If general elections were won on how swanky a campaign office is, the Greens would beat the Lib Dems hands down in Bristol West. Their candidate Darren Hall works out of a smart, airy office overlooking the harbour in one of the most expensive commercial parts of the city.
It’s all thanks to Vivienne Westwood, who has funded the office as part of her support for the Greens, and given Hall was until recently keeping most of his campaign materials in a garage, it’s quite a step up. Indeed, it puts him in far more glamorous quarters than the Lib Dems, who are working in a garage, albeit a converted one with windows and heaters, in much cheaper Bishopston.
Stephen Williams has been Lib Dem MP for the constituency since 2005, and is defending a majority of 11,000 in the constituency, which has one of the biggest electorates in the country of 82,728. But the Greens claim they’re creeping up behind the Lib Dems, distributing graphs on their election literature and displaying a pie chart in their office that puts them on 30 per cent.
It is striking that the party is trying to squeeze the Tory vote and is also highlighting that this is ‘Ed Miliband’s Labour candidate’, clearly trying to put voters off the party with the Labour leader’s unpopularity. The party believes that squeezing the Conservative vote is what keeps Bristol West winnable.
The Greens passed 2,000 members this week, and chart the progress of their membership ward-by-ward on a board in that glamorous office. The biggest challenge, Hall claims, is working out how best to use all these keen new people. One of the posters in his office offers a tip: ‘Less criticism, more teamwork’, it says.
Hall knows how it feels to be a new Green member: he only joined last May, and previously voted for the Lib Dems. His campaign manager Guy Poultney is also an ex-Lib Dem councillor, and the party is, as you would expect, pulling in many ex-Lib Dem voters. Hall is a former RAF engineer, and also worked for the Home Office. He doesn’t fit the Green stereotype of a halloumi-eating hippy, and indeed this week he popped up on the Today programme to set out a rather surprising stance from his party on defence:
The Lib Dem national strategy for dealing with the Greens is to talk about the issues that their voters find most interesting, including civil liberties, which Williams has on the front page of another one of his freesheet newspapers. ‘Do you want Theresa May reading your emails?’ it asks. ‘If the answer is “no!” – see back page!’ The back page contains an ‘exclusive report’ about Williams fighting ‘Conservative plans to read all our emails’. A fact box running down the side lists the ways his party has defended civil liberties against Labour, including ID cards, child detention and Guantanamo Bay.
The Greens are spending March talking about housing and energy, followed by transport and the NHS before finishing the campaign on environment and the economy.
A green leaflet that Hall hands me shows the local party at another market, one in the centre of the city.
Every face is white (odd, given this constituency is the most ethnically diverse in the city) and most of them look as though they’ve stepped from the pages of the Boden catalogue, which is probably quite appealing given the rather well-heeled, socially-conscious residents of Clifton, Redland and Cotham who they’re trying to appeal to. I used to live in this constituency, and it is a rather curious mix of graduates, wealthy and well-meaning professionals, artists and independent traders. Londoners who’ve never visited could imagine it as a sort of souped-up Crouch End, but with a stronger whiff of cannabis. In Stokes Croft, there were riots when Tesco set up shop among the arty shops and bars. Many shops take a ‘Bristol Pound’, a local currency designed to encourage small ethical businesses. 
The constituency also includes some of the most deprived parts of the city: St Paul’s and Easton. Bristol is a city where wealth and poverty sits cheek by jowl but often doesn’t interact.
One of the main shopping streets in the city, Park Street, has huge, smart art shops rather than chain stores. Bristol is European Green Capital for 2015, and even has a group of protestors camping in trees at an allotment site marked for demolition for a new bus route. It also has a serious air pollution problem (and not from the cannabis).
But it’s difficult for any party to know how a good chunk of voters who live in Bristol West will vote because so many of them live in large blocks of flats in the city centre. It’s difficult to get in to these blocks to canvass, and the young professionals living in them don’t have landlines for phone canvassing either. So they remain a mystery to Lib Dems, Greens and Labour.
