Our 2022 local election campaign
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The Party will be standing 2 candidates in the local elections in England on 5 May.
One in the Clapham East ward of the London Borough of Lambeth and the other in the Pantiles & St. Marks ward of Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent.
The nomination papers for our candidate in Lambeth — Danny Lambert — were handed in and accepted today. So the campaign there is off.
Here is the election address:
End Capitalism
The other candidates in this election don’t want change. Instead they will be wittering on about how they propose to fix the faulty system we live under – capitalism – so it’s maybe a tiny bit better for you and yours. But every politician says this. In every party. In every election. And they never really fix anything.
The reason they can’t fix capitalism’s problems is because capitalism IS the problem.
Why? Because it only works for the tiny minority who own most of the wealth. Capitalism has revolutionised our science and technology so that we can now produce enough for everybody worldwide. That means we could make everything free if we take the world back from the rich and run it collectively as a communally owned resource.
What’s causing poverty, inequality, wars and global warming is that we have a 21st century planet being trashed by an obsolete 19th century economic system that puts profits before meeting needs.
The natural and industrial resources of our planet Earth are the common heritage of all humans.
Universal free access would be simpler, faster, and smarter. And it’s an upgrade the world badly needs, so show your support by voting for the Socialist Party (World Socialist Movement) candidate, Danny Lambert.
According to the TUSC website, one of our opponents in Clapham East will be them, their candidate being a Bobbie Cranney. Our chance to confront and expose SPEW as a phoney socialist party.
The nomination papers for our candidate in the Patiles & St. Mark’s ward were handed into today and accepted.
We won’t know who are our opponents are here and in Lambeth till Wednesday.
Here is the election address of our candidate in Tunbidge Wells:
Fit for Purpose? Or fit for Change?
Democracy can seem abstract when your ability to make changes to your community feels limited to choosing between a small number of political parties every few years. And how can any winning party really represent the needs of all 119,000 residents in Tunbridge Wells borough?
Party politics will always get in the way of local residents being able to make changes that help build a better community for all. The main parties are limited by decisions and views made centrally, and conflict between them distracts from the need to work for improvements that benefit the greatest number of people. Two councillors this year alone have resigned from their parties for failures in both local administration and at the very top of government. Whether Liberal Democrat or Tory, it is not the party but the political system they wish to maintain which causes these issues. We must strive to create a political system that ensures all members of society are listened to and can contribute. And this must start at the very grass roots of politics, not the top.
In Tunbridge Wells, there has been a disturbing number of cases of women’s drinks being spiked in bars and clubs. This problem won’t be resolved until every woman is safe and secure while out at night. We should ask what leads some people to violent and antisocial behaviour, and aim for a culture which treats everyone with respect.
Community projects which work to safeguard and support our community never have enough funding, part of a wider problem of neglected public services which has led to problems such as the lack of NHS dental care. Capitalist society is shaped by money, with most wealth ending up with the elite and the majority left to cope with dwindling resources and high prices.
The Green Party would have you believe capitalism can be managed to mitigate the effects of industry on the environment. Locally, efforts to maintain and protect our green spaces, stop developments outside of brownfield sites, reduce traffic, and efficiently renovate properties are constrained by the economic system. The main parties merely attempt treatment of the symptoms; we propose treating the cause by advocating for a socialist society built to satisfy everyone’s needs, and those of the planet.
Shannon Kennedy, the Socialist Party candidate, Pantiles & St. Mark’s Ward.
We now know who our opponents are in Tunbridge Wells. It’s the usual gang of four capitalist parties — Tory, Labour, LibDem and Geem, including the outgoing Liberal Democrat counillor.
Here are the candidates in Clapham East ward, which is a new 2-member ward. As you can see, our opponents are: 2 Labourites, 2 Tories, 2 Greens, 1 LibDem and 1 TUSC:
Ee, the Greens failed to fill in their nomination papers properly, and presumably failed to have enough time to correct.
And perhaps the LibDems as well, as they have only one candidate. Another possibility is that there is a deal between the two parties as in some other places.
In the rest of the Borough apart from 3 other Tuscites, the only other minor capitalist parties contesting are the Womens Equality Party and the Reform party (ex-Brexit party) with one each somewhere.
It looks as if the Green Party election agent didn’t understand that in a two or three member ward electors can sign the nomination papers of up to two or three candidates, as the Labourites and Tories did. That would have been much easier than collecting another ten.
In one sense it is lucky they didn’t as their proposer is one of those who assented to our nomination. If he had also proposed the second Green candidate that would have meant that he had proposed three candidates. Which he couldn’t validly do. As it happened, we handed in our papers first and so it would have been the third nomination that would have been invalid.
More than 4000 election addresses for the elections in Lambeth were delivered to Head Office yesterday. Door-to-door distribution in Clapham East ward will begin tomorrow.
The leaflets carry a QR code which will take those using it directly to a page on our website. As this page can only be reached directly via the code this means that we can see how many used it from the leaflet.
Up to now we have only be able to judge the effectiveness of our election leafletting in terms of votes (not all that helpful) and replies by post, phone or email to Head Office (very few in recent years). We will now have a additional measure. In this sense, this election campaign is an experiment.
Five members of the branch were out yesterday to leaflet the Clapham East ward. We distributed some 1500 in a polling district with 37% of the electorate.
We ordered (and will only have to pay for) 4000, but the printer said he had sent more because of how they had to be printed. In fact he sent 5000, which is way too much for a ward with 7500 electors and under half that number of letter boxes. So we will have to distribute some outside the ward. That won’t be a problem to do and the QR code can still be used.
Forgot to add that when we returned to Head Office we had a visitor from someone who said she was a member of a group called Red Fightback. We said we had never heard of it. She said it only had 5 members. We assumed it was another Trot group but in looking them up we saw it was Maoist.
Here’s their site for anyone interested:
Despite only being 5 they still seek to lead the working class. Even so, they still say they want the sane sort of society as us, even if in the dim and distant future:
“Red Fightback believes in, and ultimately struggles towards communism—a society in which the means of production are social property, and where each citizen works towards the communal goals of society according to their ability and receives resources from society according to their need.”
I note that one of their revolutionary demands is more public toilets
A further 800 or so leaflets were distributed yesterday in two of the four polling districts. The only other sign of any political activity was one of the LibDem candidates for the neighbouring Clapham Common and Abbeville ward seen on the border between that ward and Clapham East. We gave him a leaflet and took one of his (usual stuff, based on a misleading comparison, about it being a two-horse race, in this case between them and Labour, a bold claim in an area which last time elected the only Tory councillors in Lambeth).
Only one more polling district to cover. Which we will do tomorrow. After that, we will have to distribute the leaflets left over in neighbouring ward, for the QR code.
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