vote2001: candidates
Breezing in at 10am on a Saturday morning, Gill Kirk seems unhealthily alive. Chirpily announcing that she spent the previous night riding around in the back of a police car - "The police are amazing: they just spot things and zoom off" - she gives the impression that she has everything to play for. Or rather, she has nothing to lose. Labour came third in the 1997 election, with 25% of the vote. Doesn't that mean she needs a 15% swing to get elected?
"I dislike talk of percentage swings because in a three way seat they are not very useful." Kirk's interpretation of Oxford West and Abingdon's voters is that 1997 saw a "GROT" - "Get Rid Of the Tories" - campaign, with Labour voters tactically voting for the Liberal Democrats. Now she claims that Labour supporters can safely vote for her without risking letting the Conservative candidate Ed Matts claim the Westminster seat. After all, "a Labour MP in a Labour government can represent voters in a way Evan Harris cannot."
Like by voting for tuition fees? "There was never a pledge not to introduce tuition fees. There is a pledge not to introduce top-up fees." And it's all OK, since "only 50% of students will pay any fees". The other 50% "can afford to pay".
Instead, the real problem is Evan Harris's "scaremongering ... saying that it's too expensive to go to university". What, like OUSU and the NUS say? "No, what they're doing is a lot more legitimate, as they're trying to change policy". Confusion resolved then.
That's just as well, because the former OUSU VP-Women thought the Bodleian occupation "incredibly powerful" and was "very impressed". Still, she won't be joining in egg-throwing. After a close shave herself - "a man came up with a box of eggs the other day" - she prefers to do "very boring things like fight with words". As she's been doing since she left OUSU in 1995 to work as a health care lobbyist.
Kirk still has some loyalties left to Oxford. She hesitantly agreed that Gordon Brown's comments over the Laura Spence debacle were "ill-advised": "as a rule you shouldn't use a single case to generalise".
Sipping on her cappuccino, Gill Kirk linked Oxford's homelessness problem to that of asylum. "There is a problem, which is exploitation of people who have recently arrived in this country." To stop this, the notorious voucher system for asylum seekers was introduced. Nonetheless, Kirk accepted that it was less than ideal. "The asylum process needs to be reformed... you should let more people in if they want to work." But a first step would not be to close the Campsfield detention centre.
So why bother voting? After all, Labour are all but guaranteed another comfortable majority? "Three times when Labour was predicted to win, it produced complacency, and the Tories got in," she says. Oh, and when she eats a Cream Egg she likes to "bite off the top and dig around with my finger".
It can't be nice knowing you might be unemployed in ten days time. That's the position Evan Harris finds himself in, as MP for Oxford West and Abingdon with a 6000 seat majority. The pressure on him was clear, as he appeared distinctly more tense than either Gill Kirk or Ed Matts.
Things probably weren't helped by the fact that his schedule required that I interview him as he drove around Oxford, frantically calling activists to ensure that the locality was carpet bombed with Lib Dem leaflets. Or else it was a very cunning ploy to ensure that I didn't ask anything outrageous enough to make him drive into a lamp post.
"We have been very clear that we want to abolish tuition fees and restore maintenance grants," stated Dr Harris as we eased into the interview. Indeed, he continued to be "very clear" on that point, as is probably only fair for someone who is the Liberal Democrats higher education spokesman.
Dr Harris looks like he has found his electoral niche, zealously preaching the gospel of free education to a university town and the surrounding countryside. In fact, he made me feel like a right heathen for being doctrinally unsure on exactly which Scottish students got exemptions on their graduate endowment. ("It's a very important student issue", apparently.)
Almost as important as the Bodleian occupation at which Evan Harris made a guest appearance. Egg-throwing's definitely out, but Harris says he supported the protest, though he reckons "protesting against the university ran the risk of letting the Labour Party and the Conservatives off the hook".
Harris is no one trick pony, though. He is happy to offer damning critiques on government policy on housing, the homeless and asylum. He supports better care for alcohlics, and as for the detention of asylum seekers, "the government's policy is immoral and, I believe, illegal."
But don't bring up the number of homeless people in Oxford: "we should be fighting this election on parliamentary issues" as "the Labour party needs to defend its national policy on homelessness".
On national issues, then, how long is it going to be before the Liberal Democrats are in government? "It does look likely that the Labour party will form another government," admitted Dr Harris, "but the choice in this constituency is that between a Liberal Democrat MP who will fight for all his constituents, or one of William Hague's men who will be standing on what I take to be an extreme Conservative platform."
