The last weekend

We ran a stall outside our premises in Clapham High Street from 11am to 5pm today and a second in Clapham Junction in the afternoon. We had to be careful which leaflets we handed out where as, our offices not being in Battersea but in Vauxhall constituency, the leaflets for there had to be the ones advising those who wanted socialism to write "World Socialism" across the ballot paper. Which wouldn't be appropriate for Battersea where we have a candidate.

The Tories were also handing out leaflets in Clapham High Street while supporters of the Independent candidate in Battersea, Chris Coghlan, "Opposing Brexit. Standing for a new centrist movement.", were at Clapham Junction. No sign of anyone else.

We had intended the second stall to be in Wandsworth but there are road works there. There's a street party in Old York Road, near Wandsworth Town station, tomorrow. Maybe we'll look in. Otherwise we'll leaflet the station exit on Monday.

Here we go again

No sooner are the local elections over and a general election is on us. In London, we'll be contesting Islington North, as last time, where Jeremy Corbyn is also standing, and Battersea, south of the river. We have chosen Battersea rather than our usual Vauxhall as there are plans, for the next election (now postponed till 2022), to merge half of Vauxhall and half of Battersea into a single constituency into which our Head Office on the north side of Clapham High Street will fall. So, we want to introduce ourselves to the electors there, though we have already stood in the area in the 2012 Greater London elections but there's no free postal distribution for those. We also stood in the council elections there in 1906.

The candidates are, respectively, Bill Martin and Danny Lambert.

The nominations papers (and the £500 deposit) for Battersea were handed in at Wandsworth Town Hall this afternoon. It appears there will only be 6 candidates, the usual suspects (Tories, Labourites, Liberals, Greens and UKippers) and us. So a straight fight with them.

Yet another local by-election in Lambeth

This time in Vassall ward, due to the resignation (to move on to higher things) of one of the Labour councillors. Election date will be Thursday 5 December. We are considering contesting, especially as Vassall ward is in the Vauxhall parliamentary constituency which we regularly contest.

By parliamentary constituency

The two GLA constituencies we contested covered 10 parliamentary constituencies (which would have cost us £5000 in deposits to contest as opposed to the £2000 we paid). Here are the number of votes our candidate obtained in these, excluding postal votes. As we got 220 postal votes in Lambeth (to be divided between 2 1/2 constituencies), 196 in Southwark (ditto), 159 in Wandsworth (3 constituencies) and 66 in Merton (2 constituencies), 641 in all, the full figures will be higher.

Anyway, here are the postal-voteless figures:

Vauxhall (Lab held) 593 (2.5%)
Streatham (Lab) 510 (2.1%)
Dulwich & West Norwood (Lab) 511 (2.0%)
Camberwell $ Peckham (Lab) 508 (1.9%)
Bermondsey & Old Southwark (LD) 400 (1.7%)
Mitcham & Morden (Lab) 293 (1.3%)
Battersea (Con) 232 (1.0%)
Tooting 228 (Lab) (0.9%)
Wimbledon (Con) 219 (0.9%)
Putney (Con) 146 (0.8%)

What these figures show is that we do better in Labour-held constituencies and in fact the better the safer the Labour seat is. When you think of it, this it what is to be expected in view both of the nature of our case and of the language in which we express it. More people in these places will have some degree of class consciousness.

Here is how all the parties did in Vauxhall:

Labour 12878 (53.7%)
Conservative 4763 (19.9%)
Green 2704 (11.3%)
Liberal Democrat 2515 (10.4%)
Socialist 593 (2.5%)
UKIP 538 (2.2%).

This is how they did in the 8 wards that would make up the proposed new constituency of Brixton:

Labour 15398 (58.5%)
Conservative 3894 (14.8%)
Green 3720 (14.1%)
Liberal Democrat 2117 (8.0%)
Socialist 719 (2.7%)
UKIP 486 (1.9%)

As to the 8 wards in the proposed new Battersea & Vauxhall constituency which we have been considering contesting instead of Vauxhall if it disappears, 4 of the wards are in Wandsworth and 4 in Lanbeth making comparisons difficult as there were 7 candidates in the first 4 and only 6 in the second. The Socialist candidates between them polled (not including postal votes) 428 votes (1.7%).

