Keeping Control
“What about the kids Mr Smith? How could you? There are kids being thrown out of their homes here! Don’t play innocent with me!” hollers our concerned voter. His friend, who is swaying alarmingly from side to side, emits a grunt of approval. The target of their wrath takes a deep breath and patiently begins to explain the local initiatives that are designed to help families in Oxford who are behind with their rent and in danger of being evicted. His audience explodes.
“Typical!” they both shriek. “This is the problem – you’re sitting on chairs! Sitting on them!” How exactly they would prefer their elected representative to arrange his posture is not immediately clear. Giving up on their MP, the pair quietly confide in me that they would do a far better job helping local children than Andrew Smith, a former cabinet minister and MP for Oxford East for 18 years.
Overwhelmed by the powerful scent of special brew, I give a quick nod and hurry after Smith who is disappearing down a stairwell. “If they want to help children they could start by drinking a little less,” he wryly observes. It’s a grey Tuesday afternoon on the Blackbird Leys estate and with the general election just over two weeks away, Andrew Smith is out canvassing for votes. If you believe his opponents, he’ll need every one of them.
This constituency, a mix of gentrified terraces and poverty-hit neighbourhoods, is a Lib Dem top 100 target. With student numbers east of the Magdalen roundabout exceeding Smith’s majority, Charles Kennedy’s numbercrunchers believe they can take this seat on the back of a student electorate that is predominantly anti-war and opposed to top-up fees.
It’s a suggestion that Smith, who has served as Minister for Welfare to Work, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and held several posts in the Treasury, is quick to dismiss. “The notion that there is a stock ‘student vote’ is a grotesque over-simplification,” he tells me. We are sat around a kitchen table stacked with campaign literature. The house has been Smith’s home for 26 years; his rivals don’t even live in the constituency.
Despite holding such high-profile cabinet posts, it’s clear that he is very much a ‘local’ candidate. Yet whilst that may play well with residents on the estate, the transient student vote looks more likely to be governed by national priorities. Local activists, many of them college students, traipse in and out of the house as Smith makes frenzied phone calls to his canvassers. In between barked orders, he denies that students are necessarily opposed to Blair’s government.
“The Lib Dems are taking the student vote here for granted … people vote for all sorts of reasons and to lump them together into stereotypes is not doing justice to their concerns.” But what are students’ concerns? “Oxford is a highcost place to live and a highcost place to educate and I’ve had strong representations from the vice chancellors of both Oxford and Brookes, as well as others, that they need a premium income to sustain high teaching quality.
The abolition of up-front fees is a great step, as is the increased support for poorer students. Quite simply, Oxford is getting more of the revenue it needs under this fees system than it would under a centralised system funded solely by taxpayers.” But much as Smith clearly wants to concentrate on local issues, most students will base their vote on national concerns. Smith furrows his brow when I bring up Iraq. “There’s a much wider range of issues at stake.
Whatever views people hold on the invasion it’s clear now that we have a duty to rebuild civic society in Iraq and help Iraqis construct a democratic system.” Yet as someone who opposed the first Gulf war but voted with the government on this one, Smith has left himself open to charges of inconsistency, a claim he finds preposterous. “I was campaigning against Saddam whilst the Americans were still dealing with him,” he fires back. “This war took place in exceptional circumstances.
I know one Kurd who lost 30 members of his family, all tortured and murdered by Saddam. He is so grateful for what Britain has done.” Back on the doorsteps, Iraq seems a distant concern to voters who are close to the poverty line. Smith listens to their gripes earnestly, jotting down names and numbers and promising to deal with their concerns as soon as the campaign is over. “Dinner smells nice!” he beams into the doorway of a bemused elderly couple.
A cheery hello to a boredlooking car mechanic by a row of garages is met with stony silence. It’s clear that the biggest problem here is apathy, with many voters telling Smith that they just don’t see the point of heading to the ballot box. As the light begins to fade over this concrete maze dotted with bleak patches of grass, Smith spells out why they’re wrong. “Everyone has to remember what things were like under the Tories.
Students faced the spectre of graduate unemployment – now the economy has never been in better shape. This government has created a new progressive consensus.” He marches off and I begin the journey home. Every inch the consummate constituency MP, Andrew Smith has won me round with his low-key charm and evident passion. Fought on his own terms – Oxford issues and local representation – Smith would storm this election.
But with national priorities still very much at the top of the media agenda, it is Westminster and the White House that are determining which way many people vote in Oxford East. Unless he can convince them that they are voting for Andrew Smith and not Tony Blair, next Thursday may yet throw up a few surprises.
28th Apr 2005