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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
Yes, Starmer seems determined to keep the war going in the hope that Ukraine will eventually be in a better bargaining position. Evidently he doesn’t care how many people die and how much infrastructure is destroyed in the meantime. What a cynical bastard but that’s the sort of dirty work you must do if you assume responsibility for being in power under capitalism.
I don’t know about the SPEWers entering the Green Party but at least one other Trot group, the SWP breakaway RS21, may be doing this. Look at this letter entitled “Marginal Force” in the Letters page of this issue of the Weekly Worker:
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1525/letters/
Here’s the key passage:
“I confess I don’t understand comrade Macnair’s insistence that it is “nonsense” to describe the Green Party of England and Wales as a “broad front” party. It is a party which contains conservatives, liberals, socialists, even some communists. It’s a party which seems to have little in the way of internal discipline, and whose elected officials and local branches often diverge wildly from one another in their politics. And it’s a party with a platform of standard social democratic policies hardly distinct from that of Corbyn’s Labour or from the umpteen different left-of-Labour projects over the years – and I don’t see any reason to assume that the new electoral formation which many on the left have been pushing for since 2019 will have a substantially different platform. In fact, it’s entirely conceivable that a new post-Corbynite party may end up with an almost identical policy platform to the Greens, but with substantially less internal democracy.”
“For whatever it’s worth, my instinct is that the most likely path out of this is by acting as a communist ‘party within a party’ within some broader electoral formation (whether it’s the Greens, Labour or some other party or coalition), while pushing for electoral reform, but I remain open-minded.”On the anecdotal level, on one of the pro-Palestine demonstrations before the general election I got talking to someone from RS21 and said that I supposed they’d be voting Labour and he replied that he’d be voting for the Greens.
A comrade has noticed that the Greens are now claiming to be not just a left-of-Labour party but a socialist party. What a joke.
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.
There are doubts about the authenticity of this speech:
https://www.humanecologyreview.org/pastissues/her71/71abruzzi.pdf
For the record, Robin has a short letter in this week’s Weekly Worker correcting someone who had written that we thought trade union activity was reformist. Scroll down to the end.
Most of the other letters are about the “mass communist party” idea.
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.
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 editorial in today’s Times literally calls for “Guns Before Butter” (that’s the headline) and starts:
“To underpin Europe’s security, Sir Keir Starmer must expand defence spending at a time of economic difficulty. That means taking an axe to the bloated welfare system.”
Can there be any doubt about what the Labour government is going to do?
We would also have to suddenly stop being the financial center of the global economy.
Yes, Trump does seem to be obsessed with the “balance of trade” (the price paid for physical imports as compared with the income from selling physical exports) and punishing countries with which the US has an unfavourable balance.
But there is no need for this to balance. What does need to balance is the overall balance of payments, including loans made to the US government. The dollar is the world’s reserve and main trading currency which other countries hold, mainly in the form of short-term US Treasury bills. This represents a huge loan by the rest of the capitalist world to the US — enabled by there being a favourable balance of trade vis-à-vis the US by the EU, China, Japan etc.
If the US forces, for instance, China to balance its trade with it, then China would not have a surplus of income to invest in US bonds, to lend to the US.
Trump needs to be careful as to what he wishes.
Meanwhile the Leader of the Tory party (a non-entity who surely won’t last for long) has let slip that she’s completely bonkers:
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”.
Yes and he’s tied to paying a basket case £3 billion a year for the next 100 years. It’ll probably go straight towards repaying the interest on the debt that Ukraine owes the US.
Trump is showing them how to do it : be “transactional”. I’m sure if he was the German Chancellor he’d start buying Russian oil again on the grounds that it’s cheaper than the LNG from the US and those paragons of democracy the Gulf States.
Mind you, it was the Biden regime that pulled that one off. By cutting itself off from cheap Russian oil Germany has shot itself in the foot by undermining its competitiveness.
No wonder the European leaders are running around like headless chickens. They’ve been had.
