writes in
“Before I vote, I want to know your views on (‘insert policy area here’).”
They have to realise that the your is the plural of the party, not of the individual. In fact, they could save themselves the trouble of writing to electoral candidates by just looking up what the party manifesto says!
So is the whole merry-go-round just a pretence at democracy? Voters, whose views are informed by the organisations they belong to, write in with these pre-formulated questions and the candidates write back as guided by their party HQ (who have probably also received these same letters in advance as a direct tool to hammer on the policy-makers in the party.)
This flow of communications from campaign group to political party can be important in helping to shape policy thinking. But in democratic parties, policy-making should come from the bottom up. Local branches of the party, together with their local councillors, might latch on to an issue that needs legislation and refer that up through the party, usually as something for debate at conference.
How to tell what is a priority?
In a democracy, people might think that those who shout the loudest, or the causes which get the most voices supporting it, will get to the forefront of government attention. But a moment of sober thinking will show that politics also turns on what can be afforded, what does not upset a whole lot of other things, what alleviates the worst suffering even though it it is not glamorous and so on.
However, let’s assume that politicians are influenced by the number of individuals supporting a cause. How does that look in a candidate’s mail box? Here is the data, roughly counted, from one mailbox containing over 180 emails:
Causes people wrote to electoral candidates about:
Health: 76 (consisting of 30 on arthritis, 27 on other health conditions, 10 on mental health, 7 on health professions, one on equality, and one on end of life care)
Nature and the Environment: 27 (of which one concerns trees)
Animal cruelty: 20 (plus 4 against hunting, and 2 on animal testing, one pro and one anti)
Right to life: 15 (anti abortion, or lowering gestational limits)
Age care: 10
Transgender: 10 (against self-identification)
Right to assisted dying: 9
Speak up for cats: 5
Pet care: 3
Children: 5
Kinship care: 2
Disability: 3
Housing: 2 (one on leasehold)
Transport: 2 (cycling and one on safer streets)
Fair trade: 2
Then one each on:
Charity shops
Mopeds
Veterans
Debt advice
Democracy
The Jewish community
End poverty
EU
End poverty
Equality Trust
Libraries
Credit Unions
Local government
Asylum seekers
Victims of Equitable Life scandal
People write because they care
Amid all this din of democratic voices, how to decide on priorities? It was actually quite a useful exercise to check up what the manifesto said on each of these. There were some glaring omissions. Why have a section on transport that does not mention cycling at all ?
Even though one can be cynical about whether it is worth writing to candidates (or even to MPs), on the whole I am glad to see the vigour of the process. Enough people care enough to write in, believing they can influence decision-making. It is the start of climbing the ladder of political activism. Next time they might become party activists and eventually, who knows, MPs.
