How we won in Hackney

By Louisa Thomson, newly elected Labour councillor for Stoke Newington Central, Hackney.

Thank you to everyone who saw the plug on LabourList to come out and help in the Stoke Newington Central by-election yesterday – with your support, and a staggering 100 volunteers on polling day, we successfully saw off a significant challenge from the Greens, beating them by 379 votes.

The Greens went into this campaign confident that they could elect another councillor in Hackney. But in the end it was our organisation, clear messages and highly localised campaign that made sure we held on to the seat.

Over the last six weeks in Hackney, we’ve seen the Labour Party at its best – coming together to deliver our leaflets and direct mails and canvass in freezing cold temperatures night after night. Alongside our own active members in the Hackney Labour Party, Labour councillors and members from neighbouring boroughs and CLPs pitched in – all expertly co-ordinated by Luke Akehurst (who has been blogging about the result here). We may have now committed ourselves to help out in every upcoming by-election in London for the next year to return the favours, but as with the by-election in Seven Sisters two weeks ago, a Labour effort that crosses borough boundaries has been set up.

The amount of canvassing we did was crucial to our success and meant by polling day our get out the vote operation was very focussed – not only did we know where are supporters were but we could also spend time persuading those who hadn’t yet made up their minds. Face to face contact and engagement with voters was key – the Lib Dems got less than 300 votes, yet delivered around 50,000 leaflets.

The Lib Dems ran a relentlessly negative campaign, picking up on specific local issues, but failing to offer any credible solutions beyond the bold headlines in their Focus newsletters that swamped the ward over the last month. The Greens filled their leaflets with policies from the national Green Party website, which didn’t convince local residents that they had any local knowledge or indeed vision for Stoke Newington.

In contrast, our campaign was very much about local issues and local solutions. We made three clear local pledges – on community safety, green issues and freezing council tax – directly answering the discussions we were having time and time again on the doorstep. People are concerned about the credit crunch, and want to know that the Council is on their side – able to freeze council tax for the fourth year in a row, whilst still investing in key services. Local residents want to know that their local police team will respond to their concerns and continue to tackle the problem areas around the ward. We made it clear that we weren’t going to give the Greens a monopoly on environmental issues – showing how Hackney Labour has massively increased recycling and improved the local quality of life with improvements to parks, street cleaning and tree planting.

One of the main arguments we had to counter, was ‘why elect another Labour councillor? Hackney already has 44, wouldn’t a bit more opposition be a good thing?’ As is being highlighted elsewhere on LabourList, there are massive ideological differences at a local level between the parties, that translates into decisions that have a real, tangible impact on the lives of local residents. Labour has brought about huge improvements to Hackney – but every ward here is amongst the 10% most deprived nationally, and there are big challenges that remain. As last night’s result showed – local residents do have faith in what Labour locally are offering – it will be a privilege and a huge responsibility to be part of that.