A tribute to and from the canvassers of ward 10, Edinburgh South

By Yes Morningside, 19th September 2014

According to Brian McNeill there are no gods in this infuriating little country and precious few heroes. Well we’ve learned a lot over the past year and it turns out there are rather more heroes than we thought.

We worked in one of the very toughest places in Scotland. We had to get through many, many hard Nos to reach those soft Nos and Yesses and the precious undecideds where we could make a difference by listening and talking. And to get them we had to canvass in the tenements, many hundreds of them. Not one, but two solid doors just to reach the ambiguity of the public/private space on inside doorsteps, dark, cold and with awful acoustics, where no-one feels completely at home because our society of individuals has lost the feeling of ownership of communal space. We fought the general perception that we don’t do politics ourselves any more in this country, that it’s a spectator sport, played like football on the TV with a background of green leather instead of grass. The tenements of Marchmont and Bruntsfield, Merchiston and Morningside showed us rocky barriers, physical and psychological.

And we did it. The quality we needed was pure, bloody-minded naïvity, for whom one of our heroes should take almost all the credit. No professional outfit would have contemplated such a strategy, and they didn’t. Back in February we got tired of waiting for the call to come canvassing so we met in the pub and organized it ourselves. We pushed through those barriers to have those seven thousand conversations, more than any other Edinburgh ward. We offered many more the opportunity to take part in our grand historic conversation, on the way to our one day of power, but many refused.

And we and our children and our partners suffered for our naïvity. We had nothing to offer but blood, sweat and stairs. We were patronised by Tory after Tory. We were made to feel small at every fifth door, as if we were up to something dirty and unseemly. We saw that look in many eyes, that slight stiffening, almost imperceptible but as clear as an X in a box, of an underlying feeling of shock that we actually exist. We were told there would be a war. That we were doing a terrible thing. We were told to keep our hands off their pensions. We were told very simply, and very politely, that “I don’t talk to Yes-minded people”. We were told that we are a cult, the victims of neurological reprogramming, in as genial and inoffensive tones as can be found in Morningside. Some of our targets when they saw us coming banged the doors and sang “Land of Hope and Glory” at the top of their nationalist lungs. The chief of the opposing campaign is of our community. He agreed with an interviewer that we are the kind of nationalists to be characterised by the Nazi slogan “Blut and Boden”. Our Morningside organizer is an anti-Zionist Jew who has put as much sweat into fighting ethnic nationalism for his Palestinian friends as he did into this campaign. You may imagine how he felt at that.

There were casualties. We lost some of our best people to back pain, rheumatoid problems, simple emotional exhaustion. One of the very best was immobile and fought the fight just from her desk in a ground floor Marchmont Flat, doing the vital work of data entry. We tried to bring the spirit of the campaign to her.

But there was pleasure too. We saw inside all those magnificent structures we pass every day, the monumental tenements of Victorian Edinburgh. We were touched by the support we got from Wales, from England, from Poland and further. We had the shameful pleasure of imagining the effect of our banners on our opponents. And some of our banners were something special. And some of our opponents were such as you’d like to annoy.

We brought the most exciting of political times to almost every doorstep and we found thousands willing to talk. We reinvented politics. The chat did not resemble the debate fed to us on TV. We were asked questions we could answer and questions we could not. We were honest. We admitted it and we stayed up late, many nights, researching HGV licenses, the common agricultural policy, the UN convention on the law of the sea and the exact balance of Research council spending vs tax revenues and numbers of Scottish researchers. We became experts and neglected our jobs. The answers went out in hand-addressed envelopes. We will never know their fate. We passed our victims on the streets and we still do. But we don’t know what they’re thinking and we never will.

On trips to other parts of the city we were ranted at by the BNP. And we saw defeated communities and defeated people. We are haunted by what we saw and our tears today are for people whose suffering is not self-inflicted, like our own.

Our opponents proclaimed their fierce pride in their “Scottishness”. We don’t know what that means, but our pride is quieter. We are proud beyond words of the 20 or so ordinary folk who showed absolute indefatigability, and who would have won a landslide if only a couple of hundred thousand more of our compatriots could have had the privilege of a conversation with them. They know who they are.

Why did we do it? Only for the one precious thought that we can have on our deathbeds: that we did what we could for a better future. This is our prize and all the lies and abuse will not ever take that away from each one of us.

Ivan