Some more observation from my impromptu canvassing on the train yesterday. For a 20min journey that started off with being lectured to erroneously, we managed to discuss a lot. The woman was a chipping Barnet resident. And American.
She’s a Remainer. She doesn’t like Theresa Villiers & locals are desperate to get rid. We discussed Corbyn’s personal ratings. I explained the frustration of individualised politics where ppl forget who represents you locally is more important that party leaders. She agreed.
It was interesting that she identified herself as an immigrant. Given we’ve decided to completely abandon the immigration debate I decided it wasn’t worth examining how the identity of “immigrant” means different things when you are a visible minority.
Or how a random Asian person on the train would be read as an immigrant despite being born here long before anyone would detect she was one, despite having clearly emigrated.
We discussed how much of the polarisation of the Brexit debate is down to people really not being open to being corrected and that confirmation bias was making people blind to any evidence to the contrary. She hadn’t thought of it like that.
She brought up the antisemitism issue. Was again surprised that she didn’t seem to give it much consideration though we agreed there was a problem. She did agree that, much like Brexit, polarisation on the issue was making it difficult to actually address and the danger was that
people were beginning to not care about it, not because they didn’t believe there was an issue but because (a bit like Brexit) they felt overexposed to debate on it. Which should trouble *anyone* who truly cares about tackling antisemitism.
She also couldn’t understand the reticence of Labour to work with the Lib Dems. When I explained that outside of stopping Brexit, labour voters have no reason to trust the Lib dems as they are still defending the choices they made in coalition, which will be a problem if labour
have to rely on them to pass the domestic policies of our manifesto. How can you confidently tactically vote Lib Dem when you can’t confidently say they’ll vote to ban fracking or end austerity? She actually thanked me for explaining this because she had been confused before.
So this entire exchange which began with an older lady having a go at a bunch of us for shop talk ended with her thanking me for helping her understand some stuff, and maybe the realisation that rather than the youth needing to get out and do the convincing, it’s actually boomers
But the thing it also highlighted is that replicating that conversation at the doorstep won’t give you opportunity to knock on many doors. So the more ppl out there door knocking, the longer you can spend in conversation with ppl to try and sway them. It can work.
You can follow @judeinlondon2.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled: