Voting continues

The Returning Officer has just informed candidates and agents:

We sent out just over 1,000 postal votes and around 300 have been returned so far. Hopefully we'll receive at least double that number by this time next week.

Don't know if they will but, if they do, that would be a 60 percent turnout of postal voters. As the turnout of the other 9000 or so electors cannot be expected to be much more than 20 percent, this means that over 40 percent of those who vote will be postal voters. A bit worrying from one point of view because the election campaign still has a week to go.

Having distributed most of our leaflets there's not much to do, though we did see the Tory candidate canvassing in Vassall Road the other day when we managed get into one of the gated communities to distribute our leaflet.

Next activity (weather permitting and at the moment it doesn't look as if it will) will be a stall on Saturday morning in Brixton High Road as near as we can get to the exit from Brixton tube station.

Voting begins

Those that applied for postal votes for #vassall ward by-election, you should have rec'd by now, pls send back before 28th (election day)

So Says the Lambeth Democracy Team. So, if you've got your ballot paper in front of you, and you've come here to check us out after reading our leaflet: "Hello!" This is your chance to make history: you can start a revolution. No leader can do it for you. You have an awesome weapon in your hands. Just use it: refuse to give your consent to parties that will allow the status quo to continue. Vote for yourself: vote socialism. (Also, today is the deadline for applying for proxy votes, so you can ask someone else to vote for you for a change...)

The postal voters

Lambeth Council has just made available statistics which show that, although the overall turnout was only 20%, the number of postal voters who voted was much higher at 46% (there were 1023 postal voters out of a total electorate of 11,236, 484 of them voted). In one voting district the turnout was only 16%.

This must mean something, probably that it's easier to vote from home than to go to the polling station or maybe that those who go to the trouble of registering for a postal vote are more interested in voting. The Green Party agent said that they had sent their manifesto only to postal voters.

The trouble is postal voters get to cast their vote before the election campaign is over, which means they can't take into account any last-minute developments.

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.