Falkirk West By-election 2000

>By Douglas Fraser in the Sunday Herald, 17 th December 2000

Despite the SNP's best efforts to corner the market in Santa outfits, this seems a grinding, unfestive by-election, with nobody eager to contest the assumption that Labour's Eric Joyce will win it. Hopeful that Action of Churches Together in Falkirk will at least turn out some undecided voters, he points out that he has "a faith", his wife is a religious studies teacher, and that the government has brought glad tidings to indebted developing countries.

This is, it is later explained, a political gospel which works wonders with activist, middle-class, leftish voters throughout the country, particularly in churches. And it is not a message to which his opponents can easily respond.

Indeed, the most needle the candidates can manage in their third hustings of the week is between Tory and Liberal Democrat, both with their eyes on the prize of saving their deposits.

Local political issues provide poor pickings. The need for a new Falkirk FC stadium has been neutralised by the candidates' common consent to it. Labour's opponents claim they are encountering a door-step scunner factor with the government's choice of election timing, four days before Christmas. The Tory notes you can campaign on the streets before lunchtime each day, but after then, people are much too hassled and hurried by their festive shopping agenda.

The reason for this ballot is the scunner factor of Dennis Canavan, for 26 years the local MP, who was rejected by the Labour establishment in his bid for a Scottish parliament seat, and then got in as an independent with the biggest majority in Scotland. But his attempt to regain favour by calling off his threat of a by-election, and then changing his mind, has largely left voter confusion. So the SNP's David Kerr, a television journalist aged 27, with strong political prospects, has failed to make this the referendum he had hoped for on "London New Labour control freakery". Indeed, it is Joyce who talks most about Canavan, audaciously proclaiming himself to be in the same independently minded mould.

The only consistent local issue is that of the Falkirk Royal Infirmary, subject of a protracted debate over loss of services to Stirling, with campaigners talking up the possibility of their hospital being run down. Nobody can be bothered to argue whether an MP can do anything about it at Westminster. It is the only issue in town, so it will have to do.

If "Major Joyce" wins (his opponents get what kicks they can out of needling him with his former army title), it won't really matter. He will be another Labour MP to add to the vast majority. And he will have to go straight into general election readiness for another battle, probably in less than five months.

That general election is what makes the Falkirk West contest much more interesting. Because the communities of Larbert, Dunipace, Denny and Camelon as well as Falkirk are being used as a dry run for The Big One. Though the manifesto promises are a long way from reaching the printers, this is an opportunity to test key messages and new electioneering tactics in battle conditions.

Labour aims to run on its record, but in innovative, sometimes entertaining ways. This weekend, Eric Joyce is putting out a 16-page election pamphlet, designed to look like OK! magazine, and trialled first in the Preston by-election last month. The candidate is in action man pose on the cover, and writes an agony uncle column which focuses on tax and benefit changes. There is a Labour word quiz and Clair Voyant's horoscope: "Aries: the planets are aligning for the arrival of a positive new influence on your life on Thursday. I see a red rose, a pair of trainers and a man who knows his own mind.".

Labour has also innovated with videos. With 86% of homes reckoned to own a video player, 10,000 of them in the constituency are this weekend receiving a free, five-minute version of Eric Joyce: The Movie, shot only last weekend. They reckon it will have far more effect than a party political broadcast, narrowly targeted not only at Falkirk West but at Labour loyalists who want to see a worthy successor to Canavan. The issue for Labour in Falkirk, as for the whole of the UK next year, is to get their vote out. Indeed, their campaign plan is called Operation Turnout. Their opponents' research confirms fears that disillusionment could be Labour's biggest enemy.

The SNP almost admits to admiration for Labour's new tactics, but warns that videos do not come cheap and could break strict limits on election spending. Nationalists too are trying to innovate with leaflets, when they know they are competing on doormats with a flood of festive supermarket enticements. The SNP in recent by-elections has increasingly put its trust in technology. Its primary concern is not so much the turnout as getting its message to voters when it has no editorial support from any mainstream newspaper. Former leader Alex Salmond said last year that the SNP must never go into another election with the kind of ferocious media opposition it faced in the Scottish parliamentary campaign.

But with limited prospects for newspapers coming over to the cause, they are trying to reach voters by other means. As with other parties, they are relying increasingly on telephone canvassing, with a level of activity which is hard for opponents or journalists to gauge. Much of it is simply to identify voters, increasingly employing contract call centre staff rather than party activists. The activist phone banks are more likely to be for persuasive reasons.

This is replacing the door-knock canvass, which keeps the advantage of putting a candidate in front of a voter, but is less time- effective and relies on electoral address lists which become rapidly out of date (a serious problem in the Anniesland by-elections). It is more difficult when faced with street-level front door security, and people who don't open their doors to strangers, particularly on a winter evening.

The internet is much less certain as a political tool, but the lessons from the USA are that it can be powerful. The SNP has all but replaced its traditional logo with a website address. According to one party manager, it can expect around 5000 to 6000 hits in one day, but during the Ayr by-election campaign and now Falkirk, he claims that can more than double.

The message goes out by e-mail too, and there is a steady stream of incoming messages helping to identify voters, with much of the e-campaigning directed at young people and student campuses.

In Falkirk also, political messages are being tested. The speech made last weekend in Camelon Labour Club by Henry McLeish, accepting his confirmation as Scottish parliamentary leader, hit several of the notes Labour will want to get across. The SNP is being branded with the slogan of "tax tax tax", yet standing for "Still No Policies". Tax has been identified as a Nationalist Achilles' heel, and it allows Labour to fight on Westminster's reserved powers with a focus on Chancellor Gordon Brown.

But McLeish also highlighted, inadvertantly, a problem Labour faces in Scotland. If nationalists are the enemy in most Labour constituencies, the threat is the return of a Conservative government. And the most immediate threats to Scottish Labour seats come from Tories; in Ayr, Eastwood, Edinburgh Pentlands and Stirling. So while the SNP is criticised for allegedly wanting to push up tax, Tories are under fire for their tax cut plans. It puts Labour in the middle ground, trying to get over a complex message.

The SNP, on the other hand, is using Falkirk to test out its slogan, first launched upon an underwhelmed Scotland earlier this year by John Swinney. "Standing Up ƒ" is what it's all about, mainly for Scotland, but you can add pensioners and NHS patients and whatever constituency they happen to be in. It hints at the limited ambitions the SNP wants to set for its general election campaign. "Standing Up ƒ" does not smack of breakthrough or independence: it says what an SNP MP would do, and puts down a marker for the more serious battle they face for Scottish parliament seats in 2003.

A party source says that "Standing Up ƒ" works best in the focus group work they have done so far, allied to a sense that Labour has failed to live up to its promise and voters' expectations. At last year's election, the SNP was knocked off course after it shifted late and abruptly to its Penny For Scotland campaign on tax and public services. There is a determination for 2001 that "Standing Up ƒ" will not be blown away in the spring gales.

- Dec 17