CROYDON COMMENTARY: In this latest Volunteers’ Week, PETER UNDERWOOD, pictured right, who manages an organisation that depends on voluntary service, pays tribute to the people who give up their time, efforts and expertise in the community, and in the political process
The UK Volunteers Week celebration starts on the first Monday in June every year. This is also the 40th year of Volunteers’ Week.
The aim of the week is to recognise, celebrate, and thank the country’s incredible volunteers for all they contribute to our local communities, the voluntary sector and society as a whole.
I must admit that it was only when I left my job in the Civil Service and began looking for ways to become more involved in my local community that I began to realise just how many volunteers there are in Croydon and all the wonderful ways they help our communities.
Giving their time: The Conservation Volunteers is one of the groups active in Croydon
During the covid lockdown, it was amazing to see all the people who stepped forward to volunteer, but it’s important to remember that a lot of those groups who organised the volunteering existed before the lockdown and have carried on since.
Across Croydon there are volunteers still helping out in food banks and food hubs, cooking up hot food for people who need a meal, and continuing the befriending service to talk to people who don’t get much chance to interact with anyone else.
This is on top of those people who help with litter picks, who help to look after our parks, who help out in our hospitals and schools, who answer helplines, who provide free expert advice and who help out in so many other ways.
Then there are the volunteers who help look after other volunteers: the residents’ associations, the faith leaders, the organisers and the support teams. I was at an event only the other week where my local residents’ association was throwing a thank you event for all the people who deliver the local magazine – volunteers thanking volunteers.
My experience as a volunteer and volunteer manager has taught me that volunteers are a very precious thing and should be treated as such.
I find it worrying when any organisation starts assuming that volunteers will just do what they are told to do or replace paid staff. Volunteers do what they are interested in doing and that passion for the job is their strength. I think this is also one of the reasons why the recent announcement by the Conservatives of forcing young people to take on voluntary roles went down so badly.
If you do want to volunteer yourself there are so many ways to help out. A good place to start is Croydon Voluntary Action, who help and support so many groups across Croydon.
And, in this Volunteers Week, please say a big thank you to any volunteers you know.
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At this point in the election campaign, I would like to pass on my personal thanks to all of the great people volunteering to help out the Green Party. Apart from specialist staff at head and regional offices, everyone involved in political campaigning is a volunteer – including most of the candidates.
Many of us are still doing full-time jobs to pay the bills as well as looking after families and all of the other things we need to do in our lives. The same is true of many people in all parties.
So, while you may disagree with our policies, most of us in the election are giving up a lot of time and effort because we think this is the right thing to do for our communities. As a candidate, I’ve seen the amount of abuse we get and when you add on top all of the long hours and stress of constantly being on edge throughout the campaign, it is a strain on your physical health, mental health and your family life.
You may say “but you volunteered to do it”, and that’s true.
But my concern is that many brilliant people who we desperately need in politics are put off because of the stresses and strains of taking part and the impact on the rest of their lives.
We all rightly complain about the poor standard of elected politicians, but we also need to think about the way we treat the people who stand to be elected.
As a final point on the current elections, we’ve now entered silly season when people start making predictions and setting up websites that try to tell other people how to vote “tactically”.
Even the largest national polls only give a snapshot of what is be happening across the whole country. They don’t really tell you what is happening in your constituency. As YouGov states in their most recent poll, “The average error of a seat will increase when there are specific local factors at play that are difficult to fully account for in our model.”
Wrong tactics: in Croydon this year, where the majority of the seats seem set to be won by large majorities, there’s no need for ‘tactical voting’
In other words, the more things that have been happening locally, the more guesswork there is when it comes to the local result. The “tactical voting” websites just apply the national polling figures to what happened in the 2019 election. It’s not very smart and I know of places where their voting advice seems more based on what they want to happen instead of what’s really happening in that area.
Croydon is a prime example of this, with a lot happening in the last five years, as you may have noticed. We had the Labour disaster on Croydon Council followed by the Conservatives showing that they are no better and quickly building up their own list of failures, broken promises and scandals.
We know from recent elections that the Conservative vote in Croydon has plummeted, but the Labour vote hasn’t really gone up. It appears that the Greens are the ones benefiting, closing the gap on the old parties and in some areas already moving up into second.
The pollsters are mostly predicting that Labour will win all the Croydon seats. The Conservatives are only challenging in Croydon South and possibly slipping back to third or even fourth elsewhere.
I’m not going to claim that the Greens are going to romp to victory everywhere, much as I would wish that to happen, but I would say that you would be wise not to believe every prediction you hear.
When it comes to “tactical voting”, don’t spend all your time worrying about how everyone else might vote. You only get one vote, so use it to say who you want to win. If enough people think like you, then your candidate will be the winner.
- Peter Underwood is the Green Party’s candidate for Croydon East in the General Election on July 4
- He also works for The Conservation Volunteers in Croydon. You can find out more about their activities, and volunteering with them, by clicking here
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I very much agree with the *first* part of your piece, Peter (I should declare that I’m a Labour Party member and activist, and whilst I have much admiration for many of the Green Party’s ideals, I maintain that only Labour can win against the Tories in Croydon, and bringing an end to this shambolic and cruel government after 14 years of misrule should be everyone’s priority). However much we may disagree on partisan politics, I 100% echo your sentiments regarding the government’s (IMHO misguided) announcement regarding National Service:
“I find it worrying when any organisation starts assuming that volunteers will just do what they are told to do or replace paid staff. Volunteers do what they are interested in doing and that passion for the job is their strength. I think this is also one of the reasons why the recent announcement by the Conservatives of forcing young people to take on voluntary roles went down so badly.”
Speaking as someone who has long volunteered within Croydon (as part of Nightwatch, the YOT, and as a tribunal representative across various districts, including the London South Employment Tribunal/Montague House), I truly believe that voluntary service is at its best when it’s NOT mandatory (mandatory volunteering is, in any case, surely an oxymoron), but is undertaken by a team of sincere, passionate and committed individuals who genuinely *want* to dedicate their free time to beneficial unpaid work (not that volunteers can or ever should be a substitute for fully-trained and properly paid employees, particularly within the public sector, as you quite rightly stated).
We desperately need electoral reform, but until it suits either of the two main parties, tactical voting will remain a frustratingly necessary feature of our democracy.
For my entire voting life I’ve had the mixed blessing of being able to vote for my preferred parliamentary candidate, in the knowledge that my vote will have no effect on the outcome, other than to possibly contribute to a fairly crude understanding of public opinion that if I’m lucky might influence future policy in some limited way.
At this election I find myself in the one Croydon seat where the outcome is uncertain. I now have the choice of voting for the least worst of two parties who are both moving further away from my values and can be seen on the pages of this site to have poor track records on integrity and governance, or I could vote for a candidate who would in theory represent me better, but at the risk of letting the worst candidate win. That is not a comfortable choice, nor one that we should still be forced to make.