Socialist Euro-election Campaign

In last month’s festival of xenophobia that the European elections were the Socialist Party mounted its biggest election campaign yet, emphasising by contrast the world nature of any solution by putting ‘World Socialist Movement’ on the ballot paper alongside our name . We contested two regions, South East England and Wales. Contesting Wales entitled us to our first ever Party Election Broadcast. This can be viewed on Youtube here: http://tiny.cc/prlrgx

The South East Region is the largest in the country with an electorate of over 6 million in 4 million households. Royal Mail delivered election leaflets to 984,000 households in 20 selected constituencies such as Oxford, Brighton, Southampton, Reading, Canterbury, and Dover. A further 16,000 were distributed by members and sympathisers. In Wales Royal Mail delivered our manifesto to 342,000 households in 9 constituencies with a further 8,000 being distributed by us. In all, a total of 1.35 million, the biggest ever campaign to publicise the case for a classless, stateless, moneyless world community without frontiers.

There was some good media coverage, especially from local TV and radio stations in both regions.  One fall-out from our standing was that one of our candidates was interviewed on BBC2’s Daily Politics Show, which would have had a much wider audience than our election broadcast in Wales. It can be seen at www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-27472384. Press coverage was more patchy but a number of local papers did give us a chance to present our case in more than a sound-bite. A couple of examples can be read here:

www.canterburytimes.co.uk/Socialist-GB/story-21023599-detail/story.html

www.carmarthenjournal.co.uk/gets-Euro-vote/story-21065363-detail/story.html

We got 5454 votes in the South East and 1384 in Wales.