The tragedy of not quite beating a racist
29 June 2009
Has it been neearly a whole month since the European elections? Many, many apologies for lack of news regarding this here. I haven't been slacking or ignoring the interweb, but have had my attention elsewhere, putting in as much time as possible supporting the campaigns of Green MEP candidates Rupert Read in the Eastern region and Peter Cranie in the North West.
In particular, I helped put together a strand of Peter's campaign to make the case for a Green vote being an effective way to stop the BNP winning the final seat in the North West.
This stance naturally caused some controversy. Many groups, including NW Respect, Socialist Resistance and Wigan's powerful local Community Action Party (and even the lead Libertas candidate, in an individual capacity) urged their supporters to lend their votes to us, while other parties challenged our predictions and made the case that they were better placed to stop the racists. Labour, madly, were putting out leaflets claiming that ONLY a Labour vote could stop the BNP, which was nonsense in a PR system, but then they were getting desperate.
All claims like these - particularly when put out by party candidates in an unusual election - can be seen as somewhat self-serving of course. But, in fact, our decision to make this case came about not because we set out to find a psephological argument to fire at the electorate, but only after we realised that the vote shares of both ourselves and the BNP were very likely to rise to about the level needed to get a seat - i.e. 8%.
With this realisation, several of us who have come up against the BNP before decided it was our responsibility to do something to make sure we came out ahead in this battle - a result that would, as the final count proved, have prevented Nick Griffin from being elected.
Personally I didn't do nearly enough, of course. Every day since the results were announced early on the 8th of June and I had to watch Nick Griffin being beating Peter by just 5,000 votes (0.3%), I've thought about all the things I could have done more of - or done better - to help, but I do know that we tried. And I did learn some valuable new lessons about the use of new campaigning techniques in the course of helping with this aspect of the election.
One was fundraising, which I've never before turned my hand to directly. I was both touched and relieved to get a great response to our campaign appeal for money to pay for newspaper adverts. In Manchester and Liverpool, where these adverts appeared, our vote share was approximately double that of the BNP, and I wish we could have done more of this. The appeal clearly brought in cash from a far wider set of people than existing Green supporters, and was kindly aided by retweets from prominent comedy twitterers Graham Linehan and Mitch Benn and by numerous supporters on Facebook, many of whom seem to have been too young to vote themselves, but put in huge efforts to persuade parents and friends to back Peter.
On election night, I was in London manning both my own twitter account @sianberry and the @stopnickgriffin feed, exchanging and broadcasting results for the Greens and the BNP across the country. With the counting continuing long into the night and a bottle of wine within reach, I just about managed to keep any slightly drunken sweariness to my personal account. However, the emotional ups and downs of rumours and emerging figures - along with the gradual realisation we had failed - makes the @stopnickgriffin feed rather poignant at times, finishing up at nearly 2am with ‘Final NW result due to be announced soon - Nick Griffin not stopped'.
I also dusted off my creaky Flash skills and put together a short video to make our case, which also helped explain the D'Hondt vote counting system - a bit of visual explanation I've wanted to try for a long time, regardless of a nazi threat. This was viewed nearly 12,000 times on YouTube which, while not quite gaining the status of ‘viral', is still an excellent figure compared with most party political videos.
But in the end, despite the joy of being able to work towards a genuinely good cause and try out new ways of getting people interested in politics, the thing that matters is whether we won or lost, and there's no getting over the fact we lost this one.
Nick Griffin, a disgusting misanthropic racist, is sitting in Brussels, while Peter Cranie, one of the best and most inspiring people I've ever worked with and a passionate anti-racist, is not. And that's a tragedy that will take a lot more than a month to get over.
Me
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