Walking the streets and knocking on the doors of potential voters was not quite what Holborn and St Pancras Labour Party chair and community activist Sagal Abdi-Wali expected to do on a cold and drizzly Saturday.

“I mean we were sort of expecting [an election] for pretty much the last year, even though it finally was a bit of a surprise. It was unexpected,” she said.

Abdi-Wali was with three- or four-dozen party volunteers and supporters at an early launch on the past weekend of Labour MP and shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer’s election campaign in the Camden Collective venue (where the entrance is decorated with graffiti art and the WiFi password is DontBeAnArse). If they were tired of having to campaign for another election (there was a regular one in 2015, the Brexit referendum in 2016, Theresa May’s snap election in 2017, and now this one), the enthusiastic crowd didn’t show it.

Just as in the June 2017 election, the December 12 poll will be about Brexit. As the UK last week missed its third deadline for exiting the European Union, by Halloween, Prime Minister Boris Johnson called the election with the hope of strengthening his hand in the House of Commons with an increased Conservative Party majority so that his negotiated deal will be accepted. He wants to see a swift exit from the European Union and is set to frame his campaign as such. It’s a huge risk: May’s election had the opposite effect, with the Conservatives losing seats to Labour.

What the result will be this time, is anyone’s guess, as party loyalty is not divided along the same lines as those who support Brexit and those who do not. Added to that is the UK’s first-past-the-post constituency-based system, which has the additional variable of people voting for a party based on a variety of local issues as well.

For this reason, analysts quote opinion polls with caution.

These same polls got it horribly wrong in the 2016 referendum. Nonetheless, the London Evening Standard published a poll yesterday ahead of the scheduled dissolution of parliament at midnight on Tuesday 5 November and the official start of the campaign on Wednesday, showing Brexit to be the most important issue in London.

Polls also claim that Labour and the Conservatives have lost ground to the Liberal Democrats since the 2017 elections because of the latter’s clear opposition to Brexit. Within the Labour ranks there has been division about whether to leave the EU or stay. The party’s stance is that another referendum on the issue should be called once the terms of withdrawal have been re-negotiated.

Labour has already lost votes to the Lib Dems in Camden during the European elections in May, something Starmer would have been keenly aware of as the odd supporters amid the Doc Martin-wearing crowds of tourists drawn by Camden’s gentrified punk market and vegan cafés dashed up to him to shake hands. Keen to diversify the focus, Starmer told supporters on Saturday the upcoming elections should not just be about Brexit, but that Labour should build on its gains in the 2017 elections to try to unseat the Conservatives.

“Johnson’s politics are right-wing politics,” he said. “He might be the worst of the lot, because this is a man without any moral principles, without any moral anchors. This is a man who would go anywhere to stay in power.”

He said Johnson was a populist, like US President Donald Trump, and had to be beaten for what he was doing on Brexit, but also for his “right-wing politics”. Starmer said austerity under the Tories in the past decade had led to greater inequalities. For the first time in years, life expectancy in the poorer parts of the country was going down, Starmer said.

“In our constituency, we have got a 10-year difference between the well-off areas and the less well-off areas.”

Aside from Brexit, the UK’s National Health Service is set to be one of the key battlegrounds for the December elections. While the Conservative Party has promised billions of pounds more in funding, Labour says austerity has already left 4.5 million people waiting for treatment. Dissatisfaction with the austerity measures went some way to explaining the result of the 2016 referendum, Starmer said.

“In the referendum, people were asked if they want to see things stay the same, and they said ‘no’.”

On the other end of the spectrum, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party began campaigning on Tuesday in Bolsover, about three hours’ drive north-west of London, where 71% of voters in the 2016 referendum wanted to see the United Kingdom leave the EU. Many of the older workers in regions such as South Yorkshire traditionally supported Labour, but many are now poor and felt “left behind”, which was said to be the reason for the swing.

Farage last week ruled out an election deal with the Tories because he felt Johnson’s Brexit deal was too soft — a “Remainer’s Brexit”. The move could split the vote on the right and weaken Johnson’s hand. Farage told the BBC’s Andrew Marr on Sunday he would not stand as an MP in the elections, but rather concentrate on helping with the campaign of the 600 candidates fielded by the Brexit Party. Farage, who has for more than two decades campaigned for the UK to leave the EU, has seven times failed to make it to parliament and is currently sitting in the European Parliament.

Meanwhile, campaigners such as Abdi-Wali said the six weeks notice to the elections was a blessing in disguise.

“Six weeks allow you to focus on the issues that matter and get the messages out,” she said. “Otherwise you have that sort of American thing where you campaign for two years, and all you do is campaign.”

She said anything can happen. “Nobody knows what the results can be — 2017 shows that nothing is certain until it’s final.” DM