Campaigns: looking back, looking forward

Nominations for the role of Campaigns Officer are now open, and will close at midnight on 21st May 2011.

This time a year ago we were celebrating the first ever Pirate candidates in a UK general election.  In May 2010, we stood candidates in nine Westminster constituencies, and received an average of 0.4% of the vote.

Although many of us were disappointed that the numbers weren't higher, it provided a good benchmark to judge our success in future elections. Over the last year, there've been quite a few of them!

In September 2010, Phil Hunt stood for election in the Liberton/Gilmerton ward in Edinburgh.  There, he received 0.6% of the vote.

Loz Kaye, our brand new party leader, stood in the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election in January 2011 after Phil Woolas' victory in the general election was declared void. This was our first experience of contesting a by-election, and we were caught off-guard both by the very aggressive schedule (which caused problems with getting election materials printed over the Christmas break) and high-power campaigning by the major parties.  Despite our disadvantages, Loz (supported by Graeme Lambert, who put in a lot of hard work as his election agent) still managed to secure 0.3% of the vote, amid such crowning moments of awesome as shouting down Nick Griffin in the centre of Oldham.

Two important lessons learnt in that campaign were the necessity of a strong core of 5-10 supporters in the ward or constituency to make a campaign effective, and the fact that at the Party's current stage of development, the minimum time in which we can put an election campaign together is actually quite long!

This month, May 2011, we contested our first ever Scottish parliament elections, running list candidates in the Glasgow and West of Scotland regions.  Finlay Archibald, who contested the Glasgow Central constituency in the 2010 general election, headed up the Glasgow list, and Rob Harris lead the West of Scotland list.  The run-up to the election was quite fraught: not only did we have to deal with the sudden absence of a party treasurer, but the debate between the national campaigns team and the Scottish party over how and where we should run the campaign got quite heated.  In the end, of course, a compromise was arrived at, and despite our problems the Scottish pirates received around 0.3% of the vote in both regions.

At the same time, in a sort of role-reversal, Graeme Lambert stood for election to Bury Council in the Moorside ward, with Loz as his election agent.  Quite remarkably, he managed to secure almost 4% of the vote — our strongest electoral performance yet, by an order of magnitude.

Following the Scottish election on Twitter, I saw many comments along the lines of "Pirate Party? Who?"  Although in some cases the commentators had voted for us, there were too many people who said that if they had realised who we were and what we stood for, they would have voted for us.  I believe that the biggest challenge that the party faces is still simply getting the public at large to know that we exist and what we stand for, and that that alone would greatly boost our electoral performance.

Graeme's success in the local elections in Bury is a clear demonstration of what we can achieve when we get all of our dominos in a row: sufficient time to organize the campaign, properly-done research into the area, targetted canvassing by a team who were able to spend enough time on the job to do it well, and a candidate who was willing and able to employ all of the advantages that Pirate candidates have in adapting his manifesto to match the electorate's needs.

We've had other successes over the last year, from appearances in the international media in the wake of Cablegate, to a very successful first annual conference, which I hope will be even bigger and better when it's held again next year, this time in London.

So much for the past.  Where should our campaigning efforts go from here?

As mentioned earlier, we're not currently doing well at getting the party name out there.  Our campaigns are being hampered by the fact that a relatively small proportion of those who would vote for us have heard of us — despite the coverage we received in the wake of the Wikileaks controversy.  Perhaps we didn't effectively leverage the media interest that we received then?

We're also suffering from a gradually diminishing membership.  Not only do we need to do better at attracting new members (see previous point), but we need to work harder to retain and involve our current membership.  Our experiences of electoral campaigns have shown quite clearly how critical it is to have core of committed members involved in and working on any campaign.  Similarly, we probably should try to do more and better targetted fundraising — that, of course, would be a job to carry out in coordination with our next Party Treasurer!

Despite our best efforts, and despite the fact that our manifesto covers many other issues, we're still identified solely with copyright infringement on the Internet by many people.  One idea that has been floated several times so far is the possibility of adjusting the "core principles" of the party in such a way that they cover exactly the same issues, but don't over-emphasise the importance of copyright and patents to our platform in the same way that our manifesto does.  This would be a great opportunity to make it clearer how Pirate policy can cover areas other than the traditional Pirate movement topics, but of course care would have be taken not to move far them!

At the moment, a lot of my time as a member of the National Executive Committee is spent on "housekeeping" jobs.  I personally have found it quite hard to both deal with the immediate day-to-day issues and also give enough time to thinking about long-term strategy.  Although during the first few months of the party's existence a lot of significance was placed on the fact that the party employed no staff, it was run entirely by volunteers, and all donations were spent directly on campaigning, it has gradually become clearer and clearer to me that, in fact, having a minimal staff to carry out repetitive administration tasks would be very beneficial for the party, and in particular would make it easier to organise and run the party's campaigns.

As is clear from the fact that nominations are being opened for the election of a new Campaigns Officer for the party, I intend to step down from the role.  This is for a variety of reasons, both personal (I need to write a PhD thesis) and topical.  In particular, I don't feel like I've been doing as good a job as Campaigns Officer as the party needs, and I'd like someone else to have the chance to have a go at it and hopefully do better!  I will continue to be heavily involved — I will carry on serving as a member Board of Governors, and will be concentrating on promoting the party in South-East England and London. I'll also make sure to give whoever is elected as the new Campaigns Officer as much help as they need to get settled into the role! It's been an honour to serve on the NEC, and in many respects a wonderful experience.

And remember: every little thing that every person involved in a campaign does makes a real difference.

Peter Brett
Campaigns Officer
Pirate Party UK