Not all failures are the same

Not all failures are the same. Some are joyous. Joyous because of the way your loved ones supported you. Joyous because of the people you got to know. Joyous because the bigger picture is finally one of hope.

I’m Veronica and I’m one of the thousands of parliamentary candidates who DIDN’T get in.

I’m excited about the chance we now have as a nation for change but also - having knocked on hundreds of doors for the last months and had some pretty difficult conversations - acutely aware of the delicate fixing job ahead. 

We already knew about the vandalism perpetrated against our international reputation thanks to a chaotic Brexit; and the undermining of our judiciary (‘enemies of the state’) and the civil service (‘the blob’). We remember how even the queen was dragged into the chaos when parliament was illegally suspended or ‘prorogued’. 

But what the last six weeks and hundreds of conversations on the doorsteps have brought home to me, is that Britain has suffered a far more profound form of vandalism.  

I’ve been campaigning to be the Labour MP in the Bicester and Woodstock constituency. The patch includes the dynamic and densely populated Bicester in the east to sweeping green fields cradling beautiful hamlets in the west. It’s slightly wealthier (and more economically right wing) than the UK average but still has significant deprivation. Its social values and global outlook are almost bang on average according to pollsters. In other words, what I’ve heard on the doorstep won’t be far off what many other candidates heard across the country.

And what came across most strongly – along side the technicolour examples of how our public services are on their knees – is a loss of faith that politics could possibly help anything. 

After 14 years starting with austerity and an over-sold Brexit to covid parties and Ladbrokes-gate; people simply don’t believe that politicians are in it for anything other than themselves. 

“You’re all the same” was the dreaded refrain, or ‘YATS’ as I now affectionally call it, in a futile attempt to take out some of the sting.

This is the biggest job for Labour. Rebuilding trust. Harnessing some ‘yes, we can.’ 

About half way through the campaign I decided to arm myself a list of all the things Labour achieved from 1997-2010 by way of response to YATS. Its pretty impressive and includes a ton of stuff we take for granted today – minimum wage, the equality act, freedom of information, free bus passes for over 60s etc. But none of these lists could have said it better than a man I met on the doorstep in my home village.

He had three kids. The oldest was 14 and had just been born in time to qualify for all sorts of help – Child Trust Fund (Gordon Brown iniative), Sure Start, loads of help for mum. The other two, he said, got nothing. The difference was like night and day. He remembered we were not all the same.

Bits of the Labour manifesto are really ambitious like our bid to become a Clean Energy Superpower. But the immediate deliverables – like the 40,000 NHS appointments are actually quite restrained. When you divide those appointments by the UK population you quickly realise the ‘first steps’ description is apt. There’s an absolute mountain ahead. But better to build trust with small steps, than promise the summit.

I lost my bid to become the new MP for Bicester and Woodstock. But I don’t regret trying for a moment. It’s a huge privilege to talk to voters on the doorstep. I can’t think of a better way of getting a bot-free, authentic, unfiltered view on the world. 

It was also a joy to discover how many of my fellow residents were willing to plough in time and talent into changing our politics. We didn’t win, but we took our own first steps to building trust locally. And I hope, thanks to our work, our new Labour government has a local human face and ‘you’re all the same’ has moved one tentative first step closer to ‘yes we can’.