Our 2026 local election campaign in London
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The BrixtonBuzz has published today its “Meet the Candidates” piece on our candidates:
Meet the Candidates: Socialist Party of Great Britain – abolishing capitalism since 1904
It’s has also published its one on “TUSC”:
The contrast between our straight socialist stance and their common or garden reformism could not be starker.
To return to whether or not our candidates could sign the Vote Palestine pledge, we said we couldn’t because it implied some “right of nations to self-determination”.
Despite most Green candidates having signed up to this pledge, they have just been disavowed by their Party Leader who has stated that “no country has a right to exist”.
Four of us were at the all-day count at the Oval cricket ground yesterday. The results of two of the three wards we contested are:
Brixton North (3 councillors)
Labour: 1415, 1365, 1189
Green: 1388, 1304, 1169
Independent (Shake It Up): 372
Conservative: 261, 252, 167
LibDem: 215, 200, 186
Reform: 189
Socialist: 77
TUSC: 53This is the first time that TUSC have fallen below us.
Clapham Common & Abbeville (2 councillors)
LibDems: 1331, 1195
Labour: 1116, 789
Greens: 441, 423
Conservative: 347, 331
Reform: 194, 173
Socialist: 14This is the most prosperous ward in Lambeth (and the last one to have had a Tory councillor) and confirms that we do better in terms of votes in (now one-time) “Labour” areas.
There is a recount in the third ward — Stockwell West & Larkhall which is taking place this morning. We know how many votes we got but it is against the law to reveal it and, besides, it might be different after the recount.
The result of the election at Stockwell West & Larkhall has just been announced:
Labour: 1438, 1301, 1244
Green: 1234, 1211, 1098
Conservative: 420, 358, 265
LibDems: 377, 348, 273
Reform: 374
Independent (Shake It Up): 351
TUSC: 72
Socialist: 68Looking at the three results, you have to wonder if ‘Shake It Up’ actually cost the Greens a couple of seats.
Any idea why ‘Shake It Up’ polled so well? . . . in relative terms, I mean.
Did Michael Chessum get elected for the Greens?
Yes. So at least one self-declared “Marxist” councillor.
It looks as if the Greens will be running Lambeth Council from tomorrow, maybe with LibDem support if needed, as the result is:
Greens 29
Labour 26
LibDems 8Going to be interesting to see first hand how the Greens will manage capitalism at local level and whether our future slogan can be:
Labour, Green, Same Old Scene.
Any idea why ‘Shake It Up’ polled so well? . . . in relative terms, I mean.
Yes they did relatively well, averaging about 5 percent and sometimes outvoting the Tories and/or LibDems. Limited confirmation of Roger Hallam’s approach: find a well-known enthusiastic local community activist to be candidate, campaign continuously canvassing door to door, regular weekly meetings, posters everywhere. On a radical-democratic localist programme.
It remains to be seen if they will be a permanent feature of the political scene in Lambeth.
After out voting TUSC in Brixton North I was tempted to paraphrase the old Norwegian commentator’s phrase and say “Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Dave Nellist, you boys got a hell of a beating”, but I won’t.
Genuinely though, how can the Trots argue that putting forward the straightforward socialist alternative to capitalism will not attract workers and that workers need to be lead to Socialism by a vanguard party, using reforms as enticements, when we are getting more or at least very similar support as their reformism?
Just doing a little calculation, and I do accept that this is difficult for many reasons as we only were standing one candidate in three candidate wards, however this is one way of calculating things.
Looking at the Brixton North Ward and you add up all of the multiple partys’ leading vote, then add on the votes of single candidates you could argue that this was the equivalent of a first preference vote.
This would mean adding
Labour 1415
Green 1388
Independent 372
Conservative 261
LibDem 215
Reform 189
Socialist 77
TUSC 53Giving a total of 3,970 first preference votes (arguably). That would make the Socialist vote around 2%, which would be very encouraging. I know there are a large number of caveats, but the campaign team need to be congratulated.
It would be interesting to see if any of the voters who voted Socialist had only chosen one candidate. I wonder if any of the team at the election could gauge that kind of information from the count?
At present, workers do not care about socialism; their main concern is to worship right-wing nationalist populist leaders.
They do not care if those leaders are criminals, thieves, xenophobic, racists, warmongers, or homophobic.
Even more, they are willing to lose their own social benefits.
