Martin Kyrle's history of Eastleigh elections from 1965

[tonyhill]

A couple of people have pointed out that there has been little campaigning context to what I have been posting here. This is not the fault of Martin's book, which is stuffed with the minutiae of Eastleigh and Chandler's Ford politics, but is rather the consequence of what I have chosen to extract from his books in the belief that the details of a campaign to get a children's playground in Bodycoats Road in 1970 might be trying readers' patience somewhat. However, here is an extract from 1968 for those who really want to know how it was done then.

"We were fortunate in that two issues of major importance landed in our laps at just about this time.

In 1968 the County Council published the Chandler's Ford Local Plan - in a nutshell, proposals for development on empty land which, when in due course it was built, became what is now the Chandler's Ford Industrial Estate. We weren't against the principal of industrial development in Chandler's Ford, but there were a number of dangers that we considered the Plan had minimised or overlooked completely.

We attended public meetings held to explain the Plan and held other meetings of our own to collect signatures against it until such time as its shortcomings were recognised and proposals written in to deal with them. We gained traction with the public because we were seen to be active in drawing attention to important matters and speaking up for public opinion, at the same time not striking a pose of opposition for opposition's sake (keep in mind that we had no councillors at that time).

The following spring British Rail announced the withdrawal of passenger services between Eastleigh and Romsey, meaning that our railway station would be closed. We were totally opposed to this proposal, in particular because the line would be retained for freight and as a by-pass in the event of access to Southampton Central being blocked (e.g. a roof fall in the Blechynden Tunnel). If you intend to retain the line, why not retain passenger use of it - even if only a morning and evening commuter service? No need to man the station, passengers would pay when they got off at Eastleigh or Romsey.

British Rail wouldn't listen, so we hired a piper to attend in full costume to play a lament on arrival of the last passenger train, and were joined on the platform by a large crowd. Once again the local Liberals were seen to be in the van standing up for local residents - even if we were unsuccessful, and the line was closed despite our protests. N.B. Passenger services resumed in 2003, proving that we were right!"

[yellowperil]

May 21, 2020 6:56:29 GMT tonyhill said:

A couple of people have pointed out that there has been little campaigning context to what I have been posting here. This is not the fault of Martin's book, which is stuffed with the minutiae of Eastleigh and Chandler's Ford politics, but is rather the consequence of what I have chosen to extract from his books in the belief that the details of a campaign to get a children's playground in Bodycoats Road in 1970 might be trying readers' patience somewhat. However, here is an extract from 1968 for those who really want to know how it was done then.

"We were fortunate in that two issues of major importance landed in our laps at just about this time.

In 1968 the County Council published the Chandler's Ford Local Plan - in a nutshell, proposals for development on empty land which, when in due course it was built, became what is now the Chandler's Ford Industrial Estate. We weren't against the principal of industrial development in Chandler's Ford, but there were a number of dangers that we considered the Plan had minimised or overlooked completely.

We attended public meetings held to explain the Plan and held other meetings of our own to collect signatures against it until such time as its shortcomings were recognised and proposals written in to deal with them. We gained traction with the public because we were seen to be active in drawing attention to important matters and speaking up for public opinion, at the same time not striking a pose of opposition for opposition's sake (keep in mind that we had no councillors at that time).

The following spring British Rail announced the withdrawal of passenger services between Eastleigh and Romsey, meaning that our railway station would be closed. We were totally opposed to this proposal, in particular because the line would be retained for freight and as a by-pass in the event of access to Southampton Central being blocked (e.g. a roof fall in the Blechynden Tunnel). If you intend to retain the line, why not retain passenger use of it - even if only a morning and evening commuter service? No need to man the station, passengers would pay when they got off at Eastleigh or Romsey.

British Rail wouldn't listen, so we hired a piper to attend in full costume to play a lament on arrival of the last passenger train, and were joined on the platform by a large crowd. Once again the local Liberals were seen to be in the van standing up for local residents - even if we were unsuccessful, and the line was closed despite our protests. N.B. Passenger services resumed in 2003, proving that we were right!"

