Hustings (plural)

Last night three of us went to Herne Hill to the hustings there organised by the local forum. We were surprised to find the church hall full with about 70-80 people. The main questions were about transport (logically since that's about all the Mayor and Assembly control). Here the main concern seemed to be cyclists with the candidates (except of course Danny and the UKIP man who wasn't there) lining up to promise to make cycling safer and bash motorists. Addressing an audience of motorists they would of course (except the Greens) probably take a different approach (Mayor Boris calls 4x4s "large family cars" and reduced the congestion charge on them besides freeing Kensington and Chelsea, where these "Chelsea tractors", proliferate, from the congestion zone altogether). Given the many problems facing people in London you'd have thought that there were more urgent concerns (unemployment, housing, benefit cuts), but apparently not, at least not in Herne Hill which has Tory councillors including the Tory GLA candidate.

The riots did come up, with all the candidates, including the Tory, criticising the police for stopping-and-searching black youth too much -- a different approach, we seem to remember, from what was said at the time. Danny was able to point out that the riots were obviously related to poverty and only took place in poverty-stricken parts of London. This was parish pump stuff and Danny did his best to introduce a broader perspective: capitalism and its profit priority, particularly acute in a crisis as at present, which prevents basic amenities being adequate and in fact means they're being cut back. Maybe the candidates and audience subconsciously recognised this (the LibDEm candidate did admit that money doesn't grow on trees) and that was why they only wanted to discuss cycle lanes and lollipop ladies.

There is another hustings this evening, in St Mary's Church in Putney, the church where the Putney Debates of 1647 took place between Cromwell and the Levellers. In fact the BBC are making a history film about them and will be there to ask the candidates what they think of the relevance of these debates to today. This should allow our candidate -- this time Bill, in Merton & Wandsworth -- to talk about something other than cycle lanes.

Last night we discovered (the Tory candidate told us) that there's an Election Question Time at 2pm in Brixton organised by the Lambeth Forum for Older People in association with Lambeth Pensioners Action Group to which only 4 of the 6 candidates have been invited. Danny can't make it but if he could he would gatecrash it. Pity really because we got a good reception from the LPAG at the general election in 2010 and the question of cycle lanes won't come up (more likely to be questions about cyclists cycling on the pavement and knocking pensioners down as they sail through red lights ...) This question of only inviting some of the candidates to hustings needs to be addressed. A case could be made for saying that the expenses of organising such hustings should be included in the election expenses of the candidates invited. Maybe we should make a test case of one. Anyway, we are going to leaflet it.

Hustings

Here's a list of the hustings where our candidate will be speaking:

Wednesday 18 April 6.45 for 7pm
Herne Hill Baptist Church
Half Moon Lane
SE24 9HU
Organised by Herne Hill Forum.
Details.

Thursday 19 April at 7.30pm
The Brewer Building,
St Mary's Church,
Putney Bridge, Putney High St,
SW15 1SN.
Organised by Putney Society.
Details.

Tuesday 24 April 7.15 for 7.30pm
Waterloo Action Centre
14 Baylis Rd
SE1 7AA
Organised by Lambeth Cyclists.
Details.

Wednesday 25 April 7pm
Parish of All Souls West Dulwich
Lovelace Rd
SE21 8JY
Organised by Norwood Forum
Details (not yet up).

Update

The Socialist Party held its Conference over Easter. After the session ended on the Saturday some of the delegates retired to the Bread and Roses pub (owned by the Workers Beer Company) in Clapham Manor Street. They found that TUSC and the Labour Party had been there before and left election material (including a promise by Livingstone that if he hadn't cut fares by 7 October he'd resign). With the agreement of the manager, socialist election material was immediately added.

This Thursday our candidate for Lambeth and Southwark will be interviewed by the on-line London magazine, the Big Smoke. He has also received invitations to speak at hustings in Herne Hill (Wednesday 18 April) and Norwood (Wednesday 25 April).

Our candidate in Merton and Wandsworth has not yet received any such invitations, but we have learned a bit more about the mysterious Independent candidate there from her desperate appeals on the internet to translate her message into other languages. We might contact her to invite her to explain at our election meeting on Saturday 28 April.

We said in a previous posting that we probably wouldn't be doing much leafletting in the borough of Southwark. This has proved to be wrong as last week we did leaflet parts of Peckham. The number of "Vote Livingstone" posters we saw confirms that this is solid Labour territory.