All over bar the voting

North London branch report that they had distributed by last Saturday all of the 3000 leaflets they needed to cover Junction ward in Islington. West London had also distributed 3000 by last Saturday, mostly in Barnes ward but all in the Barnes area of Richmond. South London distributed between 1000 and 2000 of the 2000 they ordered, all in Southwark but not all in Borough & Bankside ward which contains many council blocks which cannot be accessed easily. A couple of hundred were distributed yesterday at a May Day rally in Clerkenwell, which is actually in the borough of Islington though of course most of the marchers will have come from all parts of London, not that that really matters. A few replies to the leaflet (which contained a cut-off Freepost reply coupon) have already been received.

In Southwark one of the Tory candidates in London Bridge & West Bermondsey ward has died, meaning that the election there has had to be called off and will now take place on 14 June. As this is the ward next to the one we're contesting any leaflets left over could be distributed there.

Tomorrow two of our candidates, since they live in their ward, can "vote for themselves for a change"; which is what we advocate all voters to do.

Housing Crisis Hustings

Hustings last night in Peckham, organised by the Southwark Group of Tenants Organisations, with speakers from Labour, LibDems, Greens and us. The Tories were invited but apparently are boycotting all hustings. About 40 people present. The main theme was housing, a major problem in Southwark due to demand for housing near the Thames with easy and quick access to central London driving up land prices, so making it profitable even for the council to encourage up-market housing projects proposed by developers. This has given rise to criticism of "social cleansing". In fact the hustings was filmed by someone making a film on the subject.

Our candidate, Kevin Parkin, said that we had nothing against tenants association -- he himself was vice-president of his local one -- anymore than we were against trade unions; but they were only defensive organisations for workers under capitalism; the solution to problems workers faced could only be found within socialism; the housing problem, for instance, arose because under capitalism houses were built for profit.

Councillor Peter John, the Labour Leader of the Council, conceded at one point that councils could only tinker with the problem as long as they had to rely on profit-seeking businesses to build houses; to get (so-called) "affordable housing" (80 percent of the market rate, still unaffordable for most people in an area of rising land prices) they had to do deals with developers which allowed these to make a profit.

This is true. Having to provide social housing reduces their profits, so if pushed to provide too much the "developer" can simply walk away, resulting in no "affordable housing". Peter John said this could only be rectified by national legislation to allow councils to build houses themselves. This of course (though he didn't say so) would still involve paying money to capitalists as the money to finance this would have to be borrowed from the money market.

The LibDem representative, Tim McNally, billed as "a former Councillor and Cabinet Member" was completely demagogic, promising to stand up to the developers and accusing Councillor John of being in bed with them, as if the LibDem/Tory coalition, of which he was a Cabinet Member, that had run the council from 2006 to 2010 hadn't had to behave in the same way. For instance, here is what a what a Tory former Cabinet Member of that coalition, the one in charge of Housing, Kim Humphries (now, incidentally, himself a Developer -- the revolving door operates at local council level too),said at a hustings for the 2008 Greater London Assembly election in April 2008:

Councillor Humphries was surprisingly honest. He was against having a quota of "affordable housing" in all new housing developments as this could sabotage such schemes. In other words, would reduce the profits of the developers who would take their money and invest it somewhere else where they could make a bigger profit.

The Green representative wanted people to be nice to each other.

The SWP were selling "Socialist Worker" outside the venue.

Hustings in Southwark

We have received one invitation to a hustings in Southwark and know of two others.

The invitation is from the Southwark Pensioners Action Group from 10am to noon on Monday 23 April in the Crypt at St. Peter's Church, Liverpool Grove, Walworth, SE17 2HH.

The other two are:

Saturday 14 April 3pm to 5pm at Christ Church Peckham, 676-680 Old Kent Road, SE15 1JF on Planning & Regeneration, organised by Southwark Planning Network.

Wednesday 18 April 7pm to 9pm at Bells Gardens Community Centre, 19 Buller Close, SE15 6UJ on Housing, organised by the Southwark Group of Tenants Organisations.

As a pensioner and member of a tenants organisation our candidate, Kevin Parkin, happens to be overqualified to attend the ones on 18 and 23 April but, as a football fan, may find the one this Saturday afternoon difficult to fit into his calendar but should be able to get back in time for the Big Match.

Who are opponents are

The list of candidates has now been publshed.

In Islington Junction ward there are 13 condidates for the 3 seats: 3 each from Labour, the Tories, the LibDems and the Greens, and us.

In Richmond Barnes ward there are 10: 3 each from the Tories and Labour, 2 from the LibDems, 1 Green, and us.

In Southwark Borough & Bankside ward there are 14: 3 each from Labour, the Tories, the LibDems and the Greens, and 1 each from us and the Women's Equality Party (their headquarters are in the ward).