All parties are out knocking on the doors they can reach as often as they can, and the Lib Dem team are preparing for an evening of phone canvassing in one of the converted garages as I prepare to leave. The three parties fighting for the seat – Labour’s candidate is Thangam Debbonaire – are throwing everything they can at it. The Lib Dems worry that the Greens might let Labour in. The Greens say they want their voters to back them even if this is the case, given theirs is a ‘values vote’, and that they are in a two-horse race with Labour.
So who seems most confident? Hall says he hasn’t thought too much about what life will be like in Parliament, but is keen on the Green policy of having no whip, which means that he and Caroline Lucas might vote differently.
Williams is upbeat, even though his party’s national poll ratings are pretty dire. Does the national poll rating matter, though, I ask? Williams replies that there were conflicting theories in the party about whether the poll slump would last for two years, or longer. ‘Chris Huhne said it would be there for longer and it would only turn around in the last 12 months. It is not happening and I am beginning to worry that it’s not going to happen,’ he says. But the Lib Dems tend not to read too much into their national polls, saying the support they get on the ground in each constituency is the most important thing.
Neither the Greens nor the Lib Dems have conducted private polling or focus groups in the constituency, but William Hill currently put the Lib Dems as the favourites with odds of 10/11. It’s going to be a long, hard fight involving many more glasses of wine in Clifton sitting rooms before any of the parties can relax.
It’s all thanks to Vivienne Westwood, who has funded the office as part of her support for the Greens, and given Hall was until recently keeping most of his campaign materials in a garage, it’s quite a step up. Indeed, it puts him in far more glamorous quarters than the Lib Dems, who are working in a garage, albeit a converted one with windows and heaters, in much cheaper Bishopston.
Stephen Williams has been Lib Dem MP for the constituency since 2005, and is defending a majority of 11,000 in the constituency, which has one of the biggest electorates in the country of 82,728. But the Greens claim they’re creeping up behind the Lib Dems, distributing graphs on their election literature and displaying a pie chart in their office that puts them on 30 per cent.
Williams disputes this, pointing to their 2013 and 2009 local election results in the constituency wards, which put them on 23.61 per cent and 22.02 per cent respectively.
But the Greens seem to be using both the 2013 and 2014 election results (the most recent from each ward; not every ward is up for election when another is) combined to reach 30.7%, which would put them first in the local elections. In any case, a general election is a quite different beast for smaller parties than a local election, as they can often gain more support as a protest against the government and mainstream parties.
To try to drive that point about the general election result home, the Lib Dem leaflets feature some of their famous ‘can’t win here’ graphs:
It is striking that the party is trying to squeeze the Tory vote and is also highlighting that this is ‘Ed Miliband’s Labour candidate’, clearly trying to put voters off the party with the Labour leader’s unpopularity. The party believes that squeezing the Conservative vote is what keeps Bristol West winnable.
The Greens passed 2,000 members this week, and chart the progress of their membership ward-by-ward on a board in that glamorous office. The biggest challenge, Hall claims, is working out how best to use all these keen new people. One of the posters in his office offers a tip: ‘Less criticism, more teamwork’, it says.
Hall knows how it feels to be a new Green member: he only joined last May, and previously voted for the Lib Dems. His campaign manager Guy Poultney is also an ex-Lib Dem councillor, and the party is, as you would expect, pulling in many ex-Lib Dem voters. Hall is a former RAF engineer, and also worked for the Home Office. He doesn’t fit the Green stereotype of a halloumi-eating hippy, and indeed this week he popped up on the Today programme to set out a rather surprising stance from his party on defence:
He is often invited by curious Green-ish voters to speak to their friends about what the Greens stand for while sipping wine in Clifton sitting rooms. Not all political canvassing is an unglamorous trudge, it seems. Across the city, Stephen Williams is examining his new election leaflets, which are designed to resemble a freesheet lifestyle magazine called ‘Bristol West Life’. It boasts an ‘exclusive’ interview with Williams, and has a picture of the MP at a local market in Bristol. In fact, he appears to be buying some curly kale from the market, which is one way of advertising yourself to a group of would-be Green voters. Right under the bunch of kale is another tease: ‘Also inside: Lib Dems, Bristol’s greenest party’.‘It might surprise people to know that the Green party has no plans to make further cuts to defence spending over and above what has been set out by the coalition government other than, of course, our well-understood position on Trident.’
