THE SAFE SEAT CAMPAIGN - A YEAR ON

REFLECTIONS ON #GE2019

2020 has been a tough old year, but as we reach the end of it, I’ve been reflecting on activism, and what we did a year ago in 2019 for the UK General Election. I think perhaps as the world is so changed during 2020 we should be reminded that activism is a brilliant thing, and that we can change things with hope and effort. Or at least I think we can… because we did. At least a bit. 

#NOPETOCHOPE chairs at Mudeford Quay, Photo by Jimmy Young

FIFTY CHAIRS

Last year, we mounted a non-party political campaign on a tiny-budget and it involved chairs. A lot of chairs. Fifty to be exact. Our campaign morphed from the small idea of placing a symbolic ‘safe seat’ in the centre of the principal town in our constituency of Christchurch, into a huge multi-part political artwork, played out over a whole constituency with hundreds of participants. 

 

Christchurch, on the South Coast of the UK, has been for many years the safest Conservative Seat in the UK, meaning that our MP could essentially do whatever he liked with total impunity. The idea started with my feelings of (fairly impotent) fury at our local MP, Christopher Chope. As context, it is worth mentioning that he is a particularly infamous MP because of his habit of shouting ‘object’ to the progress of Private Members Bills which he - or his friends - haven’t proposed. In 2018 this famously included Gina Martin’s Upskirting Bill. When he objected, I placed a protest of knicker bunting in solidarity for Gina on his constituency office which read ‘no one should be able to photo my pants unless I want them too’. This piece of craftivism went viral and attracted rather a lot of attention in the media, we were on radio, TV (including Channel 4's The Last Leg) and all the mainstream newspapers in the UK. There was even a fair amount of International coverage and copycat knicker bunting even made it to his door in Westminster. Suddenly, people in our constituency were paying attention to Chope’s voting record – not just on Private Members Bills, but noticing his retrogressive attitudes on everything from equal marriage legislation to climate change. Throughout 2018-19 after every particularly objectionable move Chope made, I would mount a small craftivist protest – more knicker-bunting, a judo outfit, toy dinosaurs and even a beautiful string of rainbow flags to celebrate inclusive sex and relationship education in schools (he was one of just 21 MPs who voted against the measure, losing by 538).

 

However, for the 2019 general election I realised I needed some help. So I assembled a group of fellow constituents, and created Christchurch Chairs Against Chope. We wanted to represent many of the people in our area who felt poorly represented. We were campaigning because we didn’t want to stand for it any longer (sorry, this is a warning, but the seat puns just get worse from here on in). 

 

We felt that Chope shouldn’t be allowed to ‘sit pretty’ in our constituency. Many people who live in the Christchurch, even those who have voted for and campaigned for the Conservative party all their lives, find it very hard to support him. In the words of his own party member in the Echo "it appears he's trying to block bills to protect women which is not a popular thing. He's an old dinosaur". We felt that we shouldn’t take this poor representation sitting down (I did warn you about the puns).

 

Object to Upskirting? Unseat Chope, Photo by Jimmy Young

 

HOW IT WORKED

I sourced a bunch of chairs – most from our local tip, and friends who dropped spares to our house. Myself and some of the team would come up with terrible seat related puns or riffs on some of the more awful parts of Chope’s voting records and then I painstakingly sign-wrote the seats and backs into the early hours of each morning. We also set up the blog which you are  reading this on https://safeseatcampaign.blogspot.comand which recorded each of the chairs out in the wild. 

These 'safe seats', all with individual messages appeared around the constituency throughout the course of the election campaign. We hoped people would see them and smile. We implored people who did so to vote chairfully.

 

leaflet detail, photo by Jimmy Young

Don’t Stand For It, photo by Jimmy Young

I’m really interested in Craftivism – and that the action of taking time to make something makes it more interesting to the observer. I also think that there is something about domestic objects in public space which are really eye catching; we could have printed a bunch of posters, which wouldn’t have had nearly the same impact. One of our key messages was to remind people that they could vote differently, we wanted them to stop and actually engage with the message. We placed one of our chairs in a fairly central spot in Druitt Gardens, parked in a spot overlooking it and sat in our van and just observed people… and everyone looked. We watched all types of people have their interest caught by the piece - most stopped, read the leaflet, had selfies, sat on it - they fully engaged. And everywhere we placed chairs - the same thing happened. 

We’d already decided that the chairs should appear throughout the campaign in different spots around our constituency, and we had a large map of the area blown up on our wall to ensure good coverage. Many people in central Christchurch don’t realise quite how big our geographical constituency is, and we had chairs out in St Leonards and West Moors, Ferndown and Highcliffe with some chairs even making tours of the area. I had initially thought to make just 28 chairs, one for each day of the campaign, but as we grew in momentum, more people wanted to be involved and replacement chairs were dropped to our house after others were stolen, and we ended up creating 50. 