It is clear that in the long term you were vindicated on the passenger rail services issue, but what about your concerns on the industrial development? Were your complaints listened to? Did the eventual Industrial Estate get modified to reflect your concerns and were you happy with the eventual outcome?

It's sometimes useful to look back at this sort of campaign a generation or so later and think what worked and what didn't. I can think of campaigns I have been involved in where
a) we totally failed to win the case and were proved right years later, as with your rail issue above
b) we totally failed to win the case, got some useful short-term political traction, but a generation later think maybe we were wrong to be taken in by local pressure and failed to pick up that something that was in last resort just NIMBYism. Sometimes we get accused of using NIMBYs for our own ends- just as likely to be the other way round. So in the end maybe glad we lost!
c) we reached a compromise which means we gained some of our points and had to let others go- which probably means you keep some of your supporters happy but others feel betrayed.
d)we won on all counts, and let's just hope in the long term we were right!

There's 4 possible outcomes, and I can think of personal outcomes fitting all four. I think I'll keep my examples to myself, even now! Other outcomes could be mentioned.

[tonyhill]

My apologies if this account has seemed a bit muddled at times. I am not Martin Kyrle and I do not live in Eastleigh. I asked Martin, in the wake of yellowperil's fascinating account of his years of involvement in the electoral politics of Ashford, if I could do something similar based on his books on Eastleigh, and he was amenable to that idea. It has taken me until now to get around to doing it because normally although I get up early in the morning I am doing invoices and other admin. work. Having lost 80% our business I have had time to do a summary of Martin's second and third books and I thought, particularly as there are no elections at the present time, that it might give some people something to read other than endless threads about aspects of the virus, important though those are.

yellowperil makes some good points in his post above. I think that Martin would accept that being wrong about something is not one of his faults! However, some of the campaigns outlined in the books (and I repeat, there is a total of about 240 pages in these two books so I have just skimmed the surface) seem at this distance to be fairly pointless: a petition against unemployment, for example, in the run up to the 1981 County election. It sometimes seems as though I have spent the whole of the past 45 years printing leaflets campaigning about government cuts and wasted public expenditure.

I do think, though, that Eastleigh Liberals/Liberal Democrats have a good record of taking hard political decisions because they were the responsible thing to do, rather than simply trying to curry favour with the electorate - so they have a good record on yellowperil's point b) above. For example, the Chandler's Ford seats were lost later on because the Tories/Residents opposed plans to build a supermarket on part of a recreation ground and (mostly) the LibDems supported the proposal on amenity and planning grounds. As one of my friends said, he lost four years of council allowances because he voted for what he thought was right.

Similarly, the current furore over Eastleigh's proposal to meet the Government's housing targets for the Borough which led to splits in the LibDem group and the loss of seats in Bishopstoke to anti-development candidates. All such decisions are difficult, but they have to be made.

I will post some sort of summation tomorrow. As I said, I am not going to do extracts from book 4 and it will be a while before Martin publishes book 5. Book 1, about Southampton, is quite entertaining and has the advantage that the targets of the scurrilous stories are presumably dead, but it belongs to a different era and is completely disconnected from subsequent Southampton politics.

[tonyhill]

So what lessons can be learned from Martin Kyrle's partial history of Liberal activity in Eastleigh, bearing in mind that his two books on the subject only go up to the point where the Liberal Party had five Borough councillors and two County councillors? These are my thoughts, not Martin's. Most of them are fairly obvious individually, but in order to achieve lasting success they almost all have to apply, and that only happens rarely.

1 Persistence - a third party is not going to break an existing political hegemony unless it keeps at it year after year. It took twenty years of plugging away for the Liberal Democrats to win power in Eastleigh. When I stood for the first time in the derelict ward of St. Luke's in Winchester I said it would take twenty years to establish a Liberal tradition there, and for twenty years after that we gave the electors the opportunity to vote Liberal, and they finally elected the first Liberal Democrat councillor for the area twenty years on.