A word of caution: people tend to vote differently in elections which they consider don't matter (and which in fact don't matter) such as those for the GLA and the European Parliament than they do in parliamentary elections. It would be nice if these results could be reproduced in a parliamentary election but it won't necessarily be the case.

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.

A curse?

Last week we reported that our Green Party opponent in Vauxhall in the general election last year had resigned from the Green Party. Now we learn that the Trotskyist group, Workers Power, which also stood against us has split. (Hadn't realised they regarded North Korea as a "workers state". How nutty can you get?)

Was it something we did or said?

A Green sees the light

Long-term followers of this blog will recall that our Green Party opponent in Vauxhall in the 2010 general election was Joseph Healy.

The latest news is that he has just resigned from the Green Party, on precisely the issue that we raised on this blog at the time -- that any party that takes on responsibility for running the political side of capitalism will sooner or later have to act against the interests of the class of wage and salary workers and their dependents, as the Green Party had done in Ireland (see what we said here). And, as now the Green Party has apparently done in Brighton and which proved to be the last straw for him.

Hopefully, more and more Greens will realise that the Green Party is on the wrong track and that the only framework inside of which ecological and other problems can be solved is one where the Earth's resources have become the common heritage of all so that there can be production directly to satisfy people's needs instead of for profit.

Hang on...

Right, didn't attend the count, maybe some who were there will tell if anything fun happened, but here is the Beeb-Beeb-Ceeb's version of the count:

Kate Hoey	Labour	21,498	49.8%
Caroline Pidgeon	Liberal Democrat	10,847	25.1%
Glyn Chambers	Conservative	9,301	21.5%
Joseph Healy	Green	708	1.6%
Jose Navarro	English Democrats	289	0.7%
Lana Martin	Christian Party	200	0.5%
Daniel Lambert	Socialist Party of Great Britain	143	0.3%
Jeremy Drinkall	Anticapitalists - Workers Power	109	0.3%
James Kapetanos	Animal Protection Party, The	96	0.2%
Majority	10,651	24.7%
Turnout	43,191	57.7%	+9.3

That puts us down from 240 last time, and means we've been leapfrogged by the English Democrats (whop we beat last time), but at least we beat the animal rights feller.

Looking at it, if we add our vote and the Workers' Power character's vote together, we get about the vote last time, so maybe those 109 Drinkall got are left reformists who voted for us in 2005.

It will, of course, be interesting to compare with our council election votes.

Focus on Vauxhall

OK, so that was the national stats, lets throw in what we know about London:

For October to December 2009:

The employment rate was 68.7 per cent and there were 3.71 million employed people.

The unemployment rate was 9.1 per cent and there were 373,000 unemployed people.

The inactivity rate was 24.2 per cent and there were 1,253,000 working age inactive people.

According to this constituency profile (which I will add to the sidebar) back in June 2009 Vauxhall had a nearly 4% greater unemployment rate than London (which was about 2% over the national average), so we could reasonably infer that Vauxhall will have greater than 12% unemployment, around 9 to 10 thousand unemployed.

What emerges from even these scant glances through the official statistics is the shocking normality of these conditions, that such widespread unemployment (and as we have seen from previous posts) poverty should nt be a burning priority, but an after thought to servicing the wishes of the insanely wealthy.

The Tories like to beat Labour with the "class war" stick. We, though, are calling for class war, for a struggle for the thousands and millions abused and held down by the wages working to organise themselves to abolish that condition.

Where we stand

Well, I was going to kick off our campaign by, well, kicking off and giving some of our opponents a good slagging off. That is to come, though. Instead, let me try and tell you about Lambeth.

In the sidebar, you can see a link to Lambeth Statistics.

Here are some interesting facts about Lambeth (the borough where the Vauxhall Parliamentary Constituency lies).

