“John Prescott had a battle bus, I’ve got a Vauxhall Astra”: Michael Dugher in Middle England

20 seats, five days, six regions, over a thousand miles. This week Michael Dugher has been on the road campaigning in target seats across the country on a “Cost of Cameron” tour. The plan was to build on the party’s “Cost of Cameron Day” of campaigning, but it also provided Dugher with an opportunity to get out into communities across the country and take the temperature of the nation.

Travelling everywhere from Stroud in Gloucestershire to Goole in East Yorkshire and plenty of places in between, this is what Dugher calls “definitively Middle England”.

His journey this week has included round-tables, events with pensioners, young people and small businesspeople and a lot of people knocking on doors. It’s important, but it’s not glamorous. As the Barnsley MP jokes when we spoke yesterday:

“John Prescott had a battle bus, I’ve got a Vauxhall Astra”

Dugher says that the thing that has really struck him has been how the cost of living crisis is impacting on people in work, and one conversation in particular had a profound impact on him:

“There was a guy I met yesterday in Northampton, who has always worked and his wife works as well. They’ve always paid their taxes but they’re really feeling the squeeze. And he was telling me about when they make the price reductions in the supermarket on a Saturday night for stock that’s getting close to it’s sell by date. He said there were sixty people queuing late on a Saturday night waiting for the reduced to clear items to come on.” 

“This guy doesn’t want to live in the lap of luxury. He’s a postman, he works long hours. This is a guy who when he gets home from a shift his bones will ache more than yours or mine will ever. And he can’t afford a family holiday. This is something that for decades people have felt entitled to – a break with their family during the year.”

Now this all sounds a bit squeezed middle – a phrase we don’t hear as often from Miliband now – and Dugher agrees. Whilst people may have mocked Miliband for talking about the squeezed middle and the cost of living crisis, it has cut through:

“Whatever people say about Ed Miliband, this is a guy who sets the weather.”

Yet it’s not just what Labour should be campaigning on that Dugher has been thinking about this week, it’s also how:

“You can’t win from a TV studio. This is going to be an election that will be fought on the airwaves and for the first time – significantly – online, but it’s also going to be fought on the streets.”

That, he suggests, provides Labour with a distinct advantage against a Tory Party which is– in his words – “on its arse” when it comes to members, and aren’t doing the work on doorsteps and in communities:

“I just don’t see the Tories doing that – I don’t see David Cameron doing that – and why? They remind me of first world war generals – Crosby and Shapps – they’re back at the chateau forty miles behind the front line, moving things around on a large table. You can’t win like that.”

And you certainly can’t win from Westminster either. Dugher says that being out of SW1 was “completely liberating”. After a week of campaigning, meeting the voters that Labour needs to speak to if we’re to win in 2015 and talking to people who need a Labour government I can well believe it…