London local by-election leafletting
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As it happens, over the next 4 weeks there are 3 local council by-elections in wards near to our premises or where members live. They are Hammersmith Broadway (20 February), Vincent square, Westminster (27 February) and Syon & Brentford Lock (6 March).
We will not be putting up candidates but running a write-in vote for socialism campaign. It’s a bit of an experiment to see whether not having a candidate makes any difference to the response.
Three thousands leaflets have been printed and arrived today. Here is the wording:
What matters – profits or people?
All the parties standing in this by-election support capitalism (the profit system) and are squabbling over which of them should run the administrative side of it here at local level. So, there’s no real choice.
They think the profit system can be made to work in the interests of the majority. But it can’t, and they end up having to do the system’s dirty work of saving money on public services so that taxes on profits can be kept down.
Profits first, people second, that’s the way the profit system works. It’s the only way it can work. Which is why Socialists say it must go. Support for any of the parties that want to run the profit system is a vote for more of the same: more insecurity, hardship and cuts, while the rich can afford the best of everything.
What’s the alternative?
If we are going to put an end to this we must act for ourselves, without professional politicians or leaders. We’re going to have to organise ourselves to bring about a society geared to meeting people’s needs – without a price tag – not profits.But the only basis on which this can be done is common ownership and democratic co-operation. In a word, socialism.
The Socialist Party is not contesting this by-election but you can still say NO to a system based on profit, privilege and competition and YES to one based on equality, co-operation and meeting needs by writing “I vote for socialism” on your ballot paper.
The first 500 leaflets were distributed in Hammersmith earlier today. The LibDems and the Labourites had been out too. Which is good in the sense that it will give some context to our leaflet which is a generic one that doesn’t mention the ward or the date of the election.
It is a safe Labour ward where they got over 70 percent of the votes at the last election in 2022.
Hammersmith Broadway is not far from Chiswick where the old West London branch used to meet. The branch also used to run a street stall there so it is not as if we are not known in the area.
The remaining 500 allocated to the ward will be distributed next Tuesday and then we will move down the river to Vincent Square which is between Victoria Station and the Houses of Parliament.
Vincent Square Ward is the innermost of inner London wards, being not far from Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. The people there live mainly in luxury apartment blocs or social housing and so without easy access to their letterboxes. In fact to such an extent that we may have difficulty distributing even 1000 leaflets that way. There are 7,600 electors.
At least one person doesn’t like Starmer since there are quite a few graffiti saying “Kick Starmer Out”.
It is a Conservative ward, though at the last election the ward it elected 2 Tories and 1 Labourite. The by-election has been caused by the death of the Labourite. Labour is anxious to retain their representation and the Tories to make a clean sweep of the ward. So both are leafletting the area, giving our leaflet some context.
The national HQ of the Liberal Democratic Party is in the ward. So is Westminster Cathedral, the HQ of the Roman Catholic Church in England. Ours is a couple of miles and 4 tube stops away and so it’s easy to get there to leaflet.
Wouldn’t it be good if we focused on a few specific wards & threw everything we have at them at every election? That way, we might slowly but steadily convert the people of those wards to socialism; then focus on converting a few more wards to socialism; then a few more to socialism; etc. If the SPGB had started doing that in 1904, the world socialist revolution may have happened years ago.
What do you think?
“Wouldn’t it be good if we focused on a few specific wards & threw everything we have at them at every election?”
I think this is more or less a description of what is happening already?
Without wanting to piss on the picnic, I’m not convinced of the effectiveness of electioneering as a method of publicising socialism in the present situation. But that doesn’t mean we should not do it, and I could be wrong after all.
Actually, that is more or less what we’ve been doing in the area around Head Office. For the past 30 or so years we have contested most elections there: Borough council, general elections, Greater London council, even European Parliament as well quite a few council by-elections.
They have been doing the same in Folkestone.
This serves to build up awareness of us and socialism in these areas. Having said that, in elections we are appealing to the general public and most people aren’t interested in politics, conventional letter alone radical even though up to 70 percent vote in general (but not the other) elections. But we say that our immediate aim is socialism and that a majority is needed for this. So we are practising what we preach.
