Clapham results

Three of us attended the count this afternoon in the Recreation Centre besides Brixton railway station. The results for the three wards we contested can be found here:

Clapham Town

Ferndale

Larkhall

The results in the two wards we contested both times (Ferndale and Larkhall) are almost exactly the same as last time in 2010.

The new council will be completely dominated by Labour with 50 seats to 3 for the Tories and 1 for the Greens.The Liberals have been excluded from being a serious contender for council seats in the future, with the Greens taking their place as the main opposition to Labour. UKIP got nowhere (look at their result in Ferndale) and, although TUSC got more votes than us in the two wards we both stood in, in the other wards they contested they didn't do much better than we would have done.

Too many leaflets?

We finished leafletting Clapham Town ward yesterday. Larkhall has been done too and Ferndale is nearly finished but at the moment it looks as if we could have over a thousand left. We had 12000 printed, with 2500 for Junction ward in Islington and 9500 for the 3 Lambeth wards, i.e 3100 or so each. This was based on our experience of the by-elections we contested last year. We may still be able to get the figure down by revisiting blocs we left out because we couldn't gain access or streets which were difficult. We've also got a literature stall outside 52 Clapham High St later today (from noon). And we could leaflet the 4 tube stations in the area (Clapham North, Clapham Common, Stockwell and Brixton). We'll see.

Labour seem to be putting a lot of effort into holding Clapham Town with two glossy leaflets and more posters than usual. In fact they seem to be up to the old Labour Council trick of putting up some of their posters in empty council-owned houses. The only other posters are those for the Green Party in nearly every house in Rectory Gardens. Not surprising since the residents of this car-free street with insecure tenancies are threatened with eviction by the Labour council so that the area can be handed over to property developers to build upmarket flats (with a few "affordable" ones facing the dustbin area thrown in).

Trotskyist intervention

We now know some of the others who will be standing in the wards we are contesting. The crypto-trotskyists of TUSC have announced that they will standing candidates in Lambeth in the Bishops, Ferndale, Herne Hill, Larkhall, Oval, Princes and Vassall wards.

Their candidate in Ferndale will be James Ivens and in Larkhall Alexander Betteridge. They will be urging a vote for No2EU in the European Parliament elections that will be held the same day. In stark contrast our leaflet will be advocating a write-in vote for World Socialism.

Collecting the signatures to stand

The electoral register which will be used for the elections (European and local) on 22 May became available yesterday. We picked up copies for the three wards we will be contesting in Lambeth and began collecting the signatures of local electors to be able to stand (ten per ward). We got them for one ward (Larkhall), started on another (Ferndale) and will get them for Clapham Town on Friday. The nominations papers can't be handed in till after 14 April but it's as well to get this chore over as soon as possible.

One street seemed to have a high level of political understanding. On being told that we were socialists the person understood straighaway that we were not the Labour Party. So did the next person who replied "no thanks, I'm a Labourist". It is true that this particular street is one of those we have leafletted regularly since the last local elections in 2010.

Another person referred to Farage as "Forage", not that UKIP is not going to find many votes in this area. We don't know whether they will be contesting this ward (Larkhall) but they will be contesting Ferndale where their candidate will be Elizabeth Jones who we debated against last Wednesday at our premises in 52 Clapham High Street and who lives in the ward.

A bit of psephology

Here's the result with percentages:

Labour 1575 (69.3%)
Lib Dem 277 (12.2%)
Green 177 (7.8%)
TUSC 76 (3.4%)
Con 74 (3.3%)
UKIP 64 (2.8%)
Ind 20 (0.9%)
Soc 11 (0.5%)

Turnout: 20%.

Everyone knew that this was a one-horse race, but nobody predicted (see yesterday's blog) a landslide Labour victory of this proportion. It's the sort of percentage that Labour used to get in the mining valleys of South Wales when the pits were still open. It looks as if inner London is becoming a Tory no-go ahead like the Northern cities.