Where we are standing

The three wards we are contesting are Junction ward in Islington, Barnes ward in Richmond, and Borough & Bankside ward in Southwark. The candidates are, respectively, Bill Martin, Adam Buick and Kevin Parkin.

Nominations have to be in by noon next Friday, 6 April, and members of the branches running the campaigns (North, West and South London) are in the process of gathering the 10 signatures of those on the electoral register required to stand.

More psephology

The London Elects site has now published the results by borough (and ward). Here are our results by borough:

Lambeth 729 (0.74%)
Southwark 604 (0.69)
Hounslow 504 (0.65)
Waltham Forest 496 (0.64)
Hackney 464 (0.60)
Kingston 293 (0.50)
Islington 333 (0.45)
Richmond 268 (0.35)

This confirms past experience that we do better in Labour areas than elsewhere, though the rather surprising result in Islington (where we have contested many elections over the years) would seem go against this.

More on Prince's ward by-election

We will be standing a candidate, Danny Lambert, who is also standing in the General Election for Vauxhall. Our nomination papers have already been handed in and accepted.

Left Unity and TUSC are putting forward a formidable joint candidate in ex-Labour councillor, Kingsley Abrams, who is also standing for Parliament in the next-door constituency of Bermondsey & Old Southwark. See here.

More analysis

This time Lambeth and Southwark.

In Lambeth we got 1700 (2.1%) and in Southwark 1238 (1.6%).

In three wards in Lambeth (Coldharbour, Larkhall and Brixton Hill) we got over a hundred votes, respectively 111, 102 and 101, or 3.4%, 3.3% and 3.0%. What this means in practical terms (assuming only about a third of electors voted) is that if you are walking town the street in these areas 1 out of every 100 people you pass are likely to have voted Socialist. I think that means that we should have a regular literature stall in Brixton High Road (which these three wards plus Ferndale where we got 2.9% surround). It also suggests that we should consider contesting the proposed new Brixton constituency (which will include all these wards) rather than the proposed Battersea & Vauxhall constituency -- if these and the other proposed boundary changes ever come in and are not dropped in exchange for not reforming the House of Lords.

In 9 of the 21 of the wards our candidate got more votes than the UKIP, or rather "The Fresh Choice for London", candidate. Not really surprising, as their main campaign slogan was "Save the City" and who wants to do that except the likes of the City bankers and lawyers who figured on their list?

In the 8 wards making up the parliamentary constituency of Vauxhall, the vote (not including postal votes) was 593 (or 2.5%). This contrasts with the 143 (or 0,3%) we got there in the 2010 General Election and the 240 (0.6%) in the 2005 General Election. In the 2008 GLA elections the figure was 351 (or 1.6%). An analysis of how we did in all the 10 parliamentary constituencies the GLA constituency covers follows separately.

In Southwark the best ward was Nunhead (which we did happen to leaflet) with 76 (or 2.7%) and we beat UKIP in 2 wards.

The higher vote in Lambeth than Southwark is no doubt to be explained by the fact that we have put a lot of work into Vauxhall, having contested 3 General Elections and 3 Council elections there as well as the last GLA elections and the European Parliament. We have also been leafletting regularly Larkhall and Ferndale wards (chosen because that's where we did best last time). This doesn't explain why we did better in Streatham (the other Lambeth parliamentary constituency) than in any part of Southwark.

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.

Two birds with one stone

Went to a meeting at “Come to the Revolution” café in New Cross yesterday. This is not actually in the area we are contesting, but is only a mile or so away from the boundary with Southwark. So this was an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Go to the meeting organised by “People before Profit” and distribute some leaflets in Southwark.

I thought the meeting was going to be on the group’s political programme but it was a planning meeting to discuss the details of the campaign of their candidate for the Greenwich and Lewisham GLA constituency. It was still interesting to see how another small group deals with the questions that arise: raising the deposit, agreeing on leaflets and posters, how many to order and where and how to distribute them.

Of course, as a local group campaigning on local issues, mainly in Lewisham, they have a different aim and approach to us. We are contesting to spread the idea of socialism and make contacts and are not particularly concerned with the number of votes we get. They want to get as many votes as they can (they expect to save their deposit by getting at least 5%). They did have some ideas we could use, such as giving out leaflets at railway stations rather than through letter-boxes (in our area it would mainly be tube stations since all these south of the Thames are in the area we’re contesting). They also plan to leaflet schools (presumably primary schools when parents come to pick up their kids) and churches (not for us).

The area of Southwark leafletted was a part of Peckham. I hadn’t realised it was so near to Millwall football ground until I saw a platoon of mounted police trotting by. Unfortunately, in view of our lack of resources, these could be the only leaflets distributed in Southwark where we’ll have to rely on the local newspaper (the Southwark News, which is not bad) and any hustings, unless, that is, we leaflet Kennington (probably), Borough and Elephant & Castle tube stations (not priorities).