ALB
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or maybe the Left of Labour groups will now look towards the ‘Independent’ tag as a long term electoral strategy.
I wouldn’t have thought so. There is no real advantage to any group to do this even if it might well bring their candidate more votes.
If we strip out those Muslim candidates standing on an anti-Gaza War ticket who oppose the war not because it’s a war or even as “anti-imperialists” but simply because the victims are fellow Muslims, I suspect most of the others will be expelled Labour Party members, including councillors and former councillors. Their motivation will be to get as many votes as possible and increase their personal profile. At some point they will probably join the Greens or even rejoin the Labour Party.
As for the non-left Muslims, the result could be entirely negative — the formation of a Muslim communitarian party.
The reasons an organisation might contest as an organisation will mainly be, as somebody says in the comments, to raise its profile. I suppose this would include us, though, unlike all the others except perhaps Communist Future, our main aim is to put across ideas. In this respect, the others all play the game of conventional politics by making promises and pledges to do this or that but even more unrealistic than those of the parties represented in parliament, basically more and better of everything as if capitalism could be made to do this. In other words, they encourage reformist illusions.
In the case of SPEW which doesn’t contest in its own name but through its front organisation TUSC the aim is to recruit new members.
Galloway’s Workers Party will probably go the same way as Respect, which had a few local councillors but after a while deregistered as a political party. A flash in the pan.
No, I think I just caught the arse end of Macmillan’s reign of terror
I think I missed out the 14th Earl of Home, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who took over from Macmillan in 1963 before being booted out to the following year, after “14 years of Tory misrule” as the Labour Party put it, in favour of Harold Wilson. So it will be the Profumo scandal that you remember?
This table, copied from the general
General Election thread, shows that all those on the list, with the exception of Scottish Socialist Party, are in the same league as parties averaging under 1 percent of the votes cast as in most constituencies you need to get more than 350 votes to reach that percentage.Interesting that those who compiled this table did not include Galloway’s Workers Party, presumably because they did not consider it appropriate to because of its position on immigration, policing and sexual minorities.
Another letter from a member in this week’s Weekly Worker:
“Five independent pro-Palestine candidates, including former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, have won in United Kingdom general elections with Israel’s war on Gaza among key issues for voters.
The other four independent candidates who won their seats from Labour on Friday include Shockat Adam in Leicester South, Ayoub Khan in Birmingham Perry Barr, Adnan Hussain in Blackburn, and Iqbal Mohamed in Dewsbury and Batley.”
For the record, the London branch member who dealt with email enquiries sent to our candidate in Clapham and Brixton Hill from members of pressure groups and single issue campaigns that are sent to all candidates at election time reports that he sent a standard reply and appropriate link to 217 such enquiries.
I don’t think you know what a landslide victory is so here’s the definition:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landslide_victory
You could say that the Conservative won a landslide victory in 2019 when he got 65.2% of the votes cast. But not that he did just now when those opposed to him totalled 64.2%.
He won because he was the first past the post, ie got a plurality of votes defined as where “the number of votes cast for a candidate who receives more than any other but does not receive an absolute majority.”
Comment from another forum about Labour’s performance:
“Only 2% vote up from last time, lost several seats, total vote share a pathetic 34%, leader loses 18,000 votes in his seat, overall turnout a near historic low. Labour’s 9,700,000 votes is clearly fewer than the 10,300,000 votes the party received under Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 election.”
If you are talking about Christchurch the Conservative Party got 16941 votes or 35.8%.
Last time in 2019 the same candidate got 33894 or 65.2%.
Their vote was halved and you call it a landslide. Typical.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/constituencies/E14001171
Result in Folkestone and Hythe:
LAB 15020 (34.7%)
CON 11291
REF 10685 (24.7%)
GREEN 3954
LIBDEM 1736
TUSC 249
FAIRER VOTING 240
SOC 71 (0.2%)Turnout 62%
Result in Clapham and Brixton Hill
LAB 24166 (56.5%)
LIBDEM 6161
GREEN 5768
CON 4360
REFORM 1758 (4.1%)
IND 406
SOC 122 (0.3%)Turnout 57%
But George III was not an “absolute monarch”. Following the “glorious revolution” of 1688 Parliament was in control though the king retained certain “prerogatives”. Even these have now all passed to the government based on a parliamentary majority. In the US these prerogatives are still exercised by the president as “executive orders”.
Starmer will be the fifteenth PM I will have served under
I make the first to be Sir Anthony Eden. Thats’s going back a bit. So you remember the Suez adventure and the petrol rationing that resulted?
I have cast a stick-on vote for socialism too. I could have voted for a pub which has formed itself into a party as a publicity stunt. I get a chance to vote again later as I have a proxy vote for a socialist in Australia. It’s in Lewisham North and East Dulwich where I get a chance not to vote for the Workers Party and the Christian Peoples Alliance as well as the usual gang of five.
“The NFP [New Popular Front] is following a similar path today [as the 1936 Popular Front], with ambitious policies to improve the purchasing power of poor and lower-middle-class people. These reforms include a substantial increase in the minimum wage, wages indexed to prices and free school lunches. Most importantly the NFP wants to prioritise investment in the future by increasing public spending on infrastructure – throughout the country, including in isolated rural areas – as well as in health, education and research.”
Oh dear! Clearly the French left has yet to realise that this type of reformism can’t work. For a start, where’s the money going to come from to increase the purchasing power of the lowest paid and to increase spending on public services and amenities? There is only one source — the profits of capitalist businesses. But profit is what drives the capitalist economy, so this would just slow down accumulation and make things worse. Mitterrand tried this in 1981 and it was a complete flop.
It’s a recipe for disaster which risks further fuelling the advance of the far right. Mind you, if that lot come into office they will of course fail too to make capitalism work in the interest of the majority class made up of those excluded from ownership and control of the means of living. That just can’t be done.
