The welsh MP Adam Price is exploring the chances of fielding a Martin Bell style anti-Blair candidate to unseat the Prime Minister in his Sedgefield constituency at the general election. How should a campaign like this be approached, and what are its chances of success?

This should emphatically not be a stunt. Launching aggressive wars illegally and killing tens of thousands of people in the process whilst lying about your reasons for doing it ought to have, in a decent democratic society, at least some political cost attached. This shouldn’t be in the slightest bit controversial to say. The campaign being proposed here is the best chance of levying those costs on the Prime Minister. A serious attempt ought to be made. The plan carries serious risks. There is much scope for failure. But there is also much scope for success. The question at the moment is, who should stand?

This is one of the safest Labour seats in the country, and in the traditional Labour heartlands. There won’t be much mileage in the Tory vote. The candidate will have to appeal to the centre and the left, hopefully to the extent that the Lib Dems, Greens, Respect and others will stand aside. If the campaign doesn’t attract a significant degree of unity on the progressive side, forget it. A potential plus is that there could be enough disenchantment among the Labour rank and file for their campaign to be significantly weakened at the grassroots level. Even with a fearsome national party machine like Labour’s it’ll be hard to compensate for that.

Above all the Labour or natural-Labour voters of Sedgefield will need to be reassured that they are not being made the victims of a stunt got up by outsiders who don’t have their best interests at heart; people who see them and their constituency merely as a stage for a foreign agenda. Having people like Boris Johnson, Frederick Forsyth, Brian Eno, even George Galloway on board will contaminate the campaign. If you’ve voted Labour all your life and Tony Blair’s your MP are any of these characters really going to persuade you to do otherwise? Adam Price, with his views, demeanor and background, seems to me to be the only person connected with this who’d go down well in Sedgefield.

The candidate has to be relatively untainted by party politics, but at the same time someone with obviously centre-left values. They will need the common touch. They will need to be unmanufactured. Natural. In voting for this person the Sedgefield voters will need to know that they’re going to get someone who will honestly, seriously and energetically represent their concerns full time in parliament. Losing a Prime Minister but gaining a proper constituency MP should be a major advantage. The candidate’s credibility will be essential for this point to be capitalised upon.

The candidate will be painted in some quarters as a ranting and raving anti-war obsessive. While the war is plainly the major concern the candidate cannot be single issue. They must be strong on local matters. They will also have to take great pains not to sound shrill. As PM, Blair will find it particularly easy to rise above a high-pitched campaign and seem calm and reasonable. The media will help him. The candidate will have to come over as restrained, polite, good humoured even. Not hysterically anti-Blair. This should not be personal. Not when these votes have gone Blair’s way for over twenty years. This is another reason to keep celebrity Tories away from the campaign. Same goes for Galloway, who can too easily be painted as having a personal grudge.

Finally its worth noting the demographic that gets ignored far too often; the non-voters. These are disproportionately young people and/or people on low incomes; that is to say, naturally progressive voters. The candidate needs to be one that can speak convincingly to these groups. Abstainers constitute more than a third of the electorate and if even a third of those can be added to the coalition of regular voters from the centre and left then a real challenge is on. A high profile contest is going to reinvigorate the election for this seat anyway, and that should be in the candidate’s favour. This gain needs to be maximised.

So who fits this bill? It’s a very tough question. Apparently there are two serious names under discussion. The best suggestion I personally can think of under the above criteria…well, I’ve surprised myself a little here but….Billy Bragg. Impeccable traditional left credentials, without scaring the faint of heart as a demagogue or a militant. Credible and knowledgeable politically, but not tainted by party politics or personal agendas. Unmanufactured and easily able to communicate naturally with the voters, and indeed the non-voters. Downright likeable in fact, and, most importantly, someone the people of Sedgefield will recognise as not a person who will abandon them after election day, but as one who will represent their interests energetically.

Whoever is chosen, providing they meet these criteria, could be part of a seminal victory for progressive policits in the west. It’s a campaign we should unite behind.