A lot has been said about the value of ‘Action Days’. I have no doubt that for a parliamentary or council by-election it is a vital tool in getting outside help to where it is most needed. I am certain that there is great camaraderie and that it seems more effective to be working in a group and appear to cover a lot of ground.

Is this a tool to be used when council wide elections are happening alongside say a Mayoral election, where lots of people are seeking election or re-election. Is it productive to move people around instead of focussing on your own ward? Do action days add to the number of leaflets delivered or doors knocked?

I want to suggest that they don’t. In my early days as a campaigner and councillor, I found very soon found that me knocking on doors to ask people to vote for me was the most effective tool in the armoury. Taking time to go and knock on other people’s doors or deliver their leaflets reduced the number of doors I could knock on in my own ward. Moving local members around the council area is a bit like moving the deck chairs on the Titanic! 

The alternative to all this busy organisation is to spend the non-election period recruiting deliverers, getting poster sites agreed and running training sessions for members who haven’t canvassed before, so that wards can run largely self-sufficiently during elections. [Of course, this applies in spades to constituencies with MPs who should use the 5 years of a parliament to create an election machine for the next election.]

There is one caveat. There does need to be a mechanism for funnelling volunteers from outside the area to where they are needed and for sorting out where a mayoral candidate is to go during the campaign, but action days add a layer of complexity that may actually detract from getting things done.

Now I don’t want to pretend that taking the time to build up the organisation isn’t time consuming. It is. Too often people think it is quicker to do the delivery than find someone to do it. BUT, we are supposed to be an all-year-round campaigning party, so knocking on doors all-year-round should be something we do anyway. Asking every friendly person to do some local delivery should be a built-in part of the toolkit, but somehow people shy away from doing it. (More training needed?)

I also know that after a hard-fought election many activists will have become councillors and risk getting subsumed in the work of the Council to the detriment of local campaigning. I would gently suggest we have to encourage them not to do so and to keep on campaigning.

Let 2025 be the year when we actually do go out and recruit the volunteers we need, rather than move people about the patch endlessly to give the impression of activity.

* Dr Michael Taylor has been a party member since 1964. He is currently living in Greece.