2. Dedication - that goes hand in hand with Persistence. Martin and Margaret were dedicated to the Liberal Party as the means of serving their community (Chandler's Ford, West End, Eastleigh, Hampshire), and their lives revolved around service to the community and the party. We all know (maybe are) activists like that: the Kyrles were actually much better balanced than many activists I have known (including myself in my active years!), and even when Martin was fully involved with politics he found time to travel, garden, keep chickens (Martin's chickens are responsible in part for my becoming a vegan), and have a rich cultural life.

3. Innovation - one of the things I haven't really covered in this history is the way that Martin embedded the Liberals in the social life of the area. As well as the jumble sales, and the Ad Lib Newsletter, which eventually became a newspaper (see Volume 4 if you are really interested), for many years he organised a sort of fete - Fryern Field Day - which each year had a theme. It raised money for the party and other local organisations, but was also entertainment for the local populace. He also initiated the Liberal Supporters' Club - basically a monthly raffle, which although by no means unique as a method of raising money must now be one of the longest running such schemes in the country.

4. Resources - Martin realised that the political activity had to be supported by an adequate income, and set about ensuring that happened (vide above and the section on financing leaflets with advertising). I might as well blow my own trumpet as well and say that for 25 years I provided the most significant source of support for the party in Hampshire with the cheap printing that I did for the majority of the county's constituencies, as well as other local parties all over the country. Over time other LibDem printers emerged, and then constituency Risographs took over. Now most leaflets are produced by the on-line printers and are in colour, and have less impact because everyone is so used to them coming through the door.

5. Vision - you need to know why you are doing what you do and what you are trying to achieve. Sounds really obvious, but particularly when you get to have some degree of power, on a hung council for example, it is very common to become overwhelmed with day to day detail and forget that in trying to fix the potholes in Hursley Road you also need to be communicating the political values that motivated you to get involved with politics in the first place. Too many Liberal Democrats are good at talking but poor at thinking and listening: that's a personal view, but I suspect it is also true of politicians of other parties as well.

6. Leadership - maybe this is elitist and illiberal, but no party is going to be successful in the long term unless it has people within it who can provide it with stability and purpose. They also need to be honest and dogged. Charisma is not leadership and, particularly in the Liberal Party, easily leads to the 'meteor' syndrome: someone suddenly emerges who burns brightly for a short time and as quickly disappears, often leaving the place even darker than it was before. I'm sure we can all think of places with good and bad political leadership: Manchester and Reading are examples where Labour leadership has been good over the years. Andover and Gosport are towns that I have known for many years where none of the parties seem to be able to find sufficient people of talent to make a sustainable difference to the local politics (no criticism intended of my friends in both places who have struggled to change the political culture of those towns). Eastleigh has been fortunate in its political leadership since the time of Margaret Kyrle, and the Liberal Party/Liberal Democrats have consistently been able to recruit sufficient numbers of able people to stand as councillors to make it the outstanding local authority that it still is today

[Merseymike]

It doesn't really, then, appear to be about liberalism as such, as evidenced by the failure of the party to win the seat back at parliamentary level - but effectively competent localism, often characterised as taking the politics out of politics. This appears to be built around particular individuals.

This being the case:
Will it be able to sustain should the individuals who replace the current ones not have the same qualities?
Is it effectively a localised phenomenon which will both be more difficult to repeat elsewhere, and be more likely to see local rather than sustainable national success?

[The Bishop]

Though despite that the LibDems have managed to remain dominant at local level, which must tell us something. Not that far away, Adur council is a good example of where the Liberals/LibDems were once as locally dominant as in Eastleigh - but then, quite quickly, collapsed to almost nothing.

[tonyhill]

Yes, I would agree with that. In as much as there is a core vote for Liberalism these days Winchester is typical and Eastleigh is not. Winchester has had a succession of Group Leaders over the years, sometimes controlling the Council and sometimes not, whereas Eastleigh has had two: Margaret Kyrle and Keith House.

[matureleft]

May 23, 2020 8:01:23 GMT tonyhill said:

So what lessons can be learned from Martin Kyrle's partial history of Liberal activity in Eastleigh, bearing in mind that his two books on the subject only go up to the point where the Liberal Party had five Borough councillors and two County councillors? These are my thoughts, not Martin's. Most of them are fairly obvious individually, but in order to achieve lasting success they almost all have to apply, and that only happens rarely.

