At the Hustings

An encounter with real voters

I wanted to report on a little noticed tradition of British elections, namely the hustings, when candidates for a parliamentary seat are invited to speak to members of the public, or members of a particular subset of the public, such as students or those interested in climate. I took part in a hustings the other day and it was a strange and somewhat disturbing experience.

I had never attended let alone spoken at a hustings when I was invited to one at the Union Chapel in Islington, where I am standing for the Green Party (in Islington South to be precise), last weekend. I had always been too bored at the prospect of listening to political candidates. But now I was one, of course along I went.

The Union Chapel is a rather fabulous large church, with proscenium seating for perhaps two hundred people. That Sunday, I would guess about a hundred and fifty people were in the audience, seated in pews around the stage, where the candidates sat side-by-side at a long table, facing the audience. Them and Us.

Before proceedings got underway, I was ushered into a back room where the other candidates were waiting. They were largely silent, studying notes presumably of what they were going to say. The Conservative, a young woman, smiled at me. The others were pretty monosyllabic. The candidate of Social Democratic Party, which I didn’t know still existed, was the only one of us in a suit. He also bore a large party rosette. I decided to pin my rather smaller Green Party rosette to my jacket.

The Labour candidate and sitting MP, Emily Thornberry, was last to arrive. Only when she turned up did the event begin. The event consisted of pre-selected audience members invited to the stage to read out their pre-chosen questions, all of which were too long, each covering a gamut of queries about the different parties’ positions on things like asylum, housing, welfare, poverty etc.. There was a strong leftward tilt to the questions. Nothing about how to promote business or lower taxes.

The candidates then took it in turns to give their answers. A more tedious format could hardly have been chosen, but of course it was redolent of all such debates in the campaign. All of us had been sent the questions beforehand, further defeating any possibility of spontaneity or an off-the-cuff burst of honesty. Thornberry had a ream of type-written notes, presumably prepared by some underling, in front of her which she consulted before speaking. The Liberal Democrat complained that he alone had not been sent the questions. He was thus forced to scroll furiously through his party manifesto on his iPad as his turn approached. He then read out the policy of his party. But though he was unprepared, his technique differed little from the other candidates who also, mostly, read out their answers.

The 90 minutes of the event ticked away. I tried to stir things up a bit by not reading out the policies of the Green Party, though of course I made reference to them. I said that Labour and the Conservatives had dehumanised asylum-seekers and demonised them for doing precisely what we would do in their shoes. I said that house prices were symptomatic of a deep inequality across society that neither of two main parties, one allegedly socialist, talked about. I said that the church should be used for a citizens’ assembly so that we could learn what people in Islington really wanted. Instead of the candidates talking at the audience, they should talk at us. Maybe we would learn something. These interjections, though largely well-received by the audience (and of course I would think so), made little impact upon the debate which continued as stultifyingly as ever.

But two things shook things up. One of the candidates was from something called the Party of Women, which I had never heard of before. She began her answer to literally every question about anything by saying, We are a single issue party. We believe that men are men, and women and women. Men have penises and women have vaginas. Wearing lipstick does not make you a woman. At this point, she would wave a tube of lipstick at the audience. She waved that lipstick several times.

There were some jeers when she first spoke. But these were eclipsed by the loud bout of applause when she finished talking from a group of about five women sitting at the very front of the church pews. But the fourth time she repeated this speech others in the audience started groaning. To be fair to her, she did try to adapt her stock answer to the question at hand. To a question about the Gaza conflict, she answered that the Women’s Party was against all war, then the mantra 'Men are men, and women are women’ began all over again.

I was impressed by her dogged determination to make her point over and over again. The issue of ‘trans rights’ and gender is controversial but polls indicate that most voters do not care very much about it. In several mornings of knocking on doors, only one voter raised it with me (in very reasonable terms, for she was concerned about the safety of abused women whom she worked with as a lawyer). But no one would have left that hustings without knowing the views of the Party of Women about gender. Indeed, I suspect that many in the audience could have recited them word for word. Her trenchant repetition was a stark contrast to the wash of verbiage of spending commitments, taking issues very seriously etc, and all the other rot that candidates spout, most of which I suspect made not the slightest impression on the audience.