We also do other things of course such as leafletting protest demonstrations where it can be assumed that those there will be interested in political matters.
Leafletting of Hammersmith Broadway has now finished, nearly 1000 distributed in all, behind schedule due to the weather and illness. The election is next Thursday.
It’s an ultra-safe Labour ward and if they lose here there’ll be in serious trouble. On one housing estate there is a social centre called “Nye Bevan Hall” with a plaque saying “opened by former Leader of the Labour Party Michael Foot in 1996”. The plaque had been partially defaced. The question is by who? Someone who doesn’t like the Labour Party or by the Labour Party itself, now that it is “the Party of Business” and wants to repudiate its leftwing past? Foot was of course the Corbyn of his day (the early 1980s).
The Anarchist Communist Group has also been putting stickers on lampposts saying “Freeze Rents not Renters”. Amusing but not very anarchist as who is supposed to “freeze rents” if not the capitalist state? The ACG is behaving in the same reformist way to attract support as the Trotskyists. You might have thought they would campaign rather for an anarchist communist society, but there you are.
Three hundred leaflets were distributed in Vincent Square, Westminster, yesterday, resulting in 3 visits to our website. One in a hundred is not a bad response. Maybe because this is a by-election where the outcome is unclear, either Labour or the Tories could win and each is campaigning hard.
The Tory candidate has wished our campaign for a write-in vote for socialism a success. He would of course, since he imagines this would take votes from Labour and maybe let him in. He forgets that nobody who wants socialism would even think of voting Labour.
A real threat to Labour might come from the Greens who have issued a statement promising “a beautiful life on a beautiful planet – for everyone”. A change from fixing potholes and telephone kiosks.
This part of her peroration seems good advice:
“DON’T VOTE RUBBISH ANYMORE”.
The other by-election we are covering is Syon & Brentford Lock in the borough of Hounslow in West London.
The by-election is on Thursday 6 March and we plan to start leafleting this weekend. Meanwhile a local news outlet has provided advance publicity (I am not sure if you need to be on Facebook to see it but it’s a photo of the leaflet):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/brentfordtoday/posts/1843231109771976/
The by-election in Hammersmith Broadway took place yesterday. The result can be found here:
In terms of conventional politics, Labour won easily but with their share of the poll down by 19 percent with ReformUK second, confirming that they are still been punished by voters.
From our point of view, it’s the rejected ballot papers that are of interest. A ballot paper can be rejected for a number of reasons: if the polling station staff forget to perforate the paper, if the voter voted for more than 1 candidate, if they sign it, or if it is blank or has something written on it.
If something is written across a ballot paper, by convention this is classified as “wholly void for uncertainty”. This is a fiction since in most cases it is quite certain what the voter meant such as “None of the Above”, “socialism”, “free Palestine”, the Anarchist A sign or, simply, “Fuck the lot of them” (to quote some I have seen).
In the by-election there were 12 rejected papers, 9 for blank or “uncertainty”. In the council elections in May 2022 there were 7 rejected papers and only 1 for blank or uncertainty.
It is hard to believe that this increase from 1 to 9 on a smaller turnout had nothing to do with the 950 leaflets we distributed.
Something else which suggests this might be the case is that there happened to be another by-election in Hammersmith & Fulham yesterday, in Lillie ward where we didn’t distribute any of our leaflets. There the number of rejected papers was down from 7 to 5, with those blank or “uncertain” down from 4 to 3.
500 leaflets were distributed door-to-door this morning in the Isleworth part of the Syon & Brentford ward of Hounslow Council for the by-election on 6 March. That makes a total of over 700 so far.
The main contest here is between Labour and someone the Green Party candidate has labelled “a divisive ex-Labour councillor”. Theo Dennison, who is standing as an Independent, was at one point presented as one of those left-of-Labour Independents. He was associated with George Galloway’s campaign in Rochdale but now says that it is a “smear” to mention this as the Labourites are doing. He does, however, cite an endorsement by a Hounslow Labour councillor who has defected to the Workers Party of Britain (but without mentioning this).