Although everybody was expecting Labour to win, there were other contests going on -- LibDems v Greens for second place; UKIP v the Tories, even us v TUSC) -- and it can be seen who won these. Whether we like it or not (and we don't), in the public perception where there are two candidates describing themselves as "socialist" they are seen as rivals for the votes of those who consider themselves socialist. But not just in the public perception, but also amongst those who consider themselves socialist. Although we don't attach all that importance to the number of votes we get, it is undoubtedly true that we get more when there is not another candidate calling themselves socialist. In fact the combined vote for TUSC and us is about the same here (3.9%) as it was in the Brixton Hill by-election in January (4.1%). That would seem to be the measure of the "anticapitalist" audience.

In any event, TUSC must be pleased with the result. Finishing ahead of both UKIP and the Tories, they have shown that they can consistently get about 3% in elections with their "anti-cuts" campaign. This will be a protest vote against the cuts rather than for Trotsky's transitional programme or for Militant's strategy for combatting them and, as such, will have some significance. But 3% is not enough to launch a general strike over the issue.

UKIP will also be disappointed. This time (compared with Brixton Hill) they ran a much more professional campaign (expensively produced glossy leaflets, etc) specifically aimed at winning over Labour voters. They got nowhere. It looks as if they really are just an external faction of the Tories in rural and seaside areas, especially those with a noticeable presence of migrants from East Europe. They are not going to make a breakthrough in the big cities. It is difficult to understand why they thought that their appeal to old-fashioned Britishness was going to have an impact in a ward where, in the 2011 census, only 5116 out of a population of 15,771 (a little over 32%) put themselves down as "White British" (see here). Parties such as the BNP and them are no threat in places like this despite the fuss made about them by "anti-fascists".

One of our reasons for contesting these by-elections (apart from the wards being in walking distance of our Head Office) was to get us known more locally in preparation for next year's full borough council elections in May next year (which are going to be held on the same day as the Euroelections, which should increase the turnout a bit). We will almost definitely be contesting the Larkhall and Ferndale wards as we did last time. Ferndale ward is also in Brixton (bordered by Brixton High Street and Acre Lane). In the meantime we'll be continuing leafletting them and adding the nearby parts of Brixton Hill and Tulse Hill wards.

Update

A couple of interesting items in today's South London Press.

On page 8 there's a feature article entitled "Lack of job opportunities sees dole queue lengthen". According to this,

Over the past four years the number of people claiming Jobseeker's allowance in Coldharbour ward has almost doubled from 661 to 1,078. The numbers have also risen in Ferndale ward with 406 unemployed people four years ago compared to 594 today. In Brixton Hill there are considerably more people out of work, from 384 four years ago to 611 today.

By coincidence (or not) these were the three wards where, relatively speaking, we did best in the GLA elections in May.

On page 18 Streatham MP Chuka Umunna has a column headed "Bright pupils let down by the coalition". It is illustrated by a photo of a students' demonstration against the cuts in which can be clearly seen someone selling ... Socialist Worker. I don't suppose he's too pleased but, then, the SWP probably voted for him at the last General Election.

In the meantime Lambeth Council has put up the list of candidates for Brixton Hill together with their photos.

Tomorrow the Executive Committee will be adopting the election manifesto. On Monday we'll be leafletting the ward again. Meet at 52 Clapham High Street at 12 noon.

Out for the count

The result at Vauxhall wasn't declared till after 8 o'clock on Friday morning and then it was back to the Town Hall for the count for the local elections which lasted till midnight. We got 82, 48 and 45 in Ferndale and 48, 45 and 46 in Larkhall. For the full figures see here and here respectively. Since Vauxhall has 8 wards and we contested two this meant that a quarter of the electorate had a chance to Vote Socialist twice and some obviously did. We only saw a handful who had voted just for all 3 of our candidates, but most of the others were deliberately cast for us (eg one for us and 2 for Labour or 1 for us and 2 for the Greens) and the higher voted for Danny Lambert is to be explained by people knowing what we stood for.

Besides staring at ballot papers the two of us had a chance to talk to Janus Polenceus of the English Democrats. He invited us to send a speaker to a meeting of theirs to explain our attitude to their proposal for an English Parliament (not sure we can say much about that except that it's irrelevant). He also said that the English Democrats wanted a referendum to be held in the old county of Monmouthshire to decide whether the inhabitants wanted to return to England which they had been part of until the 1960s. He got 60 votes in Stockwell ward.

