on the other.
A battle that began in Lincoln in 1972 when Taverne stood with the active support of the press and went right through to Bermondse! where Tatchell was the candidate and was attacked not just by the SDP and the media but also by certain very significant elements in task.
It seemed from the very beginning that this was going to be the issue in What was interesting about it, if you look at it from that point of view, paign very very early. They began as Eric Varley resigned. They devoted, I suppose, more attention to the selection conference than they did to most by-elections. And they ran two One was thai if I was selected this would be unacceptable to the leadership of the party and reopen the so-called splits which they had used to try to destabilise us. And secondly that if 1 were selected Labour would lose the very powerful . Newsnight and ITN, as well as the popular press, used these arguments as hard as they could and failed to influence the Chesterfield In the Chesterfield selection conference what was interesting to me was that the trade unions were the ones who were clearest in a way about what it was about — or at any rate were very clear =. where agar Were media .=a0 :0 a ta: ging became the major theme. The Times, Vincent Hanna. lewsnight and others tried to play the seen. tactical vote as hard as they could. Therefore to devise a strategy to beat the Labour Party that was the prime The strategy which was accepted, and carried through, was to by-pass the media and to go straight to the people, and to call in the support of everybody who was ready to come. We had a massive campaign which was very collective in character. There were three mean parallel parts to the campaign. One was that it was obviously a platform for the national leadership to use. Secondly Photo: GM COOKSON there was a very good, the best I've ever electoral organisation. People who came in were immediately able to be used without any waste of time.
And then there was political discussion on the doorstep of a kind that reached an enormous number of the electorate Thirdly we had the campaign, which I was personally involved in, of going round to meet people. I think in the course of that campaign, if the polls anything, half the electorate claimed actually to have seen the Labour candidate And we had enormous meetings.