Cllr Russell Perrin is the Leader of Harlow District Council.
In Australia, the Sophomore slump refers to professional athletes who have a mediocre second session following a stellar debut. In the music industry, one might liken it to the one-hit wonder phenomenon. So as the dust settles on the recent round of local elections and enough time has passed for Captain Hindsight to flip-flop on several key policies, its time to reflect on how we were able to buck the national trend in Harlow once again, by taking a seat from Labour and increasing our majority.
To be honest, save for a few adaptions, we ran our campaign in much the same way as I set out for Conservative Home last year. This strategy has allowed us to increase our majority and win every year for the past three years. However, there are three key factors combined with hardworking activists, MP, and councillors, that have resulted in us being more like the Rolling Stones than Chesney Hawkes at the ballot box.
Events dear boy, events
More now than ever, the meaning behind Macmillan’s famous phrase ‘Events dear boy, events’ is as true as it was when my dear father was a boy, never having had it so good. In responding to those events people need to feel that you are with them. This statement might seem rather self-serving. However, it can be easy for an administration to forget, when fighting to keep its head above the tsunami wave of unexpected, varied, and complex events that come its way, that the only reason any of us are elected is to serve the interests of those who elect us.
Having a clear set of local policies designed to support residents, the local economy, and the environment, are necessary if you wish to accomplish anything in Local Government. It is also vitally important that you communicate what your policies seek to achieve in a compelling way. However, when things come out of left field and threaten to throw you off course, it is equally true that people will not vote for you because the LGA says you have a dynamic and exciting corporate strategy. Simply asking the electorate to stick with you because you have promised that the future will be brighter, seldom works.
It is true to say that locally we have had our fair deluge of events. Storm damage, flood damage, strikes by our waste collection company – and now by staff who work for our “LATCO” providing key services to our town’s residents. However, by far the biggest event to have hit all of us this year has been the sudden rise in the cost of living. Having delivered the largest Council Tax cut of any authority in the UK last year, it would have been extremely easy to rail back from our pledge to freeze Council Tax this year given the mounting financial pressures that all councils have faced.
Anyone who has been involved with local government will know that freezing Council Tax is easier said than done and could be likened to solving a Rubik’s Cube that wants to fight back. Section 151 officers don’t make it easy either, being typically more cautious than Jeremy Corbyn accepting an invitation for tea with the Kosher Nostra. With global inflation running nearly at 15 per cent, things were a tinsy bit more challenging than usual. But deliver we did, and we made sure that residents knew what we had done. Ensuring that we communicated to residents about the raft of measures that either we, or other agencies, had put in place to support them with the cost of living, and having Robert Halfon, an MP who has built his career on fighting to reduce the burdens of tax on residents, showed that we were on their side. In short, despite events, we never forgot who we were doing it for.
A targeted approach to campaigning
As Confucius once wisely said:
“The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm.”
We knew that with all the turbulence at the national level if we did not amend our election strategy from last year we would break like the oak and not bend like the reed. We went into this election expecting a drop in the popular share of the vote, so we targeted our resources at where we needed to win. In business, they say, ‘turnover is vanity, profit is sanity.’ We viewed our approach to winning the election in much the same way. An increase in the popular vote would have been nice, but it is gaining seats that win prizes. We did not need to fight hard in every seat to win and keep the council. To have done so would have been to spread scarce resources too thinly and we might not have won any seats at all. We therefore focused our campaign resources in the few areas we needed to win and where we thought we could beat Labour. Our success was partly a result of happenstance favouring a prepared mind.
A painful truth and fortunate blessing
I can’t escape the fact that our share of the popular vote decreased by around five per cent when compared with the previous year. I don’t deny this should serve as a bell-weather warning for us. So, although we avoided the Sophomore slump neither did we experience the Sophomore surge. It therefore pains me to say it; that if we had a more effective Labour Party here in Harlow the result could very much have been different. But the fact is we don’t, so we didn’t. I therefore wish to opine no further on this fortunate blessing, least I look a gift horse in the mouth and end up singing “I am the one and only” instead of “I was born in a crosswind hurricane”.