Deck Chairs Against Chope, photo by Jimmy Young

IT DID GET A BIT NASTY

The political parties running in the campaign (at least Labour and the Lib Dems) had had some really horrible letters threatening legal action from the Chope campaign. They were told that they were not allowed to say that Chope had objected to upskirting and FGM legisaltaion. Which, of course as was widely reported at the time, he patently had; even if his reasoning was that he was objecting to the Private Members Bill System, he still stood up in Parliament and said the word ‘object’ to these bills, which is quite clearly objecting to the bills. This kind of gaslighting was meant as intimidation, and luckily the parties have legal teams to provide support and to assure them that it was a ‘nonsense tactic’.

 

However, we had also started to receive various intimidatory comments about ‘fly tipping’ (btw placing artwork in public space is not fly tipping). A chair was stolen from us at the hustings, and then someone – which the council assured us wasn’t them - removed around half of the chairs from public spaces. Someone was monitoring our social media accounts and trying to remove chairs when they popped up. This wasn’t too bad in reality, we had placed the artwork in public space (slightly complicated legal territory), but we had to consider they might go astray. However, when chairs were vandalised, smashed up in anger, thrown down a cliff… that made it feel a little more… well, scary.

 

There are moments in many things, when I can feel a bit, well, not brave. Moments when I doubt myself. What the hell am I doing moments. Sometimes it happens when I’m full flight in a costume on a street performing somewhere (my day job). Other times it’s because I feel a bit threatened.

 

When I made my first knicker bunting protest someone kept sending me gross tweets with grubby details on what he wanted to do with my knickers and then, after photos of the pants of protest bunting I made for the Parliament Square Stage for the Women’s March in 2018 were published I received hopes for my death and/or rape (I remember physically shaking at my youngest son’s junior school sports day after a particularly nasty onslaught). I even had the misfortune of a fairly unpleasant face-to-face confrontation with the Carl ‘feminism is cancer’ Benjamin at the Trump Protest.

 

One of our smashed chairs at Christchurch Castle, photo by Adam Coshan

 

After these encounters you can feel a little bit shaken – have to stop, collect your thoughts, remind yourself why you’re doing something. Having art-work I’d spent hours on smashed up a block or so from my home was slightly unsettling. In a democracy we should be able to speak freely and clearly. We should be able to say when we think our representation is poor. Intimidation of the opposing candidates and ourselves in the election campaign as unsettling as it was, wouldn’t stop us making our point. And we’d become the talk of the town. 

 

Rather than wasting chairs (at this point they were being picked up the moment their location was shared on social media) I decided that perhaps we should start to use the chairs like a traditional political yard signs – people could place chairs in their front gardens and that way it was private property and was therefore protected by law: although this didn’t stop some chairs being trashed or stolen, the majority were left alone. We asked for volunteers to take custody of chairs and many responded - more than I could keep up with in fact. The chairs were on front gardens on every major road into Christchurch, especially in high traffic areas. They were definitely being seen.

 

Don’t Keep Chope Sitting Pretty amongst lobster pots, Photo by Jimmy Young

 

THE IMPACT 

Our campaign made the front page of all the local papers – The New Milton Advertiser and Lymington Times had us as their lead front page image for a whole week, the Echo and the Christchurch times featured us too of course. On social media we had great support from Neil Gaimen, Mark Thomas, Gina Martin, Scarlett Curtis – all amazing people and fantastic campaigners themselves. We were in SO many social media posts – people would tag me on Instagram or twitter when they found a chair and my phone would ping at all hours - from someone spotting one on an early morning run in Highcliffe to a shopper noticing one by the post box after grabbing a late night pint of milk at the St Catherine's Hill Nisa (the most tagged of all which lasted the entire election campaign was at picturesque Mudeford Quay nestled in amongst the lobster pots. Thank you to the fishermen who gave it safe harbour). We had support from all over the country from people in other safe seats who felt they were being poorly represented and that their votes were essentially useless. We even had support from Americans logging new campaign ideas for their own elections. 

 

Local Newspaper Coverage

And then… remarkably, totally joyously, people then started to put their own chairs out the front of their houses, #ChairsAgainstChope signs started to go up on houses, in windows, showing solidarity for the cause. At the hustings, someone turned up with a placard, her own cut-out knicker bunting anti-Chope literature, others brought photocopies of articles about our MP's conduct and wrote their own leaflets. Someone had stickers printed and placed them all around the local co-op and all the bollards into town. Another friend mocked up virtual 'un-safe seats' in beauty spots around Christchurch, lest they were removed from public space. Not used to campaign management, I honestly lost track entirely of how many likes, retweets, impressions, Instagram posts and facebook shares we had, but it was literally thousands and thousands and thousands.

Just some of the 'Nope to Chope' protests made by other constituents

 

 

Towards the end of the campaign the electoral commission got in touch with me. They wanted to check that we’d not been contravening electoral spending law for non-partisan political campaigns. Apparently our campaign was achieving such high profile we’d come to their attention, and the rules are quite strict. We had to register with the commission if we were spending more than £700 pounds on a local campaign. The electoral commission don’t deal with enforcement either – the police deal with you directly if you overstep the rules. I obviously laughed my head off at the communication and explained that our receipts show that we’d spent just £50 (mainly on sharpies, a couple of cans of varnish and a domain name). It was a triumphant moment to happen just before the election.