Only 67% of Lambeth's working age residents were classified as employed in 2006/2007, compared with 69% across London and 74% nationally and in May 2007 17% were benefit claimants.

In 2007, there were around 10,000 businesses in Lambeth; but more than three-quarters of these had fewer than five employees (ABI 2007). In fact according to the 2007 Lambeth Economic Digest 99.65% of businesses in the borough are Small or Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Conversely, in the north of the borough there is a cluster of large firms, 48 of which employ more than 200 employees; among these are the national headquarters of IBM, Shell, and the ITV network. Nearly all employees employed in the borough work in the service industry (94%), with roles in public sector, education and health particularly prevalent.

There are around 270,000 people who live in Lambeth. There are 117,000 jobs (obviously, not everyone employed in the borough lives in the borough, and vice versa). Of the residents, 122,000 are in employment. 19,000 are self employed. 7% are retired. 13,000 are unemployed.

Median gross annual income is £32,000 - and they calculate that added value across the borough is £25,000. So, in this overwhelmingly working class borough, if (in an imaginary land) the workers secured the fruits of their labours by hand or by brain, they'd be living on an income of about £50K each. Of course, such a thing couldn't be achieved within the market system, but it is that base inequality of all that hardwork, and the massive gap between the efforts and the fruits that forms the ground we stand on. We hope the workers of Vauxhall will look at their situation, and decide enough is enough, and signal to their fellow workers the world over that they are prepared to do a something about it.

2010 Vauxhall Manifesto

Here we go again, kids, another year, another election. Our Executive Committee (which is directly elected from our membership), are charged by our rules to agree our election addresses.

They did this on Saturday just gone. Below is the platform on which we will be contesting the General Election:

Capitalism Must Go

These elections are taking place in the middle of the biggest economic and financial crisis since the 1930s. In a world that has the potential to produce enough food, clothes, housing and the other amenities of life for all, factories are closing down, workers are being laid off, unemployment is growing, houses are being repossessed and people are having to tighten their belts. And for once the main parties are being honest in offering more of the same, competing with each other as to which of them is going to impose the most “savage cuts”.

Capitalism in relatively "good" times is bad enough, but capitalism in an economic crisis makes it plain for all to see that it is not a system geared to meeting people's needs. It’s a system based on the pursuit of profits, where the harsh economic law of "no profit, no production" prevails. The headlong pursuit of profits has led to a situation where the owners can't make profits at the same rate as before. The class who own and control the places where wealth is produced have gone on strike – refusing to allow these workplaces to be used to produce what people need, some desperately. So, as in the 1930s, it’s poverty in the midst of potential plenty again. Cutbacks in production and services alongside unmet needs. Why should we put up with this? There is an alternative.

But that's the way capitalism works, and must work. The politicians in charge of the governments don't really know what to do, not that they can do much to change the situation anyway. They are just hoping that the panic measures they have taken will work. But the slump won’t end until conditions for profitable production have come about again, and that requires real wages to fall and unprofitable firms to go out of business. So, there's no way that bankruptcies, cut-backs and lay-offs are going to be avoided, whatever governments do or whichever party is in power.

What can be done? Nothing within the profit system. It can‘t be mended, so it must be ended. But this is something we must do ourselves.

The career politicians, with their empty promises and futile measures, can do nothing for us. We need to organise to bring in a new system where goods and services are produced to meet people's needs. But we can only produce what we need if we own and control the places where this is carried out. So these must be taken out of the hands of the rich individuals, private companies and states that now control them and become the common heritage of all, under our democratic control. In short, socialism in its original sense. This has nothing to do with the failed state capitalism that used to exist in Russia or with what still exists in China and Cuba.

THE SOCIALIST PARTY is putting up a candidate, here in Vauxhall, to give you a chance to show that you don't want capitalism but want instead a society of common ownership, democratic control and production just for use not profit, with goods and services available on the basis of "from each according to ability, to each according to needs".

If you agree, you can show this by voting for us. But more importantly get in touch with us to help working towards such a society after the election is over.

Stay tuned, as ever, for incisive comment and discussion of the ins and outs of an election campaign.