The Lib Dem national strategy for dealing with the Greens is to talk about the issues that their voters find most interesting, including civil liberties, which Williams has on the front page of another one of his freesheet newspapers. ‘Do you want Theresa May reading your emails?’ it asks. ‘If the answer is “no!” – see back page!’ The back page contains an ‘exclusive report’ about Williams fighting ‘Conservative plans to read all our emails’. A fact box running down the side lists the ways his party has defended civil liberties against Labour, including ID cards, child detention and Guantanamo Bay.
The Greens are spending March talking about housing and energy, followed by transport and the NHS before finishing the campaign on environment and the economy.
A green leaflet that Hall hands me shows the local party at another market, one in the centre of the city.
Every face is white (odd, given this constituency is the most ethnically diverse in the city) and most of them look as though they’ve stepped from the pages of the Boden catalogue, which is probably quite appealing given the rather well-heeled, socially-conscious residents of Clifton, Redland and Cotham who they’re trying to appeal to. I used to live in this constituency, and it is a rather curious mix of graduates, wealthy and well-meaning professionals, artists and independent traders. Londoners who’ve never visited could imagine it as a sort of souped-up Crouch End, but with a stronger whiff of cannabis. In Stokes Croft, there were riots when Tesco set up shop among the arty shops and bars. Many shops take a ‘Bristol Pound’, a local currency designed to encourage small ethical businesses. The constituency also includes some of the most deprived parts of the city: St Paul’s and Easton. Bristol is a city where wealth and poverty sits cheek by jowl but often doesn’t interact.
One of the main shopping streets in the city, Park Street, has huge, smart art shops rather than chain stores. Bristol is European Green Capital for 2015, and even has a group of protestors camping in trees at an allotment site marked for demolition for a new bus route. It also has a serious air pollution problem (and not from the cannabis).
But it’s difficult for any party to know how a good chunk of voters who live in Bristol West will vote because so many of them live in large blocks of flats in the city centre. It’s difficult to get in to these blocks to canvass, and the young professionals living in them don’t have landlines for phone canvassing either. So they remain a mystery to Lib Dems, Greens and Labour.
All parties are out knocking on the doors they can reach as often as they can, and the Lib Dem team are preparing for an evening of phone canvassing in one of the converted garages as I prepare to leave. The three parties fighting for the seat – Labour’s candidate is Thangam Debbonaire – are throwing everything they can at it. The Lib Dems worry that the Greens might let Labour in. The Greens say they want their voters to back them even if this is the case, given theirs is a ‘values vote’, and that they are in a two-horse race with Labour.
So who seems most confident? Hall says he hasn’t thought too much about what life will be like in Parliament, but is keen on the Green policy of having no whip, which means that he and Caroline Lucas might vote differently.
Williams is upbeat, even though his party’s national poll ratings are pretty dire. Does the national poll rating matter, though, I ask? Williams replies that there were conflicting theories in the party about whether the poll slump would last for two years, or longer. ‘Chris Huhne said it would be there for longer and it would only turn around in the last 12 months. It is not happening and I am beginning to worry that it’s not going to happen,’ he says. But the Lib Dems tend not to read too much into their national polls, saying the support they get on the ground in each constituency is the most important thing.
Neither the Greens nor the Lib Dems have conducted private polling or focus groups in the constituency, but William Hill currently put the Lib Dems as the favourites with odds of 10/11. It’s going to be a long, hard fight involving many more glasses of wine in Clifton sitting rooms before any of the parties can relax.
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