Tories tend not to have the easiest time from students. Indeed, one of Ed Matts's competitors naughtily suggested that he had given up student hustings as a bad job, and was off canvassing "real people". Commenting on his failure to turn up personally to St John's last Friday, Matts regretted that he "couldn't be everywhere at once", but denied that he was uninterested in students.
Instead, Matts went to some frankly startling lengths to curry the student vote. "I believe very strongly in the principle and the practice of free education." Meaning you support the abolition of tuition fees? "Yes." And how about reintroducing maintenance grants while you're at it? "I don't think the costs would be so substantial, and the impact it would have on the education system would improve the social sphere of this country dramatically."
Asked how this gels with Conservative Party policy, he paused, plucking at the grass where we were sitting on Wellington Square. "It is not Conservative Party policy to abolish tuition fees, because there is a list of priorities. It's very easy for the Liberal Democrats to say they'd abolish it, but their finances don't add up." Well that depends on who you believe: the previous day, Evan Harris said his party's plans for higher education would cost £700m; Ed Matts cited "House of Commons figures" putting the cost at £6.4bn. This problem is omnipresent in contemporary political dialogue, as so many competing costs are posited that it would be a full time job hunting for a single credible quote.
Homelessness brought Matts back on to more familiar Tory territory. "One of the biggest causes is family breakdown... arguably because access to divorce is too easy." Police should have a greater role in keeping the homeless off the streets, along with more money for voluntary groups tackling the problem.
Asylum provided some clear blue water too. Matts noted that "whenever we talk about asylum, we are branded as racists". But Conservative policy, he claimed, was intended to diffuse latent concerns of the electorate. "Osney Court old people's home was closed, and I've been to meetings with people screaming that it shouldn't be closed and then the next thing we know, asylum seekers are being put in.... Racial tension is there already." This, Matts believes, is unfair to asylum seekers as well as residents.
As for the election, Matts believes that LibDem support has dropped sharply, to the extent that there is a straight Conservative/Labour fight. Maybe this reminds him of some personal ideological turns. "I came to Oxford without any interest in politics" - though a member of the Labour Party. However, it wasn't long before he became Christ Church JCR President and the only Conservative on OUSU Exec.
A certain non-partisanship developed then still persists. Picking up fragments of a smashed Bacardi Breezer bottle ("yob culture"), he concluded that Oxford really needed "a non-partisan campaign to pick up litter".
I find myself, the virgin-enfranchised, clutching an official poll card for the first time, without conviction about how to use my precious vote. The Tories are at their wits' end, the Liberal leader is ginger and I cannot agree with Evan Harris' position in the moral maze that is the cloning debate; confronted with the prospect of another centre-right Blair government I fear that my vote will count for nothing
Despair not, says the Oxford West and Abingdon Independent candidate and messiah of a 'new way'. I met the bespectacled and shrewish Sigrid Shreeve, implausibly dressed as a comic strip character, with a frisky terrier at her heels in Broad Street. Playing on a passing resemblance to Dennis the Menace seems to be a new and lightweight way of getting a serious message heard.
Shreeve's Beano election communication reeks of Greenham Common, but there is ground for taking her seriously. Her professional background is broad, ranging from management to investment banking, and she claims experience as a 'policy advisor' as well as grass roots campaigner.
Shreeve is undoubtedly a woman of fine upstanding ideals, but I wonder whether the reality and practicality of her vision for Oxford and the nation is a little politically na•ve. Shreeve and her own doctors of spin, six faithful from Hill View Road, have brainstormed on the policy issue and brushed aside traditional party issues such as taxation and the budget to focus on local level ethics. She insists that policies must shift to renewable energies, more eco-taxation as well as localisation of trade and trade barriers in the interests of fairness, decency and the community.
Martin Bell showed in the last election that the "say it like it is" direct approach had a chance against Tory scandal-monger Neil Hamilton. Whether or not the Independent cachet has wider appeal in seats not contested by envelope-pushers is uncertain. Her Friends of the Earth credentials suggest that Shreeve would be more at home on a taskforce maintaining our streams and rivers, but she prophesies that even those who traditionally support the Tory, Labour or Lib Dem blocs "are so fed up with party politics... which has undermined parliamentary democracy that they feel the need to make a protest vote". The Hill View Road freedom fighters may not see election in the next parliament, but I think Sigrid is making a worthwhile stand. Only thing is, I don't think the dog will be allowed in the Commons.
1st Jun 2001