1 Persistence - a third party is not going to break an existing political hegemony unless it keeps at it year after year. It took twenty years of plugging away for the Liberal Democrats to win power in Eastleigh. When I stood for the first time in the derelict ward of St. Luke's in Winchester I said it would take twenty years to establish a Liberal tradition there, and for twenty years after that we gave the electors the opportunity to vote Liberal, and they finally elected the first Liberal Democrat councillor for the area twenty years on.

2. Dedication - that goes hand in hand with Persistence. Martin and Margaret were dedicated to the Liberal Party as the means of serving their community (Chandler's Ford, West End, Eastleigh, Hampshire), and their lives revolved around service to the community and the party. We all know (maybe are) activists like that: the Kyrles were actually much better balanced than many activists I have known (including myself in my active years!), and even when Martin was fully involved with politics he found time to travel, garden, keep chickens (Martin's chickens are responsible in part for my becoming a vegan), and have a rich cultural life.

3. Innovation - one of the things I haven't really covered in this history is the way that Martin embedded the Liberals in the social life of the area. As well as the jumble sales, and the Ad Lib Newsletter, which eventually became a newspaper (see Volume 4 if you are really interested), for many years he organised a sort of fete - Fryern Field Day - which each year had a theme. It raised money for the party and other local organisations, but was also entertainment for the local populace. He also initiated the Liberal Supporters' Club - basically a monthly raffle, which although by no means unique as a method of raising money must now be one of the longest running such schemes in the country.

4. Resources - Martin realised that the political activity had to be supported by an adequate income, and set about ensuring that happened (vide above and the section on financing leaflets with advertising). I might as well blow my own trumpet as well and say that for 25 years I provided the most significant source of support for the party in Hampshire with the cheap printing that I did for the majority of the county's constituencies, as well as other local parties all over the country. Over time other LibDem printers emerged, and then constituency Risographs took over. Now most leaflets are produced by the on-line printers and are in colour, and have less impact because everyone is so used to them coming through the door.

5. Vision - you need to know why you are doing what you do and what you are trying to achieve. Sounds really obvious, but particularly when you get to have some degree of power, on a hung council for example, it is very common to become overwhelmed with day to day detail and forget that in trying to fix the potholes in Hursley Road you also need to be communicating the political values that motivated you to get involved with politics in the first place. Too many Liberal Democrats are good at talking but poor at thinking and listening: that's a personal view, but I suspect it is also true of politicians of other parties as well.

6. Leadership - maybe this is elitist and illiberal, but no party is going to be successful in the long term unless it has people within it who can provide it with stability and purpose. They also need to be honest and dogged. Charisma is not leadership and, particularly in the Liberal Party, easily leads to the 'meteor' syndrome: someone suddenly emerges who burns brightly for a short time and as quickly disappears, often leaving the place even darker than it was before. I'm sure we can all think of places with good and bad political leadership: Manchester and Reading are examples where Labour leadership has been good over the years. Andover and Gosport are towns that I have known for many years where none of the parties seem to be able to find sufficient people of talent to make a sustainable difference to the local politics (no criticism intended of my friends in both places who have struggled to change the political culture of those towns). Eastleigh has been fortunate in its political leadership since the time of Margaret Kyrle, and the Liberal Party/Liberal Democrats have consistently been able to recruit sufficient numbers of able people to stand as councillors to make it the outstanding local authority that it still is today

I've enjoyed this. The minutiae of local politics has always interested me. I don't know the place, although it's not far from where my family has lived for many years. That may say something about the area (or about them!).

Implicit in the narrative are two other lessons:

1. Listening. I learned early that what might seem to me a matter of trivial importance didn't necessarily appear that way to others, and that anyway lots of tiny things pursued built a local narrative of service. One of my best leaflets showed an A4 map of my ward with individual recent projects that I'd been involved in pulled out and highlighted. There were lots, of varying significance and scale, and it illustrated the breadth and depth of activity.

2. Flexibility. Events can throw out your plans and offer new opportunities and you need to be able to redirect efforts to fit. Doing this with volunteers isn't easy as they don't always appreciate the wider strategy.

