Bean over Britain: Peter Kyle on the progressive alliance, Brexit and some “irresponsible” opinion polls

Peter Kyle is up for re-election in the marginal Hove and Portslade constituency he took off the Tories just two years ago. It is a seat that sometimes decides governments although Kyle took it by 1,236 votes at the last general election. Tories know that just one extra vote for every street is enough to turn it blue.

It is being contested by the Tories, Labour, the Greens, Lib Dems and an independent. The lack of UKIP is likely to help the Conservatives, and the 3,265 votes the kippers gathered last time around are up for grabs.

This year the Conservative candidate Kristy Adams seems an odd choice for the seat, as she has refused to disclose her vote in the EU referendum in a pro-EU constituency. She has also been accused of having links to a “gay-cure” church. Adams said she supported the government’s equal marriage bill and is committed to equality.

What have you got to offer the people of Hove and Portslade in Britain’s next parliament?

“I’m standing here because I’ve had about 18 months in the job, and in that time I think I’ve been working as hard as I can, learning the job as fast as I can, and I’ve actually achieved quite a lot for some of the core social justice issues that the Labour party stands for.

“I’ve had the law changed to protect vulnerable women in the family courts. I’m the one who questioned Mike Ashley as part of the select committee, that got him to convert 20,000 zero hour contracts into permanent contracts. Down here, there are 1,500 people we have supported and in some cases helped turn lives around. I want to make sure that Labour carries on doing that, and not just in the same way, but in a better more practised and more proficient way. That’s what I’m aspiring to, and that’s the offer that we have. It’s a positive offer, not a negative one.

“It’s not just about trying to stop the bad things the Tories are doing, I think here in Hove we’ve a record to run on, and a really positive vision for the future and our community for the future.”

What do you think of the progressive alliance?

“I think there is a lot of talk about the progressive alliance, and the very fact that we’re talking about it in the run up to a general election is I think incredibly unhelpful.

“I just don’t know what it means in practice. I know what some people’s vision of it is, that me and Caroline Lucas and a bunch of others just get on, but in practice, lets just role play this. In Brighton Pavilion, Labour has 15,00 votes, in Hove next door, the Greens have about 3,000. Now, what does that mean? Does it mean that we do it constituency by constituency – the Greens stand down in Hove, and Labour stands down in Pavilion? Or, does it mean we’ve got 15,000 votes in Pavilion therefore they owe us about five or six constituencies?

“Either way, it takes us to a point where we take for granted those votes – however you follow the progressive alliance to its logical conclusion, it involves politicians going into rooms, appearing a few hours later, and telling people how to vote [but] my whole grounding in politics is to go out and meet voters and earn their trust.

“I feel myself, every time I have this conversation, being sucked away from the type of politics that I went into this for.”

How would you describe your politics?

“I would say that my politics is rooted in communities. It is about listening to the priorities of the people and families that I seek to represent – them seeing my job as proof that my values and principles as a politician and the values and principles of my party exist, to serve and reflect their priorities.”

How has Brexit affected Hove and Portslade?

“Profoundly. There is no doubt in my mind that we are uniquely vulnerable to a bad Brexit. We are a city with 8.5 million visitors and we’re a tourist economy. We have two universities, where we have students coming from abroad, students leaving to study abroad. We have academics making a similar journey and we have £10m of EU funding coming into this city. And we have an economy that sells more to the continent than it does to any other city in the UK.”

“We are an outward-facing, global city, which makes us uniquely vulnerable to a bad Brexit, so it is a profound danger to our economy and we’ve got to engage with the negotiations and we need our community to have the strongest possible voice to help shape what comes next.”

Why does Britain need a Labour government?

“Britain needs a Labour government because we live in an age where such instability from abroad and coming down from government into our communities is shaking our ability to support those in greatest need.

“Secondly, we need an economy that rewards hard work. We do not have an economy which rewards hard work anymore. And perversely, for a great many people in our society, the harder you work, the less reward you get. We now live in a world where wages have not outpaced inflation for almost a decade. That’s a world that’s simply unfair.”

What’s been the number one issue on the doorstep?

“Europe.”

Do you think Labour receives a fair hearing from the media?

“We’ve gone into this election knowing full well what the media is, which is overwhelmingly and instinctively biased towards an economically conservative vision of Britain, and an anti-internationalist vision of Britain. We’ve always known that, and we’ve always known that as an instinctively internationalist, outward-facing party, that we will face challenges with the media.

“I don’t think Labour has ever had a fair hearing, not in my lifetime, but that shouldn’t stop us being incredibly focussed in the way we engage with the media and making sure that our messages about fairness and about economic and social justice are articulated in a way that can cope with an instinctively hostile media. I don’t wasting too much energy on bashing the media delivers the results we would like.”

Labour faces mixed poll ratings nationally, starting from the back foot, so how are you dealing with that here?

“There is nothing that either the Tories have done, or that I’ve read in the national press, or that I have taken from polling, that has changed the campaign here in Hove and Portslade.

“We went into this campaign absolutely determined to be proud of our record here, to be proud of our vision going forwards, and also, to expose the harm that this Tory government and our local Tory candidate can and will do to our community. Nothing’s made us deviate from that.

“I think some of the polls have been irresponsible, and I suspect that some of the people who’ve been responsible for some of the polling know that some individual poll results are not a fair reflection and yet they’re still allowing them to go out to the public sphere. I think that’s been a damaging and distracting aspect of this campaign.”

When was the last moment you had to relax and how did you spend it?

“The team and I went for a meal a few nights ago, after a full day’s campaigning. Did we always not talk about work? Not all the time, but that’s as good as it gets at the moment. It was a really lovely evening.

“It’s not just campaigning. We won here against the odds in 2015 and we never quite found the off button. We carried on taking the energy it took to win Hove in the first place, and just carried as if we were still going at full tilt. I think all of us that have been involved in Hove haven’t had the most balanced of lives since, and it’s something we have spoken about and were working towards, and then this happened again. We never quite found the dimmer switch!”

To help re-elect Peter Kyle and keep Hove and Portslade Labour you can find campaign events here.