I’ve just spent a couple of hours on the Burnhill estate in Rutherglen watching a group of Labour ‘No’ campaigners knock on the doors of voters to find out how they’ll be voting on Thursday. Burnhill is a tidy estate of mostly social housing and a Labour council ward. The local Labour MP Tom Greatrex and his colleague Graham Jones, visiting from Hyndburn, were part of the group.
I was surprised by the number of ‘No’ posters on display in the windows. I was expecting a plethora of ‘Yes’ placards, but fewer indications of the households whose inhabitants plan to reject independence, but on this estate at least, it’s not the case. The activists say many, many more ‘No’ posters have appeared in the days since the shock Sunday Times poll that showed ‘Yes’ moving into the lead. ‘It was the best thing that could have happened for our campaign,’ says one, as he pushes the gate of another home. ‘We’ve had so many requests for flyers and posters.’
Some voters say they watched their neighbours put up ‘Yes’ posters long ago, but have only recently decided that they’ve had enough. But when we come across two very strident ‘No’ voters who are enraged by Nicola Sturgeon and looking forward to polling day, they don’t want to be interviewed. One of them works for the council, and even though she doesn’t seem particularly reticent in telling her neighbours and the activists what she thinks, she says she doesn’t want ‘any trouble’.
I don’t see any trouble as we go around. Two young men tell us cheerfully to ‘vote aye’ at one point as they stride past the group, and any ‘yes’ voters they do meet are perfectly friendly. But the activists say they’ve been followed around by campaigners who film them, or walk after them shouting abuse.
They also claim that the SNP sends bigger groups to do door knocking. I’m out with the ‘Yes’ campaign tonight and tomorrow morning, so I’ll see what I find, but while the ‘No’ campaigners claim this is an inefficient way of collecting voter data and is simply the SNP trying to move activists around local authority areas, rather than embedded local activists already being there, it doesn’t seem the worst move to turn up with a slightly bigger crowd: it suggests that the cause is popular. A ‘Yes’ van with music blaring from loudspeakers is also driving through the streets, presumably to create the same atmosphere of noise and occasion (although it could also backfire by being pretty annoying).
This sense of energy and hype is something ‘Yes’ have spent far more time focusing on than ‘No’. The Spectator has previously praised the grassroots-feel and village hall meeting format of the pro-independence campaign, and while ‘No’ say they’re better at actually talking to real wavering voters, rather than packing out halls of people who would never change their mind from ‘Yes’. But that sense of energy is still important.
What these Labour councillors, party members and MPs are interested in is data. They’ve already knocked on these doors before, this time they’re trying to fill in the blanks of households who didn’t open the door the first time around, finding out whether anyone they’ve previously canvassed has changed their mind, and asking what time confirmed ‘No’ supporters will be voting.
They say the answers they’re getting to the second question are now reassuring them: people who were ‘Yes’ have changed their mind. ‘The ‘No’ vote appears to be hardening,’ says Greatrex. The third question will make their get out the vote operation on Thursday more efficient: if you know that most people in an area plan to vote in the evening, there’s not much point in your activists pitching up there at 10am when they’re all out at work.
No-one wants to call Thursday’s result yet. But the activists in Rutherglen at least don’t seem to be in a colossal panic. Indeed, they seem far more optimistic than those back in Westminster.
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