The other issue was Gaza. The chair handled the meeting poorly, letting the candidates waffle on too long (especially Thornberry, to whom he was gratingly deferential). There were only a few minutes left when the Gaza question finally came around. You could sense the tension rise as it was read out. What did our parties think about a ceasefire? When had we called for one? And if we hadn’t, why not?

The Lib Dem, SDP man and the Tory offered bromides about deploring the loss of life and insisting that their parties wanted a ceasefire, the Tory of course failing to mention that the government had only started calling for a limited ceasefire (it still doesn’t call for a permanent one) after about thirty thousand civilians had been slaughtered. Then, Thornberry spoke. In a soft voice, she read out that the Labour Party supported a ceasefire, supported international law, supported the International Court of Justice, supported the International Criminal Court. As she spoke, shouts immediately broke out. Liar! Shame on you! An older woman, whom I later found out was Jewish and a Holocaust survivor, started yelling, ‘You support genocide!’ She stood up and brandished a large picture of a dead Palestinian child.

My turn came around. Having listened to Thornberry’s remarks, I was by now very angry. My voice shook and my microphone wobbled in my hand from side to side. Not very professional. Among other things, I said that the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, had stated in an infamous TV interview that he supported Israel’s right to stop food and water to be supplied to the Gaza Strip. Neither Labour nor the Tories ever talked about the need for the occupation to end. At this, I could hear a bellowing from my side, ‘Nonsense! Nonsense!’. It was Emily Thornberry, the shadow Attorney-General (the minister in charge of the legal system), yelling at me.

Chaos descended upon the hall. The representative of the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition also attacked Thornberry, for she too like Starmer had justified Israel’s blockade of humanitarian supplies into Gaza. More uproar from the audience. Shame! Shame! Shame! The older Jewish woman was ushered out, shouting as she left. She was so upset she appeared to be crying. Another heckler, a young woman, was also ejected. The man from the Trade Unions spiced his answer with references to ‘Zionists’, at which Thornberry shouted, ‘Want to mention the conspiracies?’ or words to that effect. The chair then declared that Thornberry, alone of all the candidates, should be given the right of reply since she ‘had been attacked personally’. I objected to this. Thornberry was likely to be the next Attorney-General. Her views were of great political concern. Why should she be allowed to speak twice, but not the rest of us? The chair ignored me as Thornberry talked again in her soft voice, holding her microphone close to her mouth, reminding us that the war in Gaza had begun with Hamas’s attacks on 7 October.

Rejecting his own timetable, the Chair then invited the candidates to speak about gender as, he claimed, this was such a big issue. Thornberry spoke, perfectly reasonably. Lots of shouting from the women at the front. The rest of us were then not asked to comment.

A final round of questions was permitted. But this time the questioners were not invited to speak. The chair read out their questions, which were about Sudan, Afghanistan and Tigray (the event had been billed as being about foreign as well as domestic issues). Absurdly, the chair asked the candidates to group our answers about all three countries. It was an awkward end to the discussion; the only people denied the right to ask their own questions were immigrants. There were supposed to be further more ‘spontaneous’ questions from the audience but the time had run out.

It was, all in all, a rather unsavoury occasion, this rare meeting of politicians with real live members of the public. I was struck how all the candidates spoke as they thought politicians were supposed to speak. There was rarely a moment of authenticity, doubt or passion. They thought the audience was there to hear them recite party policy, so that’s what they did (only they read it out) and party policy is incredibly boring. I sensed that the audience left as dejected and uninspired as I was. No one seemed to get to the nub of things. The only exception were the Gaza hecklers. They cared about something. And indeed if you care about anything, it should be the mass slaughter of innocents.

The true professional politician was Thornberry. The only time she got excited was when she was criticised over Gaza. Her answers otherwise slipped off her tongue as smoothly as a pat of butter off a warm knife. She was effortlessly fluent, compared to the ‘ums’ and ‘ah’s’ and nervous stutterings of the rest of us amateurs. Her performance was impressive but utterly depressing, as one realised that this person would soon enjoy one of the most powerful offices in the land. She beetled off the stage as soon as the chair called a halt, no goodbyes to me unsurprisingly.