No long detours but the obligatory hanging around today. One candidate couldn’t make it due to a hangover and we misplaced a pile of personally addressed letters to voters.

We had a lot more conversations today than yesterday with voters in various states of undress. A disconcerting number of men in this ward are quite happy to answer the door without either their shirt or their trousers on. Frequently both. This does not seem to have any bearing on their politics. Comrade George T persuaded one schoolkeeper to stop voting Labour on account of what they were doing to public sector pay. Housing came up a lot and the Respect pledges on stopping stock transfer and building new homes went down well.

One woman said she wasn’t voting because “the East End ain’t what it used to be.” Our crytpologists think this may some sort of racist code. Another woman said that she didn’t feel that Respect represents the “local indigenous people”. I thought she might have been talking about some little band of hunter gatherers who only come out under cover of darkness. Silly me. Candidate Mehdi was standing behind me and she conceded that he might be indigenous too. She used to be a Labour voter and said they had become too Tory. We went through the usual shopping list and she agreed with us and we left her saying she might vote Respect.

Labour’s vote is holding up quite well with older white people, based on my couple of days of canvassing. Yet a lot of them no longer feel the intense loyalty they once did and their views are not shared by the young.