He stood as an Independent in the same ward in the 2022 local elections and in a by-election in May last year in a neighbouring ward. In both he came second. This time he is sparing no effort and money to get back into the Council Chamber. There is nothing particularly leftwing about his campaign. He is projecting himself as an ordinary independent to represent the residents of Brentford against those of the rest of Hounslow and has called on all anti-Labour people, including Tories, to rally round him. A complete opportunist.
His leafletters had been there before us, which means that people will get both our leaflets at the same time and note the contrast. The Greens and Labourites had also passed by.
Also standing are the Tories, LibDems and ReformUK whose candidate is a Sikh sporting a turban in their colours. A clever choice perhaps, since there are quite a number of people in the ward whose parents or grandparents emigrated from India. In fact, one of the polling stations is in a Hindu Temple.
Yesterday we finished distributing the leaflets, in Vincent Square and in Syon & Brentford Lock. In the end a total of 600 were distributed in the former and 1400 in the latter. Previously 950 had been distributed in Hammersmith Broadway. The election takes place in Vincent Square tomorrow and in Brentford a week later.
Meanwhile the Greens have dared to raise a world issue in another by-election in Hounslow a week tomorrow, in Brentford East (which we haven’t been leafletting):
https://m.facebook.com/groups/brentfordtoday/posts/1847196339375453/?locale=en_GB
As can be seen, they got criticised for doing so. Gaza may be a bit remote (even if a chance to kick the Labour Party) but, despite what Tory councillor Jack Emsley says, potholes and street lighting are affected by how capitalism works at an international level. Local councils are largely financed by money from central government but this is restricted by the need for the government to give to profit-making.
The parties contesting local elections all claim to be able to improve local services and amenities but, as we say in our leaflet they “end up having to do the system’s dirty work of saving money on public services so that taxes on profits can be kept down”. This includes the Greens, as can be seen from when they are in office, as currently in Bristol and previously in Brighton. For example:
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/thousands-sign-petition-against-monthly-9902035
The Conservatives easily won the Vincent Square by-election taking the seat back from Labour:
https://www.westminster.gov.uk/media/document/declaration-of-results-of-vincent-square-by-election
Turnout was 29.07% which is not bad for a local by-election. There were 10 rejected ballot papers, 5 for being blank or having something written on them.
This compares with 18 and 15 in the May 2022 council elections. The figure of 15 is likely to be explained by there being no Green Party candidate then and some die-hard Greens taking the advice of their candidate this time not to “vote rubbish”.
If so, interesting that some Greens took the same principled position as us in not voting for something they don’t want.
We were only able to distribute 600 rather than the planned 1000 leaflets here due to so many electors living in apartment blocs without access:
“In the 2021 census Vincent Square ranked number 8 of all the wards in England and Wales for flats or apartments, which make up 97.0% of households here.”
Here is the result of the third local by- election we leafletted that took place yesterday.
Syon and Brentford Lock, Hounslow
Independent (Dennison) 615 (33.48%)
Labour 603 (32.83%)
Greens 218 (11.87%)
Conservatives 150 (8.17%)
Reform UK 149 (8.11%)
Liberal Democrats 102 (5.55%)
Turnout 1837 20.97%
Electorate of 8775, 3 spoilt papers.In view of the small number of rejected votes we can’t claim to have any effect in this respect. However, we did get some publicity and discussion of our leaflet on a local online news site.
As with the local by-election in Islington we contested in December, this one too this made the national news;
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/2023939/george-galloway-ally-byelection-labour
On the other hand, Reform welcomed the election of Dennison and claimed to have helped to bring it about:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/brentfordtoday/posts/1855494291878991/
Dennison was originally billed as a left-of-Labour candidate on the basis of his participation in George Galloway’s by-election campaign in Rochdale, but here he campaigned as a middle of the road Brentford anti-Labour localist.
Basically, he seems to have been an ordinary opportunist politician who was prepared to gather votes where he could.
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