Last week’s local election results were a mixed bag, with the one overriding theme being a continued decline in Conservative fortunes. Roughly half of all of the Conservative councillors searching for re-election last Thursday lost their seats. A proportion harking back to the fate of councillors in my very own party, the Liberal Democrats 10 years ago as we faced deep unpopularity towards the top of our time within the coalition government. Back then, I saw many excellent councillors lose their seats due to voters selecting to punish them – and reward others – on account of national issues.
The most high-profile casualty of last week’s elections was Andy Street, the Conservative elected mayor of the West Midlands. He was widely considered to have done a superb job and to be a pleasing, effective and independent-minded person. And – albeit by the tiniest of margins – he still lost his job last week to the Labour candidate Richard Parker.
Many people – including Parker himself and opposition politicians from all parties – have expressed real sympathy and heat towards Andy Street, who has said that he’s personally devastated by the result.
There are a whole lot of Andy Streets on the market immediately. Less famous people across the country, who’ve either lost their seats, or else stood for election with a practical hope that they may win but weren’t successful.
To be a candidate is to make yourself really vulnerable, to show yourself to scrutiny, perhaps to ridicule and hostility, but actually to the likelihood that you just might be rejected by your community. We should thank God for individuals who have put themselves forward and pray that He will give wisdom and humility to those that won, and luxury and strength to those that lost.
But it is not just the candidates who bear the injuries of defeat.
Maybe you’ve got seen small bands of plucky volunteers, carrying leaflets, with hand-held devices or clipboards and wearing rosettes, walking around your local area and knocking on doors?
In this age of sophisticated software, there continues to be no higher option to gather details about voters’ intentions or to know their situations, than on foot, door by door, person by person.
This is where the ‘real stuff’ of politics happens and people politicians and commentators who spend an excessive amount of time in Westminster, or within the office or online … will simply miss this and remain out of touch.
On the doorstep I hear in regards to the difficulties of each day life for families and communities and I see how they’re so often the results of problems on a national and international scale. Housing needs, experiences of health treatment and waiting times, the plight of small businesses, the impact of poverty …
Knocking on someone’s door doesn’t necessarily mean that you just might be welcomed! Rory Stewart describes his first session canvassing within the Cumbrian town of Penrith. He encountered a street filled with individuals who declared themselves too busy to talk to him and in a single case he literally had a door slammed in his face. Nothing brings you more right down to earth than a few hours out on the doorsteps!
The privilege of being a neighborhood constituency MP is that you just get to champion a spot and advocate for and serve its people. It is the same calling to being rooted in a neighborhood church. To love the place you might be in, to stick to it through thick and thin, through gentrification or decline, through disasters and celebrations. It resides out that familiar instruction from Jeremiah to ‘seek the welfare of the town you might be in’.
And the canvassers and other volunteers for candidates who lost last week, will feel the devastation of defeat just as keenly because the candidates themselves. Yet, even in defeat, their calling to serve their community may not have modified. Defeat is just not at all times God’s way of telling you to offer up and do something else. Maybe He is teaching you or refining you in order that you could go on to greater things?
A friend of mine who lost his seat as an MP a couple of years ago explained that far worse even than the shock of defeat and the lack of his job, was the lack of his identity. Being the local MP was who he was. It was his status, it gave his life meaning. I do know what he means. Yet I also know that my status doesn’t give me my identity, nor does it sum up who I’m, nor give my life meaning. A wondrous thing about being a follower of Jesus is that we all know that irrespective of what the electorate thinks of us, the God of the universe thinks that we’re price dying for, we’re loved and we’re precious to Him.
For those that shouldn’t have their hope in Jesus, defeat might be all of the more crushing. So we should always pray for all those that now bear the burden of disappointment following last week’s elections – but we should always pray otherwise for individuals who know Jesus as their Lord and Saviour, and for individuals who to this point don’t.
