The FT journalist Stephen Bush (who lives in Camden) has highlighted an issue (or possibly a non issue) about where the Green candidate in the Holborn and St Pancras By-Election actually lives. Bush underlines that the only person who seems bothered about this is Polanski himself.
The Green leader was living on a houseboat at Springfield Marina which is borderline Hackney and Walthamstow. He now lives somewhere in the latter place. However he has revealed that his barber remains in Camden where he lived for a period in the early 2000s (Agar Grove).
The Labour candidate, who also leads Camden Council, does not live in the Constituency either.
I live in Central Cardiff and Tottenham for both personal and work related reasons but I tend to think that when it comes to an election the real question is whether a candidate is in tune with the concerns of voters.
We can easily find a precedent. Keir Hardie was born in Lanarkshire but he went to be elected as Lib/Lab MP for West Ham and then as Independent Labour MP for Merthyr in South Wales. The key issue here was not that he was Scottish or where he might have been living but that he stood up for the concerns of the working class voters in those locations.
Authenticity of politics rather than place.
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