I will be honest, a year ago I simply did not believe that Labour would have any chance of taking Nick Clegg’s seat of Sheffield Hallam. But now, two polls have put Labour in the lead. We have an excellent candidate in Oliver Coppard, we have momentum and a campaign that feels lively, active and engaged locally.

It is too late to add Sheffield Hallam to the list of Labour’s 106 target seats and Labour centrally should probably not reallocated their already scarce resources. But unofficially, we should all get behind the campaign.

I’m not normally a big fan of symbolic decapitation strategies. If we had little or no hope of winning the seat, I wouldn’t want us to waste time and resources on it just out of a sense of loathing for Nick Clegg as an individual politician. Not while David Laws  exists in the world any way!

But there are good reasons for Labour to throw a certain amount at this seat. Below are five of them.

1. I am a big fan of Labour winning seats. And we could win this one. In an election that will be as close as this one, every seat will count. No seat where we have a reasonable chance – and seats where we are ahead in the polling definitely fall into that category – should be abandoned. We have a real chance of gaining an excellent new Labour MP. Let’s do our best to make that happen.

2. As George Eaton has pointed out on Twitter, losing Clegg as leader makes it much, much harder for the Lib Dems to go back into coalition with the Tories. It is highly likely that the next Leader of the Lib Dems will be Tim Farron who may well prefer to try to heal the Party from opposition rather than go into a formal deal with anyone. But he certainly comes from the more left wing faction of the Party making a smooth continuation of the current arrangement extremely unlikely. So if we don’t manage an outright majority, a Lib Dem Party without Clegg works considerably better for Labour.

3. Lib Dems are incredibly tribal. More so in many ways than supporters of other Parties, And they hate Labour. They hated us when we were in power and they hate us even more now we point out the ways they have failed and hurt our country while they are in power. Decapitating their leader simply cannot make them hate us any more than they already do. But perhaps it might wake them up to the lie they tell themselves that it is just Labour activists who feel this way about them. Losing their leader might be the wake up call they need as to just how toxic working with the Tories has been. It might help them kick start the healing process they need as a party. It won’t feel like it on the day after the election – but it could be the best thing that could happen to them as a Party.

4. The Lib Dems are currently running a “57 by-elections” strategy. Following the success they had in holding on to Eastleigh after they threw everything they had at it, they believe that this is their best bet at holding on to as many of their seats as possible. Of course the reality is you can’t do this very successfully when it’s diluted 57 times. Like homoeopathy, it doesn’t work. It’s a silly lie people tell themselves to make then feel better even when their sickness is fatal. They have lost a third of their members. They don’t have the resources they once had. They will not take a threat to their leader lightly. They will have to concentrate more resources on Sheffield Hallam than they had originally planned taking them away from other seats. So even if we don’t gain the seat, we win by stretching them thinner in other seats where we are challenging them.

All Labour Party members should have a think about what they can do to help Oliver Coppard win in May. At the very least, those of us who are a bit  far away from Sheffield can all donate to help Oliver get over the line. If he manages it – and he could well manage it – this will be a political moment that will put Portillo’s loss in 1997 in the shade.

Let’s go for it Labour. Good luck Oliver!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 7th, 2015 at 19:35 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.