From the Vaults

I've popped to the party offices in Clapham, and run across our archivist here. So, I put him to work, and here are our votes from the 1973 GLC election:

Islington North	Buick	284
Hackney North & Stoke Newington	Carter	250
Hampstead	Cox	191
Hornsey	Porter	144
Streatham	Simpkins	120
Vauxhall	Sansum	121
Lambeth Central	Baldwin	115
Tottenham	A. Young	109
Holborn & St. Pancras	Davies	99
Norwood	H. Young	95
St. Marylebone	Weidberg	84

If we take those seats in our 2012 area, Norwood, Streatham, Lambeth Central and Vauxhall, we have 451. The Old GLC constituencies were much smaller and more numerous, but judging by their names they seem to have corresponded with the rough size of a Parliamentary constituency, and seem to have had electoral lists totalling about 45,000 voters. So that was 451 out of about 185,000 potential voters.

As the wikipedia article, linked to above, states, 1973 was a changed electoral system. Here are our totals for 1970

Camden	Cox	391
Camden	Davies	323
Camden	Grant	299
Ealing	George	735
Ealing	Buchanan	695
Ealing	Rose	392
Ealing	Sawyer	293
Haringey	Carter	443
Haringey	Buick	374
Haringey	Waite	212
Lambeth	Garnham	620
Lambeth	Phillips	536
Lambeth	Simkins	295

As can be seen, these were multi-member constituencies, so we could be picking up stray votes from other parties. We can take our "real" vote as being our top vote in each, which to summarise were:

Camden	Cox	391
Ealing	George	735
Haringey	Carter	443
Lambeth	Garnham	620

We're mostly conerned with Lambeth. Now, note, this is across the whole borough (hence the much higher votes than 1973). Lambeth is, obviously, what is now our main stomping ground of Lambeth and Southwark. 620 votes in 1970 can be roughly coubled (assuming an equivilent vote available in Southwark) to give us 1,200 - about our result in 2008, but about half of our vote this time. The above results were about 0.6% of the vote. But, let's look at 1967.

Camden	Buchanan	907
Camden	Grant	419
Camden	Giles	411
Ealing	Cox	1250
Ealing	George	1107
Ealing	Rose	611
Ealing	Wait	441
Haringey	Buick	1277
Haringey	Carter	1191
Haringey	Davies	1067
Lambeth	Garnham	1362
Lambeth	Baldwin	970
Lambeth	Phillips	806

And those headlines again:

Lambeth	Garnham	1362
Haringey	Buick	1277
Ealing	Cox	1250
Camden	Buchanan	907

Now, intriguingly, we were up against Communist Party opposition that year, and by and large they ouit polled us. Except in Lambeth, where Garnham came above one of the communist candidates. 1967 was not a year of crisis (in fact, it was the year before the crisis, while the going was still relatively good). It was a year of voting against the incumbant Labour government (so the Tories got in) and that may explain our quite high vote in Haringey (1.8%), and our then record in Lambeth (1.3%). To continue my unscientific procedure, if we double the Lambeth vote, we get 2724, just behind our score this time. Last time led to Tory government and to a surge back to Labour, this time we achieved our vote during a surge to Labour, which suggests there may be space for more growth. but in any case, it looks like 2012 is definitively our best election result ever. The trick now will be to build on that vote.