What’s happening in High Barnet
So far this election campaign has proved to be the most interesting and exciting for many years. The sharp and sustained rise in the polls for the Lib Dems has caught the main stream media by surprise. The question facing my colleagues and I is what effect that has had in High Barnet. The first and most noticable effect is the number of volunteers we have coming out to help us campaign. It is certainly unprecedented in my experience. On the doorstep we are beginiing to see a change. At the start of the campaign there were large numbers of people who genuinely had not made up their minds. Now increasingly we are seeing those people begining to realise that there is a chance for real change at this election.
Of course the effect of the right wing media’s attacks on the Lib Dems has come out on the doorstep. I’ve had quite a few discussions on immigration for example. The cheering thing is that when our policy is actually explained to those people they are usually quite happy with it. On local issues people like the fact that we have kept in touch with them all year round through our Focus newsletter and many tradiional Labour voters are turning to us in the local elections.
Tonight there are hustings at St John’s Wood Street at 8pm organised by the Churches. Our parlimentary candidate Dr Stephen Barber will be there. Please come alomng and hear what he and the other candidates have to say.
Duncan
I appreciate you will be somewhat biased, but do you really think that people are switching to the LibDems because they believe in your policies or simply as a protest against Labour and the Conservatives?
Opinion polls consistently show that the public is opposed to the Euro and greater European integration – yet these are two of the mainstays of LibDem policy.
Nick Clegg’s antipathy towards Israel, and in particular his comments about a nuclear Iran, are not likely to be well received in large parts of Barnet.
Clegg clearly understands how fed up the public are with the political classes and the whole rotten political system and has cleverly positioned himself as something new, even though he isn’t. But if his policies were subjected to forensic scrutiny, I suspect people would not be quite so enthusiastic. I have often argued that most people vote “against” rather than “for” and this is probably what is happening now.
Whether the Clegg bounce will translate into seats, time will tell. My gut feeling is that come the day of the election, the Conservatives will win a majority because of the fear that voting for the LibDems in protest will simply help Labour more than the Tories, and Cameron is a more palatable option that five more years of Brown.
DCMD
A bit of both I think. Many of the people who mention Europe are tories who are only likely to switch to UKIP. They wouldn’t vote Lib Dem anyway. The change us happening amongst the floating voter not the hardline supporters.
Duncan
Well it will be interesting to see what disaffected Tories do in Chipping Barnet. I doubt many of them will want to vote for UKIP given that their candidate, James Fluss, has made some pretty repulsive statements about the Gurkhas.
http://www.barnetbugle.com/journal/2010/4/21/chipping-barnet-ukip-candidate-james-g-fluss-in-gurkha-contr.html
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