It's been suggested that this sort of work isn't ideological. Of course there's a lot in that. However I found that a strong local delivery had fair correlation (over time) to parliamentary votes. Initially it certainly produced lots of "we vote for you but not for the party". And I served through a period (the 1980s) when Labour nationally gave people plenty of opportunity to make that distinction. However over the medium term, with a well-run council illustrating that Labour could deliver competently at that level too, the votes tended to become more consistent.

[yellowperil]

May 23, 2020 9:09:19 GMT Merseymike said:

It doesn't really, then, appear to be about liberalism as such, as evidenced by the failure of the party to win the seat back at parliamentary level - but effectively competent localism, often characterised as taking the politics out of politics. This appears to be built around particular individuals.

This being the case:
Will it be able to sustain should the individuals who replace the current ones not have the same qualities?
Is it effectively a localised phenomenon which will both be more difficult to repeat elsewhere, and be more likely to see local rather than sustainable national success?

There is of course some truth in this and it would be foolish to deny it, but at the same time it is manifestly unfair if you are comparing say Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Local Labour parties have the advantage of their considerably greater national strength and name recognition,so if there is a local collapse it may have a greater chance of being short term. For the Lib Dems it can take decades to build up local strength but for a while once you have done that you have something uniquely good because it has required great character to get there, but achieving continuity thereafter can be very difficult  and the weakness of the picture nationwide is a large part of that, whether that is a matter of political figures with a national profile, media coverage, etc. Indeed the very strength of the Lib Dems at their high points may actually work against them in the longer term. Sometimes Leader A is exceptional and that's how and why the breakthrough occured in the first place, but Leader B who eventually takes over is perfectly adequate for the job of providing continuity, but there is still a feeling that they are no A....  Obviously each case is different but in the case of Eastleigh and most other comparable examples what is being said and done is in broad terms the same basic principles as are being said nationally but it does take a lot more flair and determination to see it all put into practice, i.e. I don't accept the criticism that this is some unLiberal bit of Localism that has nothing really to do with the party, au contraire this is what the party is all about but unfortunately doesn't always live up to everywhere.

Mike, you may need to think this all through in terms of what people of your persuasion are going to do in the future. By abandoning the Labour party because you see it as too compromised, socialists like you finish up in an even weaker starting electoral position than the Lib Dems. That leaves you with maybe a 3-fold choice as to where to put your energies - a) you could concentrate on trying to recapture the Labour brand and machine which you sort-of had during the Corbyn era, b) you could abandon elective politics altogether and think revolution, or c) you could concentrate on where you are locally strong and try to apply your principles there. If you go for option  c) which I would very much prefer you do, you finish up very much with the same strengths/weaknesses as the Lib Dems. 

[Merseymike]

I think doing anything until we get a change in the electoral system is pretty much impossible. The only way I see that happening is for Labour to grasp that it won't win an overall majority on its own as to finally concede the need for some sort of pre election arrangement. Unfortunately the right of the party are currently behaving as were the bulk of the left before the last election. A level of rather naive optimism.

I must also say that the slide into a disturbing blend of authoritarianism and sentimentality hasn't endeared the left much to me in recent weeks. Neither has the naive equation of the economy with capitalism, so let's not worry if the economy collapses because we can replace it with something better than capitalism. The idea of priorities also seems to be off the agenda particularly relating to healthcare

[yellowperil]

Yes , if the final word is the need for cooperation between progressive parties in order to achieve electoral reform, who am I to complain?

[hullenedge]

Thoroughly enjoyed reading these three books. Plenty of amusing anecdotes and election tips (for all sides). Pity that there are few of this genre.

[tonyhill]

I have just finished printing and binding Martin Kyrle's fifth volume on Eastleigh politics, this one stretching from 1981 until 1990 and control of Eastleigh Council. I don't know if there will be a further volume: the LibDems lost control in the the wake of the Eastleigh Services debacle, and Keith House replaced Margaret Kyrle as Group Leader, neither of which events would be likely to inspire Martin to carry on with this history. So in all probability the next thirty years of Eastleigh's political history will remain unwritten, along with that of pretty much everywhere else in the UK.