At the general election count two of us spent some time talking to the people from the Animal Protection Party. Apparently they are different from the Animals Count Party we met at the European elections. They see themselves as the "spikey" wing of the Animal Rights movement and are hunt saboteurs. Their candidate told us he had voted for the Greens in his constituency.

We eventually met and talked to the people from Workers Power. At the beginning of the evening they had been hostile, the editor of their paper remarking to Danny that we had decided to "sully our hands" had we? In the end, as the votes for the 5 minor parties were counted together at one table, we had to talk to each other in a more civilised manner. When I said that the last time there had been two candidates calling themselves "socialist" in Vauxhall (in 1997) the other one (Scargill's SLP) had easily got many more votes than us, their candidate said that he had once been a member of the SLP. I'd forgotten that quite a number of Trotskyist groups entered the SLP till Scargill the Stalinist kicked them out.

The local bloggers couldn't get over the fact that, despite his slick campaign of tweets and YouTube clips, Jeremy Drinkall got less votes than us. Our friend the SW8 nationalist in particular, but he'd been hostile to us from the start. Maybe it was the triumph of substance over form. Or maybe that the people on council estates he targetted don't tweet. To tell the truth, from a media point of view, his campaign was better than ours. We never got a mention in the Financial Times, or got a photo in the South London Press or used YouTube. We'll have to do better here next time.

Local election nomination papers handed in

This morning handed in the nomination papers for our 6 candidates in the local elections in Lambeth. They've been accepted. So our candidates (Bond, Buick and Parker for Larkhall and Lambert, Lee and Shodeke for Ferndale) are now officially candidates and are no longer allowed to buy drinks for electors. Apparently the Greens are expected to stand a full list so there could be at least 15 candidates for the 3 seats in both wards.

On the way back from Brixton Town Hall noticed the offices of the local government workers' union UNISON so dropped a leaflet through their letter box and looked at their noticeboard. There were three notices.

One was a call for volunteers to go canvassing for the Labour Party in Barking to stop the BNP. Apparently there's a chance they might win control of the council there. As if it wasn't the inevitable failure of the mainstream reformist parties to make capitalism work for the workers that hadn't created conditions for the rise of the BNP.

The other was from the Union's LGBT section (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgender, for the uninitiated). Not quite sure what that's got to do with trade unionism which is about what unites workers not what divides them but maybe it's just concerned with combatting prejudices.

The third was from Youth Fight for Jobs, which is a front for Militant. The leaders of UNISON don't like Militant and have recently taken over a branch in Greenwich which Militant had captured. Don't know what this was all about but in general it's a bad thing for union branches to be hi-jacked by vanguardist parties (which specialise in this) or any political party for that matter. They ought to be controlled democratically by their members irrespective of their political views.

On the leaf

A touch overdue, I've been busy doing trade union work where I'm employed the last day or so.

On Saturday, however, it was political work, as me and Danny set out leafletting Ferndale Ward. I have fond memories of leafletting in a warm sun, with a slight breeze to keep me cool. Sadly, Saturday was freezing and wet, the reality those fond memories continually disguise.

It was nice to see, coming the otherway down the same street, Val Shawcross and her Labour Party team - nice in that it shows the other sides are putting in an effort, and that maybe, awareness of the election is raised enough so that people might read our very well laid out leaflet (congrats to the layout team, btw). That said, I only saw one poster in a window on the whole round.

We blitzed the street - we had a mild disagreement over whether to give leaflets to those houses that say "No Junk Mail". Now, I agree, election literature isn't junk mail, but I take the view that we're not there to make that argument, and the people with that sort of sticker aren't going to examine the lit closely enough to notice any difference. That means, though, that some houses get left out. I just argue that it means where the limited leaflets we have do get put somewhere where there is more of a chance of them being read (albeit, lets be honest, slight).

One nice feature of the route we took was the old LCC School of Building building (now luxury flats) where Jack Fitzgerald (a founder member of our party) used to work. I wonder what he would make of the change of use - glad that workers have such a fine building to live in? Perhaps annoyed that we have to cram into every last nook and cranny rather than building enough good homes for all.

Other comrades went to diverse other wards, and we aim to at least try and get our messages out across the vast constituency as best we can throughout the campaign - keep an eye out for us...