I visited the constituency of Liverpool Wavertree for a couple of days during the general election campaign to help out, and was very encouraged by what I saw. Like many seats, Wavertree had been Labour since 1997 but faced a new threat in 2010, with the Lib Dems making it their key North West target. Things did not go as [...]

Contrary to most media predictions, Labour’s Andy Slaughter secured a 3,500 majority to defeat Shaun Bailey in Hammersmith in the general election. Bailey, a Tory A-lister and darling of the media, had at least £500,000 financial support from a series of wealthy backers but failed to win the hearts and minds of Hammersmith voters. So why and how did Andy Slaughter defy the national swing to the Conservatives? I would highlight [...]

While a 1.1% swing to Labour and an increase in the majority from 8,009 to 9,856 might not rank as the most dramatic success in the recent General Election, it’s a good result and illustrates that we must be doing something right in Blackburn. Three activities explain the success.

In the wake of a historic election defeat, it would be tempting for the Labour Party to seek out “quick fixes” – campaigning strategies that could deliver election victories in three and a half short weeks. The lesson from Copeland is that elections aren’t won in a short campaign: they are the product of doing politics properly over the long [...]

A simple email list in Broxstowe was the key to keeping the loss to a minimum. There are now over 4,000 homes individually signed up. This generated 400 non-party volunteer deliverers at the General election, plus £5,000 in donations, plus endorsements from across the spectrum, including two public non-party campaigns (“Conservatives for Palmer” and “Independents for Palmer”) complementing the main Labour campaign.

Dagenham and Rainham posed a unique challenge in British politics. Jon Cruddas MP was up against a consolidated BNP vote in three wards, a strong Tory challenger backed by Lord Ashcroft cash, and boundary changes meaning almost all the electorate were new. A ‘tight-loose’ style of campaigning won the day.

Labour weren’t supposed to win in Islington South and Finsbury. But, through a combination of hard work, a carefully co-ordinated campaign, and lots of door knocking, Labour achieved a vastly increased majority.

It’s hard to say whether the Tory candidate or Gisela Stuart was more surprised on election night. What differentiated our campaign from those we had undertaken previously was how many people were involved and how trained and motivated those volunteers were.

Rushanara Ali’s victory in Bethnal Green and Bow was due in no small part to the decision to run an aggressive voter-identification and turnout campaign modeled on best-practice in US politics, where field work has moved rapidly from art to science.

Most fundamentally, the campaign in Walthamstow was based and focused on people – both the volunteers who enabled us to deliver a campaign and the voters we needed to convince.