Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Elections are ideally a summer sport

Last night in Royal Docks it was wet and very windy. Not ideal circumstances for canvassers of any political persuasion. As soon as we started off I lost the voter ID sheets for that street in the wind and had to chase after them. I managed to find them under a car.

They were very soggy but still thankfully in one piece. Stupidly, despite the weather I didn’t make sure before setting out from the campaign HQ that we had housing blocks with cover to canvass were we could shelter from Mother Nature.

I was with a trio of Newham Councillors – Andrew Baikie (Executive member for Housing and Little Ilford ward), James Butler (Deputy Executive advisor and Custom House ward) and Clive Furness (Executive member for Health and Canning Town North). On the way out we bumped into Newham Mayor, Sir Robin Wales, on his way out with another canvass team.

It was a bloody miserable night – the only positive thing was that residents were so astonished that we out and about in such weather that we earned brownie points for Steve because of it. I saw no other canvassers from any other party. We had one of us in the car shouting out of the car window addresses to call out at and then take back voter ID reports while the wet ones scurried to and fro. You had to have somewhere dry with a light to read and record information. Outside in the rain your canvass sheets just disintegrated. This went on for a while. It was just about ok since the rain was blustery rather than constant.

Then joy of joys, James found a tower block in the pack which we could canvass. So we finished off canvassing in the dry at least. This block had not been modernised recently. So there were problems which Andrew was taking up the next day. However, I was pleased to see there was a fairly effective security service since the communal stairs and landing were in a very good condition.

After we had dropped off the canvass returns Andrew and I had to have a serious political canvass debrief in the local “So Bar”.

My camera batteries ran out so no pictures – what a shame.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi John
Many congratulations on overtaking the 'leftier-than-thou'Mr Rogers in blog hits. It just goes to show there is an appetite for mainstream sensible political blogging on the left, although no doubt a lot of the hits are the Trots checking in to see how you've upstaged them yet again!

And before some smartarse comes on and says blog hits are nothing because they don't mean people are reading the blog, or web crawlers and so on, let's remember that your blog's been running a shorter time than Jon's, and that you get far more in the way of comments about what you say.

I think the fact that you also get the rightwing (occasionally very rightwing)commenting also means you are hitting a nerve and actually saying things they don't want to hear. they really don't give a toss about the extreme lefties because they aren't going anywhere.

Good luck with keeping the blog going John and here's to the next 62000 hits!

Andrew

John Gray said...

Hi Andrew

Thanks for that - Yes, you are right, the true enemy is the Tories and frankly the ultra left are irrelevant.

They are still a nuisance in the unions.

Anonymous said...

Irrelevant to the needs of our members absolutely, but more than a nuisance - they are more than capable of setting us off on absurd adventurs that cost us members money, goodwill, and bargaining power. That's of course when they aren't found to be misusing resources or members money for their own narrow political purposes.

John Gray said...

Hi Anon

Yes, very true!

Anonymous said...

If the "ultra-left" are an irrelevance, how come you spend so much time on your blog berating their evils (which are?).

Given you apparantly have a number of public appointments, I'm not sure how on earth you find so much time to post your every bowel movement on the interweb!

Kinnockite, Croydon

p.s. Shame that "Andrew" Venedi can't find something more useful to do than blogging and posting comments on other blogs!

John Gray said...

Hi Kinnockite, Croydon

Shock horror! You have made me realise that I have only made one post so far this month out of 32 about the Coalition’s favourite 5th Columnists http://grayee.blogspot.com/2010/12/trot-on-pull.html

I must do better:)

I haven't a clue who Andrew is and neither have you. I know you lot think you know everything.

Seasonal greetings to you as well Comrade!