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Four of us were at the count. The result, announced just after midnight, was:
Lambeth Council
Myatt’s Fields By-ElectionLAB: 1,936 (46.7%)
GRN: 815 (37.1%)
LIBDEM: 189 (8.6%)
CON: 74 (3.4%)
REFUK: 58 (2.6%)
CHRISTIAN: 26 (1.2%)
SOCIALIST: 9 (0.4%)
Invalid votes: 7
Turnout: 26.3% (down from 37.1%)Labour won unexpectedly. 0.4% is 1 in every 250 voters.
We ran out of leaflets and run off a few hundred more for distribution mainly in the Myatt’s Field South Estate. Here is the wording:
TO THE ELECTORS OF MYATT’S FIELDS
Fellow Workers!
On Thursday you will be asked to choose someone to represent Myatt’s Fields on Lambeth Council, The Greenies, Labore, LimpDems, Torys & Deform will all tell you they can make capitalism work better for you. I am writing to say something different.
I am not standing to manage Lambeth Council, and I am not offering you a programme of reforms. Councils, whichever party runs them, can only administer a system based on profit and the market. That system is why rents and mortgages keep rising while estates like ours wait years for repairs. It is why everything you need, housing, heating, food, care, is produced only when it makes someone a profit.
No councillor can fix this, because the problem is not bad management. The problem is capitalism itself.
The Socialist Party stands for one thing: a world society based on common ownership and democratic control of the Earth’s resources, where production is for need, not profit, a world without buying and selling, wages, bosses or borders. Some will say that’s unrealistic. But what is truly unrealistic is expecting a system designed around profit to ever put people first.
The vote is one of the few weapons workers have. It won’t change society on its own, but every vote for socialism is a signal that more and more of us have stopped believing the promises of the parties that have presided over decades of failure, and who, in Lambeth, now preside over a council where not even the administration can agree on how it should be run.
So I am not asking for your vote as a favour. I am asking you to vote only if you actually want socialism. If you do, vote Socialist on Thursday, 8th Oct, between 7am and 10pm, and remember to bring photo ID, as you now need it to vote.
This is not a vote for a person, and it is not a vote for a better run Lambeth. It is a vote for a different kind of world, one worth voting for.
Yours for Socialism
Anya Krycek
Socialist Party (GB) candidate Myatt’s FieldsThe Green Party have brought out a leaflet in which their candidate is endorsed by Tara Amfo who stood in the ward in May for Roger Hallam’s “Shake It Up” group of independents. She got 198 votes (3%) ahead of both Reform and the Tories. If her voters follow her advice that should get the Greens over the winning line.
Local publicity for our campaign in the Myatt’s ward by-election on 8 October:
The trouble with psychological, particularly psychoanalytical, explanations of why workers don’t want capitalism is that, if true, they prove too much — that workers’ minds have been changed to make them positively want capitalism. But if that’s the case how can they come to unwant capitalism? It would not just be a matter of changing opinion or a changing social or economic environment but of changing an ingrained psychology. The solution would have to be psychological too. For Freudians, a majority of workers would have to be psychoanalysed. Reich thought that we’d all have to be sexually liberated.
The new Burnham government accepts that, as profits drive the economy, they must be encouraged. Here’s an extract from the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s speech at the Labour Party conference:
“I want our government decisions and our policies to bring new levels of confidence, investment and yes, profits in British business. Because it’s businesses that will create this country’s jobs, and wealth, and growth.”
Nothing new or surprising about this. Business as usual. The Labour Party has long recognised that being the government under capitalism you must allow profits to be made, in fact give priority to profit-making.
More of our leaflets distributed in Holborn and St Pancras today. This time we came across one from the Restore party candidate, a certain Tyler Johnson who says he “attends church in the City”.
His leaflet is really aimed at Farage’s RefUK. I’d heard that they are a particularly nasty lot but I hadn’t realised how much. Here’s what they say:
“Illegal and taxpayer-dependent foreign nationals should be deported. Millions must go.”
