What a difference a year makes

By Chi Onwurah MP / @ChiOnwurah

This time last year Cleggmania was at its peak. He had been the surprise ‘winner’ of the first live leaders’ debate on April 15th and some said the second a week later showed it was not a blip, he really was the people’s choice.

I was standing for election in Newcastle Central. My home town. The city where my Labour values were forged.

We were holding a series of Town Hall Meetings across the constituency, part of our campaign to hear and speak to the communities on which the city depends.

These were going well but often ended about the same time as the Leaders’ Debates. So I would be deluged with Clegg-media-mania the moment I got home.

Then on April 27th our local paper published a PoliticsHome/YouGov poll which gave a 13 point swing to the Lib Dems in the North East .

That would have put Newcastle Central, North and East all in Lib Dem hands. Newcastle Council had fallen to the Lib Dems in 2004. Was our Westminster representation about to go the same way? On the doorstep support seemed strong, if not overwhelmingly so.

Still, I found it hard to believe that the people of Newcastle would fall for a man whose promises were almost as impossibly shiny as his suit.

On the day all three Newcastle constituencies voted Labour. In Central there was a swing of just 0.6% from Labour to the Lib Dems. In the local elections we won seven out of eight wards, two of which were Labour gains from the Lib Dems.

If last year’s results are repeated then the Lib Dem’s flagship North East council will be a Labour gain.

The mood in Newcastle is more solidly Labour this year. And there is another difference.

Geordies are generally polite on the doorstep, and often warm and welcoming. But when canvassing in the poorer areas of Newcastle you will occasionally be met with real anger. The cause of the anger may vary – a wife who has left, an employer who has sacked them, the job centre, politicians, the police. But what these angry people generally have in common is that they are male and isolated from the community.

As MP they are a real worry. They are hard to reach, they don’t come to surgeries or even visit their GP. They don’t use community services. They need help but will not acknowledge it. They articulate their concerns through alcohol and aggression. And the very last thing they are going to do is vote.

But in the last few weeks I have increasingly come across a new phenomenon: the angry woman.

These are women who voted Lib Dem last time. They feel betrayed. And that makes them angry.

I know why the sense of betrayal is so great amongst many Lib Dem female voters.

The party they voted for is now part of the coalition which is targeting women. In January VAT went up, putting more pressure on family budgets. Pensioners know they will be getting less in fuel allowance, whilst mothers have lost child tax credits, seen child benefit cut and worry their children will never make it to Uni because of the scrapping of EMA and the introduction of £9,000 tuition fees.

And the services they use or work in are under attack. In the North East, 46% of all women who work, work in the public sector. Nick and Dave are cutting half a million public sector jobs and claiming the Big Society will fill the care gap.

In Newcastle, many who voted Lib Dem did so in the belief that ‘Liberal’ was shorthand for progressive. For them, the word Liberal represented freedom as in freedom from want, from hunger, from ignorance, from prejudice. Freedom to make informed and independent choices and take responsibility for them.

But last year they found that liberal stood for something else. It was short hand for laissez faire. The freedom the coalition Lib Dems represent is the freedom of the privileged to turn their backs on the less privileged.

That is not what Lib Dem women voted for in Newcastle.

And the 42,000 students in the city share their sense of betrayal.

So when the Lib Dem Leader of Newcastle council says that Nick Clegg is welcome here I have to say my experience on the doorstep tells a very different story. And I think the Lib Dems know that. In the little election literature they have put out, Nick Clegg is not even mentioned.

A year ago his photo was everywhere.

What a difference a year makes…