 

Our Campaign Rosettes

SO - DID WE WIN? 

Well… I’m sad to say…. the short answer is no. I realise the Hollywood ending of our plucky ramshackle gang would be that we did. But no. Christopher Chope still has an enormous majority and an extremely safe seat.

I spoke to so many people during the campaign and it was illuminating. Essentially, the fear of “Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party” in our area was so huge that people were so worried ‘he’ might win they felt that they couldn’t not vote conservative. SO many fellow constituents confided in me that they truly hated Chope with a passion “he gives the conservative party a bad name”, that he was “a rude, self-serving” man, but that they would have to hold their nose and vote Tory anyway, because they couldn’t/wouldn’t consider the alternative. Quite a few women of a similar age to me (and please know that this pains me deeply) admitted that they just vote how their husbands do. I suppose, considering the swing to the conservatives in the wider country we certainly couldn’t even hope to have won in such a safe constituency… 

…but well, I do think we did win a bit. I did lots of complicated cross referencing of voting tables, but I can confirm that CHRISTCHURCH IS NO LONGER THE SAFEST CONSERVATE SEAT IN THE UK. In fact we’re not even in the top twenty of safe tory seats. So… well, that’s progress, right? Many more people are now looking at what Christopher does. Anytime he makes any statement or says something awful my inbox fills. I seem to have been appointed the official opposition by some (I’m honoured, but prefer to stay politically adjacent to taking office). However, this increased interest makes me so hopeful. We could all stand to take more notice of our politicians. And even when the odds are stacked against us in our wildly, wildly unrepresentative democracy we can make a noise, get noticed, talk about what our values are and should be. Keep our morals at the forefront of our hearts and minds even as we encounter tough times, because we all have the possibility to try to make the world a bit better. 

 

Don’t Let Christchurch be a Safe Seat, Photo by Andy Hannaford

THANK YOUS

The Christchurch Chairs Against Chope Committee are amazing. They consist of writers, artists, museum specialists, solutions architects and musicians: Amy Bratley (for her amazing copyrighting and support), Sandie Campbell (for hosting a Chairs against Chope Choir at the Christchurch Lights Switch on), Andy Hannaford and Nuala Bisset (breakfasts, chair distribution and cheerleading), Alison Smith (chairs, and social media), Heidi Steller (beautiful drawings, posts and chair distribution), Jimmy Young (photography, logo and leaflet design) and Simon Bradley (who bought the chrischope.co.uk domain name which directed traffic to our blog and was a very sage advisor indeed). You can also see all 50 of the chairs on the site. Special, special thanks go to Adam Coshan, who lent our home to the 50 chairs which were decorated well into the early hours of most days and who checked on them all in the field each morning. 

 

Finally, to our wider community for social media posts, donations of chairs, front gardens, driveways, messages of support, solidarity and encouragement and for those people who didn’t vote for him. It meant the world. I've spent the past year thinking that I could have done more of course, but I learnt so much. And most of all I learnt that we can effect change by talking to people and connecting with them.

Chairs Against Chope drawings by Heidi Steller instagram: @heidistellerart 

AFTERWORD: SOME NOTES ON CHRIS CHOPE’S VOTING RECORD 

Christopher Chope has voted against ALL of the major equal gay rights bills put forward in Parliament since 1998. In 2019 he was one of just 21 MPs in the UK who voted against the Relationship and Sex Education bill (which allows schools to be able to talk about different family models with young people). He voted that gay couples shouldn’t be able to adopt, that there shouldn’t be an equal age of consent, and in 2018 blocked legislation which would allow same sex couples to marry in Northern Ireland, prompting the comment: “It cannot be right that a single MP has now been able to thwart the happiness of thousands”. In 2013 he blocked a posthumous pardon for War Hero Alan Turing, who cracked the 'Enigma Code' and helped Britain win the Second World War. Despite Turing’s heroic act he was charged with homosexual offences in 1952 and killed himself after taking hormones to 'suppress' his sexual orientation.

In 2013 Chope was one of four MPs who camped outside Parliament to facilitate a new Queens Speech. Their proposals included holding a referendum on whether equal marriage should be ‘allowed’, banning the wearing of the burqua, bringing back the death penalty, privatise the BBC, stopping the subsidy of wind farms and renaming August bank holiday ‘Margaret Thatcher’ Day.

As of the General Election in 2017, Chris Chope had the largest majority of any Conservative Member of Parliament. It was, by a long way, one of the safest seats in the UK.

 

Subsequent to the election result, in 2020 Christopher Chope has:

Tabled a motion which, as one MP said was ‘mocking’ children for having anxiety about climate change (it won’t surprise you that Chope’s a sceptic). 

Accused his own government of scare-mongering about coronavirus and voted against a second lockdown in October 2020.

Opposed face mask legislation in shops, supermarkets and other settings and despite the legislation having been passed has been photographed endangering people in a local shop by not wearing a mask.

Chairs Everyone, Photo by Lorna Rees