London local council by-election campaign
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I think what happened is that at some point in the late 90s there was an influx of the up-and-coming New Labour types. The Labour Student hacks, leaving university, and starting out in the journey of moving up the political greasy pole would move to London to work as researchers, spads and think tank tea boys and gravitate to that part of London, joining the local Labour Party in Lambeth in the process.
A typical example might be Steve Reed who was leader of the council from 2006 to 2012 when he quit to contest a by-election in next door Croydon which he won, advancing up the greasy pole. He was one of those who resigned from Corbyn’s shadow cabinet in a bid to topple him. Starmer has just appointed him shadow Secretary of State for the environment and he is surely destined for a cabinet post if Labour wins next year’s general election, another move up the greasy pole.
More online publicity:
https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/elections/SW8%202LJ/
If they are right that Lee Rotherham is this one, the Tory candidate is the die-hard Brexiteer and researcher at the Taxpayers Alliance who has also stood for parliament a number of times.
A reconnaissance mission today confirmed that most electors in the ward live in blocs of flats — the rich and super-rich in luxury apartments overlooking the Thames and the rest and the poor literally on the other side of the railway tracks. Not much terraced housing. Which makes the ward difficult for door to door leafletting unless we can get into the blocs on this side of the tracks. We will try on Wednesday. Could well be the most densely populated ward in the country.
We probably won’t bother with the 1500 or so electors living in St. George Wharf and the Tower (a 49-storey skyscraper).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_George_Wharf
Came across Labourite canvassers (two different groups) and exchanged leaflets with their candidate. Distributed about 350 but that wasn’t the main reason for touring the ward. 1600 left for Wednesday abd next weekend.
The Greens are resorting to the same underhand tactic that the LibDems are notorious for — distorting the results of previous elections.
In this video their candidate claims that only 500 votes separate the Greens from Labour and that this is “miniscule”.
Actually this is the difference in the results in May last year the 3-member ward between the lowest placed Labour candidate and the highest placed Green candidate. In terms of votes cast for each candidate it was the Tories not them who were second. And 500 votes is not “minuscule”. In the context of a ward where only 1729 voted (less will this time) it’s enormous.
https://moderngov.lambeth.gov.uk/mgElectionAreaResults.aspx?XXR=0&ID=226&RPID=67460729
ps. She doesn’t actually live in the ward itself either as she implies right at the start.
Out again today. Over 700 leaflets distributed until rain stopped play (as at the nearby Oval which we could see from the ward though it is outside it where the floodlights indicated that there was a match going on). We managed to get into a number of the blocks of flats this side of the tracks, through luck (following a postman, door open, somebody happened to be coming in or out).
We made sure the New Economics Foundation, the left/green leaning thinktank, whose offices we discovered are in the ward, got a leaflet. The person we gave it to did say that they didn’t like capitalism. Unfortunately they are reformists who are advocating within capitalism a chimeric Green New Deal:
Picked up the LibDem and Green leaflets. They are an object lesson in how to mislead with statistics. Both had bar charts claiming to show that they were best placed to defeat Labour, the LibDems on the basis of the number of seats they got in the council in last year’s elections, the Greens on the basis of the number of votes obtained in those elections. Both irrelevant in the ward since, there last year, it was the Tories who came second in terms of votes, perhaps reflecting the 2000 (out of 6000) electors living in the luxury flats the other side of the railway tracks.
Still some 800 leaflets to be distributed before polling day on 5 October.
This Saturday is “World Car Free Day”. Lambeth Council’s contribution this year is to close Goding Street, which in in ward just behind Vauxhall station, to cars and organise various events there:
This seems worth leafletting so we will be there. I bet the Green candidate will be there on her bike.
We won’t be staying there all the time as we have to go to the opening of this exhibition off Clapham High Street by a local arts group in which we feature.
https://studiovoltaire.org/whats-on/unearthed-collective-where-can-we-be-heard/
Scroll down to the interviews.
The Lambeth “World Car Free Day” event was a bit of a flop, at least on the two occasions we passed by. Just the stall holders and a few families. Maybe it got better later in the afternoon. And of course all the main roads leading to Vauxhall Bridge were just the opposite of car free. Still, a good try but against the flow in the week the government announced it was postponing by five more years the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans.
But we did find evidence of some radical activity in the ward in a nearby road. This IWW sticker on a road sign:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/16253171/710927396542553682
400 more leaflets were distributed, some outside the ward but that doesn’t matter. The aim is not to get votes but to spread the idea and in particular see how many responses we get to the QR code.
500 to go, much of which will be distributed before and/or after the London. Branch meeting tomorrow.
The last 200 leaflets were distributed yesterday. Preliminary data on the use of the QR indicate that there was an increase in visits to the page chosen as the landing page on the days that leaflets were distributed but it has no yet been established by how much above normal.
Polling day is tomorrow. The result should be announced well before midnight.
In the meantime we have more data on visits to the landing page. The page was the one for the offer of a free 3-month trial subscription to the Socialist Standard. We were not expecting anyone to take up the offer but chose this page as one that would not have all that many visitors. (If we had had time we could have prepared a special page.)
There have been 175 visits since we started leafletting on 16 September. Depending on what the normal number of visits a day are assumed to be (5, 6 or 7) the extra number could be between about 40 and 80. Since 1950 leaflets were distributed that’s between that between 1 in 50 (2%) and 1 in 24 (4.1%). Which shows that a QR code is relatively useful as a measure of the minimum number of those who take some notice of the leaflet, ie don’t simply bin it. Others will have read it without using the code but there is no way of measuring that.
Our next experiment will be to leaflet an area when there is not an election on.
The leaflets cost £105 to be printed. We are not expecting the percentage of the vote to be similar of course as it’s not a measure of those who agree with what it says only of those who used the QR code.
To complete what our opponents say, here’s the Tory candidate’s election statement. It is the Lee Rotherham, the die-hard Brexiteer and researcher for the Taxpayers Alliance.
Lee Rotherham: I’m standing for Lambeth Council to provide a functioning opposition to Labour
Here’s the result announced just after midnight;
LAMBETH Vauxhall
SWAINE-JAMESON, Tom Simon (Labour Party) 595
ALDERECHI, Fareed (Liberal Democrats) 395
BOND, Jacqueline Rose (The Green Party) 256
ROTHERHAM, Lee Stuart (Conservative Party Candidate) 160
LAMBERT, Daniel Peter (The Socialist Party (GB)) 9Vauxhall (Lambeth) council by-election result:
LAB: 42.0% (-11.1)
LDEM: 27.9% (+16.8)
GRN: 18.1% (-2.1)
CON: 11.3% (-4.3)
SPGB: 0.6% (+0.6)Votes cast: 1,415
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