'Never heard of them, mate': Change UK's struggle to cut through the indifference

The good news for Change UK members canvassing in Liverpool on Tuesday was that no milkshakes were thrown.

In a European election build up where the dairy drink has become the protest missile of choice against Brexiteers and bigots, the most dispiriting thing chucked at this new progressive pro-Remain party has perhaps been the recurring question: who?

Which brings us to the bad news.

Despite bringing some of their big(ish) guns – though no Chuka, no Anna, no Heidi – to this stringently pro-European city, Change UK was met with what might generously be called indifference.

During 20 minutes of canvassing in the centre and around the Royal Albert Docks, there was almost zero recognition of either the party’s two attendant MPs, Mike Gapes and Chris Leslie, or its regional MEP candidates, Andrea Cooper and Arun Banerji. Few people allowed themselves to be engaged beyond accepting leaflets. At a small rallying event afterwards – held in a conference room of a Jury’s Inn – only a dozen or so people turned up. They were outnumbered by customers sat downstairs in the hotel bar. And this was 4pm.

When I told one such drinker what was happening on the floor above, he seemed unbothered. “Never heard of them, mate,” he noted. He had, for what it’s worth, heard of the Brexit Party.

“We’re a small party and we don’t expect to make an immediate breakthrough,” said Mr Gapes when asked about this apparent lack of interest. “But we are planting our flag and we’re not going away.

“I think of this like a start-up business and it comes with all the opportunities – and challenges – of a start-up business. So, we don’t have the party machinery of the Labour and the Tories because we’re starting something new and fresh. But that brings possibilities. It’s hard work but it’s exciting. This is the most exciting thing, politically, I’ve ever been part of.”

Both Labour and the Tories took years to be properly established, his colleague Mr Leslie pointed out, flyers in hand. “By comparison, we’re up and running in a little over five weeks. I call that a success.”

Yet, in Liverpool at least, the optimism of the movement’s early days – when eight Labour and three Tory MPs quit their respective parties to form The Independent Group – seemed a long way off.

Back then, there was talk that more parliamentarians would join them and that this nascent group – created with the twin aims of pushing for a second EU referendum and taking the political centre ground – could change the course of both Brexit and British political history. It was, its twin spokespeople Anna Soubry and Chuka Umunna repeatedly said, the natural home of Britain’s 16.1 million Remainers.

Today, 24 hours before voting booths open for European elections, it is polling, nationally, at just 3 per cent. A third of people asked by YouGov do not even know that Change UK wants to stay in the EU. Which may be especially galling because, strictly speaking, staying in the EU is the only real policy it has so far.

So perturbed by this lack of progress was David Macdonald, their lead candidate in Scotland, that last week he told supporters to back the Lib Dems to shore up the Remain vote. Another of their better-known names Rachel Johnson was just as blunt in a Times interview at the weekend: “the rat that jumps on the sinking ship”, is how she described her decision to join the party.

Even party leader Heidi Allen seems unconvinced by what is happening. In a Radio 4 interview on Monday she appeared to throw doubt on whether there would even be a Change UK by the time of any new general election: “the format might be slightly different”, she said when asked if she would stand for the party at such a contest.

And yet, despite all these setbacks – “challenges” appears to be the shorthand used by those involved – there remained a sense that these elections are far from lost during Tuesday’s campaigning in Liverpool.

“Being involved with this has been the best month of my life,” said Andrea Cooper, a youth charity strategy manager who is the party’s lead candidate in the northwest. “And I think we might be surprised on Thursday.

“When I’ve been out and about across the region, the people I speak to are consistently saying they get what we’re about, that they support what we’re doing. We’re winning the arguments.

“They recognise Chuka, and like him. But, of course, the party is just five-weeks-old so when we’re on the street, we don’t have the same brand recognition as Labour or the Tories. It would be unreasonable to think we could.”

The fact that Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party – also just five-weeks-old – already has huge recognition and is polling at 33 per does not concern her.

“Nigel Farage started his campaign 30 years ago,” she said. “That’s not really a new party.”

Of equally little concern is the mockery the party has received for its bizarre symbol, four lines of black and white that looks not entirely unlike a redacted document. Indeed, as we spoke, I noticed she was wearing a top with a somewhat similar pattern.

“I bought it especially,” she said. “I saw it and thought I have to have that.”

She herself decided to stand, despite having no political experience, because she felt so passionately that being part of Europe is better for the future.

“I deal with young people every day for work – they are struggling to get on the housing ladder and to find good jobs, and being out of Europe is only going to make that worse,” she said, adding: “A second referendum on the terms of any agreement will give the country a chance to turn away from this act of self-harm.”

Her wannabe MEP colleague, Arun Banerji, is a 27-year-old junior doctor – one who was present at the Manchester Arena attack – who says that staying in Europe is vital for public services to continue functioning.

“Voting Change UK is the only way to ensure that happens,” he told me.

As it happens, one person who turned up to the event at the Jury’s Inn had already done just that.

Suzanne Butler, a community nurse from Liverpool, cast her ballot when postal voting opened earlier this month.

“The 2016 referendum was a vote without the full facts and we need a new one,” she said as the day’s canvassing came to an end. “I take my hat off to this party because all these MPs, they’ve risked their political careers for what they believe in, which is the right thing. And I think they’ll do better than people think. I think this country likes people with principles, which is exactly what they have. Even if they don’t do brilliantly this time round, the country needs a party like this.”

Indifference may have dominated this campaign but the future, it seems, could still be bright for Change UK.