Another Saturday's stalls

West London members were out again yesterday with two street stalls in different parts of the South West constituency.

Brentford turned out to be a bad choice as there weren't many passing by, so we moved on to Hounslow and gave out leaflets, sold the Socialist Standard, made a few contacts, even got a £5 spontaneous donation, and engaged in discussions with workers from eastern Europe including one from Russia who agreed with us. That's the second week running that we've been in Hounslow, so people there will be beginning to note our presence.

The stall in Kingston went on as planned despite the cold (8 degrees centigrade). Both the Remain and the Leave campaigns were leafletting, so we changed our tactic and gave out our election leaflet inside our one on the referendum headed "An Irrelevant Sideshow. The Socialist view on the EU referendum". This provoked a discussion with three young supporters of staying in. They put us on the spot a bit when, after we had said that one minor benefit of being in the EU was the free movement of workers and the relaxing of border controls and couldn't see any benefit to workers from leaving, they said why not vote to stay in as an out vote would take this benefit even if minor away. We had to reply that for us the over-riding issue was capitalism or socialism and that, in or out, capitalism and its problems would still continue. They turned out to be Labour Party members from Leatherhead in Tory Surrey, so they must know what it is like to be in a small minority faced at election times with an alternative (Tory or LibDem) both of which they reject. An Out supporter told us he was going off to live in Bulgaria, apparently not realising that this might not be so easy if his side won.

Next week it's Chiswick again and Feltham but if Feltham turns out to be like Brentford it could be Hounslow for a third time.