London local council by-election campaign
December 2024 › Forums › World Socialist Movement › London local council by-election campaign
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September 5, 2023 at 9:03 am #246604ALBKeymaster
Due to the death of a councillor elected in last year’s borough council’s elections in Lambeth, a by-election is being held in the Vauxhall ward to fill the vacancy.
As this is only a short bus or tube ride from our head office in Clapham High Street the London branch has decided to stand a candidate. The election will take place on 5 October, so leafletting will start in the next week or so. Our candidate is Danny Lambert.
The nomination papers were handed in and accepted yesterday (only 2 electors are required to sign them as opposed to 10 previously). We won’t know till Friday who our opponents, the other candidates, are. But we do know already that they will all stand for capitalism in one form or another.
The ward includes part of the Albert Embankment so if any member or sympathiser wants to kill two birds with one stone by leafletting before or after visiting the Globe Theatre, the Tate Gallery, the London Eye or even the headquarters of MI6, now is their chance.
September 6, 2023 at 8:12 am #246633Lizzie45BlockedLet’s hope, for your party’s sake, that Danny picks up more votes than the 11 Shannon Phileas Fogg Kennedy, or whatever his/her name was, received in a recent local election, and who, according to the grapevine, threw in the party towel shortly afterwards in desperation.
September 6, 2023 at 11:19 am #246634robbo203ParticipantLet’s hope, for your party’s sake, that Danny picks up more votes than the 11 Shannon Phileas Fogg Kennedy, or whatever his/her name was, received in a recent local election, and who, according to the grapevine, threw in the party towel shortly afterwards in desperation.
………………
You love taking the piss, don’t you? Never anything helpful or constructive to say. Talk about a wet towel. Got anything else that you can do that would brighten up what is otherwise presumably a miserable existence? Why are you so obsessed if you are so convinced we are going nowhere, eh? I can’t fathom it. Weird (to say the least)
September 6, 2023 at 7:14 pm #246644ALBKeymasterThat reminds of the joke that Mick McGahey, the Communist Party miners’ leader in Scotland, used to tell about an organisation in Edinburgh called the International Socialist Labour Party. They had ten members in the constituency, enough for them all to sign the nomination paper. Their candidate got 11 votes — and was expelled for reformist vote-catching.
September 6, 2023 at 10:51 pm #246650Lizzie45BlockedTalk about a wet towel.
Ooh ahh, now you’re talking, Robin!
I can’t fathom it.
And I can’t quite fathom why the way you express yourself often gives me a buzz. 🙂
September 7, 2023 at 8:27 am #246654ALBKeymasterIt seems that Mick McGahey’s joke did have sone basis in fact. There was a party called the British Section of the International Socialist Labour Party and it did contest municipal elections in Edinburgh. Here’s the results of the 1936 elections.
Scroll down to South Leith. It seems that McGahey exaggerated at bit. Their candidate got 27 votes. Which was 0.3 percent of the votes cast.
Our candidate in Tunbridge Wells got 0.5 percent. Which is 1 in every 200 people who voted. Which if repeated throughout the UK and if there was exact proportional representation would mean 3 MPs.
While we are wandering off topic, I didn’t realise that in Edinburgh in the mid-1930s there was a strong sectarian Protestant party. You live and learn.
September 7, 2023 at 7:58 pm #246656imposs1904Participant“While we are wandering off topic, I didn’t realise that in Edinburgh in the mid-1930s there was a strong sectarian Protestant party. You live and learn.”
There was a strong sectarian Protestant party in Liverpool up until the 1970s. Members on the local council.
But, then, Liverpool had an Irish Nationalist MP up until the late 1920s.
September 8, 2023 at 4:00 pm #246673Young Master SmeetModeratorThis thread is broadly on topic, but can I remind people that people’s motives for being on the forum and their behaviour is always off-topic.
@lizzie45 Could I remind you to address people by their chosen handle, please?September 9, 2023 at 8:27 am #246684ALBKeymasterNominations closed on 4pm yesterday and it’s just us against the usual suspects — Labour, Tory, Liberal, Greens:
The ward is Labour and normally they should win again. The electorate is 6,400 but last May only 27% voted. It will be even less this time as a by-election.
September 9, 2023 at 3:54 pm #246689ALBKeymasterHere’s something on one of our opponents — the Green Party candidate, standing for an impossible return to the small-scale capitalism from which the present corporate capitalism evolved while in the meantime trying to impose a green agenda on existing capitalism in place of its built-in priority of profit-making (another impossibility).
A rather high-profile candidate for a local council by-election but no doubt to help raise her profile as the local Greens’ candidate for the parliamentary constituency of Vauxhall in the general election some time next year.
September 10, 2023 at 1:17 pm #246710ALBKeymasterHere’s more on our LibDem opponent:
https://www.lambethlibdems.org.uk/vauxhall-war-by-election-candidate
He talks a lot here about “our community” as if all those living in the ward formed a community with a common interest. But this is an area which physically shows the division of society into two classes. The rich living in luxury high rise flats overlooking the Thames. The poor living in social housing away from the river. The class division couldn’t be more evident.
They seem to be going for the gay vote which is not insignificant in this part of London:
September 11, 2023 at 3:32 pm #246745ALBKeymasterThere an ongoing discussion of this by-election amongst others here:
https://vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/17581/local-council-elections-october-2023
I like this one:
“I remember Daniel Lambert from when he was SPGB candidate in Brixton Hill in 2013. His answer to every question at the hustings meeting was to smash capitalism.”
Here he is doing just that:
https://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2023/03/danny-lambert-video.html?m=1
September 14, 2023 at 11:27 am #246823ALBKeymasterThe election leaflets have arrived from the printers. Only 2000, since although the electorate is 6,400 and the number of separate households with separate letter-boxes about half that, the number of accessible letter-boxes will be less with gated communities on the waterfront and large parts of the rest social housing blocks. We may still be able to get into some of these.
The leaflets have a QR code which will allow us to count how many went that far.
We will begin distributing this weekend.
The Labourites have already started:
https://events.labour.org.uk/event/389747
Their candidate is a lecturer in philosophy at Liverpool university.
September 14, 2023 at 12:47 pm #246824imposs1904ParticipantIsn’t the Lambeth Labour Party notoriously right of centre?
I seem to remember that the Vauxhall CLP nominated Liz Kendall for the Labour Party leadership in 2015.
September 14, 2023 at 1:45 pm #246838ALBKeymasterIt didn’t used to be when Ted Knight was around:
https://www.breviarystuff.org.uk/simon-hannah-radical-lambeth-1978-1991/
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