GERRY’S café sits on Pennywell Road in Muirhouse. Our local Yes campaigners would meet there regularly before every activity. We were there so often because we were conducting our own mass canvas of Muirhouse (I even took holidays there) as well as some other parts of West Edinburgh. It took over a year to speak with and register as many local people as we could and we were acutely aware that a fair section of potential Yes voters weren’t on the electoral register or did not participate in electoral politics.
Though Edinburgh City Council worked to register voters through its annual canvass, plenty of voters had slipped through the net for one reason or another, not least the churn of people through Edinburgh’s large private rented sector. Some people were disenchanted with politics, politicians, political parties and institutions. They stopped voting, fell off the electoral register and had a healthy disdain for the political establishment.
However, there were also more practical reasons for people to be missing from the register. Some people were hiding to avoid debt repayments. Not the old poll tax debts, but more recent debts to people like loan sharks and they didn’t want to be found. Others had fallen off the register through literacy problems and being unable to keep track of the various registration forms and understand the paperwork.
When it came to electoral registration, the long campaign helped and so did the huge amount of work by Yes campaigners on the ground: registration became a campaign in itself. Basically, we kept at it, registering all the way up to the deadline on September 2, 2014 (yes, we were responsible for some of the queues at the registration office that night). Permanent canvassing dovetailed with registration – meaning doing it morning, afternoon and evening, day after day as we worked our way from houses to flats and back again and became a permanent presence in working-class areas. We were also meticulous when it came to voter registration – compiling hand-written lists of voters and missing voters from various sources to determine who was on the electoral roll and who wasn’t.
Both canvassing and registration involved some basic political education – talking about elections, devolution, policy and constitutional and economic change. And, believe me, the people we met on the doorsteps educated us about these things too and more. We explained how voting worked and how to handle the application – giving local people the forms and envelopes and explaining the mechanics of voting, the what, how, where and when.
This public engagement meant you were helping to enfranchise people in some of Scotland’s most disadvantaged communities and getting them to exercise their citizenship rights.
We might have been some of the only people who came to talk about politics with them as parties had abandoned low turnout areas. I can’t emphasise enough how important this part of the campaign was. It was integral to the 2014 experience and one of the many features that drove the high turnout and the high Yes vote.
In his new book IndyRef To ScotRef: Campaigning For Yes, senior lecturer in history nad politics Professor Peter Lynch warns Yessers to be realistic and prepared, outlining what must be done to secure a Yes for Scotland. We’re running extracts every day until Saturday. The book is out now and available from all booksellers, priced at £14.99.
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