During the general election campaign, I worked as a political advisor to Andy Slaughter, Labour’s candidate for Hammersmith. Part of my job involved prepping the candidate for hustings, which is where I first saw his photogenic Tory opponent, Shaun Bailey, a youth worker who grew up on council estates, explain his philosophy and the origins of his conservatism. On the morning of May 7, after our victory, I returned to the town hall for the council count and spotted Shaun standing outside on his own. Tired after a long night of high emotion, his head was cast down in contemplation.
Throughout the campaign, despite the pitched battle, I had developed some empathy with him. Both of us are from ethnic minorities and we are both children of poverty. Mine was a poor immigrant family in Old Trafford, his a single mother in north Kensington. We both looked at our immediate milieu of gangs, guns and drugs and dreamed of something better.
I expressed sympathy for his defeat. I told him I knew we shared similar upbringings. In my work for Andy, I had studied Shaun in detail. In 2005, he wrote No Man’s Land, a Centre for Policy Studies publication expounding on how “tough love” and the eradication of the liberal state can solve inner-city problems of cyclical drug abuse, violence and poverty. The paper’s prescriptions seemed grotesque: censorship, overtly Christian moral instruction in schools, limits on abortion and imposing specific “rules” – a sort of ASBO for the entire working class. I remember one Liberal Democrat supporter I canvassed insisted: “He’s black, isn’t he? He can’t be illiberal.” After I pulled my jaw off the floor, I explained that Shaun Bailey is an authoritarian right-winger who believes the enemy is liberalism.
As we stood outside the town hall, I told Shaun that I knew why he held his opinions. He believes the reasons for his success are his drive and discipline. To help the poor, we must impose these on them through authoritarian right-wing solutions. I explained why I disagreed. I grew up the son of a British-born Pashtun father and a very young immigrant mother. Neither worked. Life was tough. My mother would sometimes take vegetables from the skip at the back of the grocery store to feed us. We struggled with poverty, domestic violence and my domineering Muslim father. I worked hard – partly out of desire for a better life, partly because I enjoyed it. Despite these hardships, I laughed a lot, played football and cricket with my brothers, and spent time talking with my sisters about school, boys and gossip. I was awarded a school scholarship. I went on to read politics at Cambridge and have lived a blessed and joyful life since.
I told Shaun that, while drive had been important, it would have been meaningless without the institutions to refine it into actual social mobility. The National Health Service kept me alive as a severely asthmatic child; skilled doctors stabilised and healed me several times as I lay gasping for a breath that simply wouldn’t come. The welfare state meant we struggled but never starved, freeing me to focus on higher goals than mere survival. Free schooling allowed me to turn my thirst for knowledge into understanding and academic success, and the liberal state ensured that, despite my race, I would be treated equally and fairly.
All these were championed by Labour. As we spoke, I saw a flicker of recognition in Shaun’s eyes. I hoped he’d thought about the state institutions that had given him his drive and focus. We talked about why we had come up with such radically different worldviews, how our understanding had influenced our politics and agreed there were elements of each other’s arguments that resonated. We parted with a friendly handshake, leaving me alone to reflect.
After all the canvassing, the arguments, the fevered activity, I realised the true narrative of this election. It had been an honest clash defined by a bold expression of values, not negative campaigning. Just as my values, those I share with Andy Slaughter and the Labour Party, had driven everything I’d said on the doorsteps and written during the campaign, so Shaun’s values, which he shares with David Cameron and the Conservative Party, had informed his actions. That is what defined the choice for voters. In Hammersmith, Labour won the parliamentary seat and got two new councillors elected. In the battle of values, the local people rejected the Tories’ authoritarianism and right-wing ideology and endorsed Labour’s beliefs.
Specifically highlighting Hammersmith, the Prime Minister has said the majority of his A-list candidates failed to get elected because of lies and negativity. The truth is that Labour won because our ideas and the values resonated better with the people of this constituency. Nationally, the party spent so much time attacking the Tories that this positive message was lost. Labour has spent its existence finding solutions to the poverty and anomie that I experienced as a child. It draws its strength and energy from the simple, honest values of compassion and solidarity. If we can regain this focus as a party, then Hammersmith will be an exemplar, not of Labour’s cynicism, but of how our values are shared by the many and not the few – and of how we can win the next general election.
Imran Ahmed is a Labour activist in Hammersmith