It is pure masochism.
Marx never thought that the working class was going to support their own exploiters
There are various ways of counting the percentage of votes cast for each candidate. The easiest is the number of votes cast for a candidate divided by the total number of votes cast (bearing in mind that each voters can have 2 votes or 3 votes but doesn’t have to use them all). That is the method used on Lambeth Council website rounded up or down to the nearest whole number (which means that if it’s less than 0.5 percent the figure is recorded as 0 percent). Wikipedia does the same but rounds up or down to the nearest first decimal point. This gives, for instance, our candidate in Brixton North 0.8 percent.
To work out how many individuals voted for a particular candidate you would divide the number of votes for a candidate by the number of ballot papers. This is what they appear to have done here:
https://www.mylondon.news/news/south-london-news/lambeth-election-results-full-2026-33916540
This gives 2.4 percent in Brixton North, 2.0 percent in Stockwell West, and 0.5 in Clapham Common.
The figures for the 9 TUSC candidates (showing how badly they did from their own point of view) are: 2.1 (Stockwell West), 1.6 (Brixton North), 1.4, 1.4, 1,2, 0.9, 0.9, 0,9, and 0.7. Which are ridiculous for a party offering reforms — if you want reforms you might as well vote for a party that has a chance of getting elected and so in a position to implement some. Which is what those attracted by reforms did.
As to how many voted just for our candidate, I can’t say regarding Brixton North as I was at the table for Stockwell West. The way they counted the ballot papers of those who didn’t vote for all 3 candidates of one party enabled you to see how these had scattered their votes. My impression is that not many voted only for us (in fact not many used only one of their votes). Most of our voters also voted for one or more other candidates but not randomly, for instance for us and/or a Green or the ShakeItUp candidate or a Labourite or, quite often, the TUSC candidate. We might not like this but it at least showed that those who did vote for us did so deliberately, probably on the principle of voting the furthest “left” that you can.
The other thing to note — Professor Curtice continues — is that we do better in “Labour” wards and constituencies. Stockwell West was a clean sweep for Labour, Brixton North elected 2 Labour and 1 Green. (Clapham Common elected 2 LibDems).
Maybe next time we should field the full number of candidates. We did that in 2010. Here are the results (scroll down):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferndale_(Lambeth_ward)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larkhall_(Lambeth_ward)
The percentages are 1.0 and 0.8.
The Greens have just elected the new leaders of their group on Lambeth Council. Their leader is to be Martin Abrams, who was elected as a Labour councillor in 2022 but left over Palestine. As the Greens are the biggest party on the council he is likely to be the new Leader of the Council too.
Here is one of the things he is promising:
“We will put power in the hands of residents, workers and the community. Things can, and will, get better.”
And what one of his deputy co-leader, Ciara Alleyne, is:
“ Again and again, residents told us the same story – a political elite, locally and nationally, is prioritising the needs of developers, big business and themselves over the needs of people and planet. We will do things differently.”
Martin Abrams elected Leader of Lambeth Green Group: official statement
Bold words. Putting powers into the hands of workers and not prioritising the needs of big business. Let’s see how they get on.
TUSC have published the results of the votes obtained by all their candidates despite this making them a laughing stock. Only a handful got into triple figures with quite a few not reaching even double figures. One got as much as 4 votes.
We know that had we contested the same sort of wards our results would have been similar but we don’t have pretensions at being a serious reformist party with a detailed programme of reforms and a plan for how councils could balance their budgets. We know the current low level of support amongst the working class for socialism and are contesting as part our general policy of using every opportunity to put across the case for socialism.
Anyway, here are the TUSC results:
https://www.tusc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-Results-report.pdf
They publish the results of other left of Labour parties and candidates. These are rather better including those standing as Your Party.
Thankfully we are not counted as such a party. In fact we are not counted by them as a party at all but are recorded, in the 2 wards, where we went head to head with them as “Ind”. They must know that this is untrue but they are following the practice that the mainstream media used to of referring to us as “Independent”. In previous years they did record us as “SPGB”.
Since the election two councillors elected as Greens have resigned, one accused of anti-semitism by the police, the other probably because she never expected to get elected.
The upshot is that there will two council by-elections in the near future, one next door to one of the wards we contested. It is unlikely that we will stand a candidate but the branch will certainly take this opportunity to follow up our election campaign.
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