ALB
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Here from the BBC’s site is the full list of parties and their candidates standing in the South East Region. Apart from our candidates I don’t suppose anyone here will recognise anyone except Farage and maybe Daniel Hannan, the Tory lead candidate and outgoing MEP and loud-mouthed Brexiteer. Larry Sanders on the Green Party list is Bernie’s elder brother. We met him when we stood in the Oxford West & Abingdon constituency in the 2015 General Election and he was the Green Party candidate. He advocated many of the things we do, as e.g. on education, but thought (as the Greens do) that these could be achieved under capitalism.
Two developments today.
The government has confirmed that the elections are definitely going ahead. Which is good news and bad news fo us. The bad news is that we won’t get our £5,000 election deposit back unless we get at least 2% of the votes cast (not just in Folkestone but across the whole region). The good news is that we now know that any money we spend on printing leaflets for free postal distribution is not going to be wasted with us ending up 315,000 dated leaflets to distribute.
The other development is that Royal Mail have approved the artwork for these leaflets which has been sent for printing. They are going to be distributed in 6 selected Westminster constituencies:
Brighton Pavilion, Oxford East, Canterbury, Dover, Folkestone & Hythe, and Maidstone & the Weald.
Five members were out yesterday in Southampton to do a stall at the TUC May Day event there. We were surprised to hear somebody high-up in Southampton Labour Party (didn’t catch his name) say capitalism existed in both the UK and the EU, that Leave or Remain wasn’t the issue and that socialism was the answer. More or less what we say. Of course he didn’t mean the same. For him capitalism “neo-liberal capitalism” and “socialism” was a Labour government under Jeremy.
As things were quiet at the stall and there were five of us, four went out leafletting and one stayed to look after the stall. In all, we must have shifted about a 1,000. One reaction, from a polite enough Brexshitter, was that 23 May, the date of the election, was “traitors’ day”. The shape of things to come in the rest of the campaign and if there’s another referendum, as conditions begin to resemble those in the Weimar Republic in Germany after WWI (well, sort of)?
Back at the stall, one person agreed to take some of our leaflets to put in the pidgeon-holes at her student hostel. Further activity in the area is the hustings in the Isle of Wight tomorrow evening and leafletting in New Milton.
I didn’t mean it that way at all. I was contrasting the 131 votes we got in one election with the 59 votes we got in another in the same area and was seeking a reason why some decided to vote for us in one but not the other. I did say in an earlier post that the 59 votes (4.2%) would have been the result of sustained electoral and other activity in the area.
I know we used to get this sort of result in the North East, with on one occasion us being the only non-Labour candidate in a 6-member ward and that, had there been a particularly unpopular Labour candidate, we could have ended up with our first local councillor, though hardly one elected by in the main consciously socialist voters.
The second salvo in our campaign took place yesterday with leafletting in the Wolverton area of Milton Keynes. This week the campaign is to really get under way with leafletting and stalls in Southampton, Oxford and Oxfordshire, meetings and hustings in Oxford and the Isle of Wight, and the printing of half-a-million leaflets.
Here is the result of the seat on Folkestone Town Council we contested. With (I think) the same electorate but different candidates and voters having 3 rather than 2 votes, here is the result.
The 131 votes, which is 9.4% of the 1397 who voted, is no doubt to be explained by the absence of LibDem or Green candidates compared with the District Council elections. Nobody else, except for the ex-Ukipper who got elected, for those who are anti-Tory and anti-Labour to vote for, not that we want such votes.
Newport Pagnell, isn’t that a service station on the M1? Sounds alright but you know the area better than the rest of us. To cover two wards you will need more leaflets of course.
Meanwhile, we have received another invitation to a hustings, again in the North of the region:
Monday 13 May 7pm-9pm. Banbury Town Hall, 1 Bridge St, Banbury OX16 5QB
Mike Foster will be our representative.
Interesting to see that deliberately spoiled ballot papers, which we used to get mocked for for advocating when faced with a choice of pro-capitalist candidates only, is gaining some legitimacy as a political tactic when you don’t agree with the options on offer:
Since everybody seems to be doing it I think I’ll take a photo of my write-in vote for socialism on 23 May (if the election takes place).
I’ve worked it out. 1,411 people voted. Of these 59 cast one of their two votes for the Socialist candidate. That’s 4.2%.
We always do better in local than in general elections but this is better than usual even in local elections and no doubt reflects the electoral and other activity put in in Folkestone over a number of years. It will also reflect that last time four years ago, when we got 35 votes, TUSC was also standing. This time the weren’t but one of the Labour candidates elected had stood for them in 2014.
A Brexit Party leaflet has just dropped through my letter box. They are quick off the mark. I suppose they want to get their stuff out before the government cancels the elections (as they intent if they can get a deal with Labour). Among those on the leaflet calling for a Brexit Party vote is ex “Revolutionary Communist Party” Trot, billed as a “writer”, Clare Fox who says: “Left-wing democrats should vote to deliver the referendum result”. Presumably she still regards herself as “left-wing”.
Here is the result of the election in the ward in Folkestone and Hythe District Council that we contested. Not worked out what it is in percentage terms (difficult anyway, as electors had 2 votes). Incidentally, the result was a Labour gain (from Tory and ex-UKIP).
We also stood a candidate for Folkestone Town Council. Result not yet published.
It’s a bit surprising that no mention has yet been made here of the report of the Committee on Climate Change published the other day. At least this report shows that capitalist governments realise that global warming is a problem and that they are going to try to do something about it. The proposal is that the UK should aim to go “carbon neutral”, i.e that emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere should be balanced by counter-measures to take an equivalent amount out , by 2050 (the XR people want the government to aim for this by 2025) and sets out measures that should be taken to achieve this.
Of course it remains to be seen how successful implementing such a policy will be, as in the face of resistance from vested interests and of loss of competitiveness if the governments of other countries don’t follow suit and, of course, doing this just in Britain won’t have much effect on its own.
No doubt something will be done, and it will have some effect, which will mean that the worst case scenarios, based on the assumption that nothing will be done, won’t take place. What happens might be bad, but it won’t be that bad. We shouldn’t base what we say about global warming on the assumption that capitalist governments will do nothing about it. It should be that under capitalism the problem can’t be dealt with adequately.
I am always suspicious of talk about “debt-based” money or economies as it suggests that the user thinks bank loans are somehow created out of thin air by a keyboard stroke. Capitalism is not based on interest and debt-slavery but on profit and wage-slavery.
Anyway, since bank loans are not created out of thin air but come from money the banks have (from deposits and what they themselves borrow), cancelling all debts would cause chaos to the capitalist economy (would indeed “up end” it) as, at the personal level, the banks would have no income to pay interest on people’s savings. In fact, they’d collapse and people lose their savings. Not going to work. Or not going to provoke the intended response. XR would get a different reaction to just causing traffic chaos for a few days.
I hadn’t heard of them either till yesterday. They had a stall in Trafalgar Square with some publications. I must confess I didn’t look at them because the hammer-and-sickle logos put me off. I think they are more a magazine. Following the various trotskyist sects is complicated enough without having to add the maoist ones. But I imagine there are 57 varieties of them too.
Just read through some of the leaflets I picked up at the May Day rally in London yesterday. This one headed “In or Out of the EU – The Rich Will Still Rule!” is really quite good. But for a reference to future “socialist countries” it could almost have come from us. No idea who they are but they appear to be Maoists.
(My browser says the link is insecure but you can get round this, but if anyone can’t and wants to read the text I can post it here; it’s not very long).
