Two weeks ago, I wrote an article for openDemocracy about the surge in independent candidacies at the British general election. With 48 hours to go until polling stations open on 5 May, I meet Stewart Rickersey at Mansfield station in the pouring midlands rain. Rickersey is widely considered the most likely of the 160 first-time independent candidates to be heading for Westminster once the votes are counted. As we drive off in his car the inside of which boasts enough communication technology to coordinate a modest invasion he beams: seven out of ten voters are telling him he has their vote.
We sit down in June Stendalls living room. Stendall was one of the 25 successful independent candidates who smashed Mansfields ossified Labour council in 2003. I ask Rickersey, the independent councillors unofficial leader, why he embarked on his quest to unyoke Mansfield from party politics at every level. I was opposed on principle to being taken for a complete idiot. When the council tried to discredit his petition of 4,500 signatures demanding an elected mayor in 2002, it was a red rag to a bull.
Also by Tom Burgis in openDemocracy on the UK election:
Dont miss too Anthony Barnetts election blog
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It is an hour before he mentions Alan Meale, the Labour member of parliament in Mansfield until the election was announced. Meale, once a hard-left union organiser who, like so many of his colleagues, had drifted toward the centre, has been MP for Mansfield since 1987. But Meale is no longer the toast of the local party, and struggles to secure even the most tepid support from constituency leaders. He seems an unfamiliar face and voice on the doorsteps of his constituents, and he declined an invitation to talk to this visiting reporter.
Rickersey balances the negative and positive in his own campaign both weaving his candidacy from the threads of anti-Labour feeling and offering himself as the instrument of representative democracy. He has attacked Meale on his lamentable parliamentary record (intervening in just seven debates in 2004). Meales response has, not uncommonly with Labour candidates in battleground seats, been litigious. Rickersey, unintimidated, instructed his lawyers to hit back with the legal equivalent of bring it on.
But with an 11,000 majority to overturn, Rickersey has a political mountain to climb. A lone campaigner, without a party logo on the ballot paper, Rickerseys candidacy lives or dies by his personal profile.
In the afternoon, we hit the streets. Mansfield is a working-class town, though far from what Rickersey regards as its ludicrous image of a bleak ex-mining settlement. Indeed, the people of its semi-detached housing estates are relatively well-off and elderly. But Rickersey knows that an instinctively loyal Labour vote a composite product of habit, experience, inheritance and union solidarity presents a formidable opponent. The consensus here has for years been that you could stick a donkey in the town square, pin a red rosette on it, and it would win.
By their nature, independents have no electoral base of their own. Where the major parties toot a subtle dog-whistle to rouse their core vote, Rickersey and Kate Allsop (standing next door in Ashfield against the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon) prefer a tuba. On the doorstep, Rickersey is both smooth operator and chameleon. He mixes Tory-style rhetoric on small government with New Labour language on local empowerment, but does so without crass denunciations of red tape or heralding a Peoples Republic of Mansfield.
He talks about values, ordinary folk and old-fashioned common sense to pensioners whose voting intentions may be governed more by meteorology than ideology (a rainy election day can damage the turnout of elderly, working-class Labour voters). With the young, the nomenclature is different: bucking the whip, insurrection, a pinprick in the backside of the parties.
When an erudite voter accosts him on the pavement and waxes Burkean, Rickersey portrays himself as the antidote to the absentee incumbent: I am here; I exist. Later, I watch as Allsop goes after Hoon on international law while pushing her own case with promises of secure bolts for Mrs Greens twice-violated windows.
When Rickersey tells me he canvasses everyone from extreme communists to Genghis Khans, I wonder if this is not an unscrupulous populism populism unchecked by even the most lapsed creed. I am countered by David Woods of the Independent Network (IN), an NGO set up to support independents in public office. Give the people power and they will assume responsibility, he says. We have reached the end of the big ideas pure socialism, pure capitalism.
Woods enthuses about the INs community voting system, a secure polling mechanism currently being tested, by which independents could hold mini-referenda on key issues and be directed past the tellers by their constituents letters, text messages, phone calls and emails. I put to him the argument lucidly made by John Guess, a legal advisor to the British government who responded to my first openDemocracy article: The Independent Networks suggestion of some sort of interactive Athenian Pop Idol is so laughable: it would lead to a catastrophic pauperisation of national decision-making.
As he zealously distributes leaflets, Woods is scornful: The likes of the Ukraine must be looking at us and laughing. He sees the IN as the vanguard of a new politics. One MP working in this way, Woods believes, would sting his fellows into actively reinvigorating their relationship with their constituencies. With postal-vote fraud seemingly rife, Woods argues that a system that could foster debate and community, and which could potentially do for the disenfranchised and disillusioned what Fame Academy did for the discordant, has to be worth supporting.
The sun is out and shines on Rickerseys small but committed campaign team. I hope to be your independent MP on Thursday, he tells a retired soldier. I hope you are anall, comes the reply. On the stump, Rickersey unrepentantly styles himself a prospective delegate MP. Rather than broadly represent the national interest through the exercise of conscience as favoured by Martin Bell or Richard Taylor he will speak and vote exactly as his would-be constituents bid him: a ventriloquised tribune, as it were. I suggest that with such a pledge he sacrifices his own judgment. That implies that the 650 people in parliament are the most intelligent in the country, he says. And that is patently not true.
With a flourish of Bill Clinton by way of Richard Nixon, Rickersey talks of the great silent majority. He says that his bid for election and the work of the IN are part of a long journey that would take Britain fully into proportional representation, perhaps with a handful of indies in parliament to harangue a government that will always think twice before scrapping the system that put it in power.
We are on the cusp of a little British revolution, he says. And the key to it all is communication. He knows that the war and a widening income gap have put an almost unbearable strain on Labours marriage to its long-since cuckolded grassroots support. And that may be his ticket to Westminster as a pioneer techno-democrat. As one ex-guardsman living in a Mansfield council flat put it: People dont like being taken for granted. Thats why I got rid of my missus.
