Reform UK National Action Day

After recently having had our most sensational branch meeting yet, I was preparing to wind down for a long weekend off to celebrate my birthday. The team were well equipped without me and tasks were in good order. Great!

Then I receive a notification: we are running a national action day and all branches are recommended to get involved. When is it happening? Two weeks time. What are the stakes? £5,000 for the winning branch.

Preparation

Hurried conversations are had in the committee and we decided we were going to go for it. Sure, the competition is strong, but there's a nice jackpot to aim for and, quite frankly, it will be a positive exercise for us anyway.

So we tell the membership and recruit some volunteers to save the date. James and I spend a few evenings figuring out exactly what we were going to do. Thanks to a generous donation we are able to afford a gazebo (Thank you again!) and this would be a big event to debut it. So what plan did we come up with?

• 10:00 : Tilgate Parade team start

• 11:00 : Stall is set up at Queen's Square

• 13:00 : Broadfield Barton team start

• 13:30 : Stadium team start (match against Bristol that day)

• 14:00 : Cinema team start

• 16:00 : All finish for final photos and videos at the stall

• 16:30 : Take down the stall and clear up

• 17:00 : Pub and results

Alongside this we have our guy-in-the-chair who will accept all our photos and videos and post them on social media. To add some more flavour to the day, I call in friends from Manchester with very good camera equipment to come take pictures and videos.

Next I design the gazebo art and order it. Thanks to the wonderful service we got at gazeboshop.co.uk, it arrives just in time. When I say 'just in time', I mean the frame arrives 15 minutes before we leave my home to start the day. The card reader would not set up easily either, but we get it working the morning of the event.

The car loaded and ready to go!

The Main Event

However, despite that close call, we made it. Upon parking up, we start carrying things to the gazebo site in Queen's Square. Very quickly we run into our volunteers who help us unload and set up. The stall looked great! After a brief to the team, everyone gets to work spreading out talking to people and it takes barely a few minutes before we are signing up our first new member.

So many people speak to us over the day it's impossible to regale the stories. There is one thing that we consistently hear: the Tories failed and can't be trusted and Labour are just terrible. People use more colourful language than that but I shall remain polite in writing! I take our camera team on a tour of Crawley where I give a few interviews and show them what our town is like. There's 80GB of footage, so that will come out in time and in snippets.

When I arrive back at the stall having completed the tour, a gentleman was having a very emotional argument with James, our incredibly calm vice-chair. He's a master at handling those conversations which he demonstrates again then.

As 4PM comes, everyone assembles together exactly as I had asked (damn my teams are good, I didn't have to chase anyone) and we conclude the day with our final photos and videos. Our last task: tidy up and then off to the pub.

It's a close race!

So we head into the White Hart, get ourselves a drink and start sharing stories. Then I get a nudge from HQ. There's half an hour left, we're 2nd place in the South East, the competition is right behind us. There's still money to be won. The competition closes at 5PM.

It's not over.

We scramble about thinking how we can get just a few more. One of our team rings family and manages to secure two members. Another rings a friend and get's one more. Another of our team goes round the pub to sign up anyone else. Then 5PM comes. Now it really is over.

I would say the wait is tense, but it isn't. We're in a pub after a long day, everything went well and we're all friends, so we relax.

My phone beeps. I receive this message.

So close! Yet so far!

We already knew Portsmouth was far ahead of us, so to get 2nd place is a huge achievement and we ended up 7th in the entire country. Only six branches did better than us out of 450 and we managed it with no celebrity help, no elected people in our area and we're as grassroots as it gets. We banked £1,500 for the branch.

Thank you everyone!

Celebrations continue to the great music at the White Hart ruined by our loud singing.

I'm so proud of everyone involved who helped make this day happen. Everyone was amazing and I am lucky to have so many people of such great competence around me. A true team effort and a great achievement.

What a day.