“Demographic change and mass immigration must be reversed before Britain is changed for ever.”
Mass immigration must be reversed. Millions must go. But where? And how? The idea is preposterous even from a capitalist point of view.
This campaign is financed by a single maverick multi-millionaire. The rest of the capitalist class can’t be too happy about millions of those who produce surplus value for them being deported.
Here is the wording of the leaflet being distributed in Holborn & St. Pancras:
Don’t be distracted by the noise
… around the Holborn St. Pancras by-electionLabour and the Greens are competing over who can best manage the cost-of-living crisis. But neither can solve its root cause: capitalism is organised around the interests of those who own and control the means of production wealth, rather than the needs of everyone.
Socialism means common ownership and democratic control. When production is to meet human needs rather than for profit, the dependence on the insecurity and problems of having to work for a wage will disappear.
If you agree, cut through the politicians’ spin. Write SOCIALISM across the ballot paper and make your voice heard.
Want to help build a world based on common ownership and production for use? Get in touch.
A thousand or so leaflets suggesting a write-in vote for socialism rather than voting for any of the candidates were distributed through letterboxes in Holborn & St Pancras yesterday, in area between Kentish Town and Camden Town.
Labour posters evident in the poshest part we leafletted. We picked up 3 different Green Party leaflets. Their line is that, as there will still be a Labour government after the by-election, people who normally vote Labour can safely vote for Polanski to “pull Labour on the right direction”. It might work (pulling in the votes that is, not influencing the Labour government).
We also came across an office of the Camden People’s Alliance, the organisation which former ANC MP in South Africa, Andrew Fernstein, is associated with. He stood against Starmer in the general election and finished second. He has endorsed Polanski this time. Naturally, we put through their letterbox more information about socialism than just the leaflet.
The Greens are certainly putting in a lot of work. We met one Green canvasser wandering around lost. She had come from Brighton. We got lost too as we didn’t bring a proper map and got mixed up
with the tourists at Camden Market.I have just read my way through his manifesto. It’s the first thing by a Green I’ve read that has shown any sign of (capitalist) economic literacy. His description of the consequences of the state relying on outsourcing services to profit-seeking private enterprises (the pursuit of short-term profits and the distribution of much as them as possible as dividends) is accurate enough as well as much of the other financial stuff.
None of the usual nonsense from Greens about banks being able to create credit out of thin air and silly reforms to counter this. The school of reformist economic thought that he seems to adhere to is Modern Monetary Theory, as can be seen from this section:
The “sovereign state” pays for something and then gets it back as taxes and financial benefits from what it paid for. This might work if the state was completely sovereign which Britain isn’t as it depends a lot of imports and exports. Driscoll hardly takes this into account and seems to want to isolate Britain from or at least drastically its reduce dependence on the world market and its forces. Which won’t work as he intends.
Actually, we do have something set out like that. It’s here ;
Supporters of the government’s move are telling the truth about military action this time — that is about defending a key trade route.
Andy Burnham goes to war:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqlykpe4dk0yo
Can’t pretend this time that it’s about defending democracy or human rights which of course don’t exist under the Saudi oriental despotism.
Another 800 or distributed yesterday mainly on the Cowley Estate. Met three Green canvassers, armed with clipboard and doors to knock on.
Meanwhile the LibDems who are taking this election seriously have put out a leaflet which mentions their proposal to end the cost of living crisis:
“Lib Dems will rejoin the single market to solve the cost of living crisis”.
As if there wasn’t one in the EU countries too.
Our leaflet has brought a reaction from a member of the Lambeth & Southwark section of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, apparently a supporter of the Green Party (though we’ve heard the same argument from supporters of the Labour Party).
Anyway, here it is:
“Hi Guys
We appreciate your views, but on a practical level there is are many steps before perfection, and the Greens are leading us in the right direction. The country is in crisis and the most divided it has been for generations – let’s join together rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.
A volunteer for L&S PSC”
