ALB
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In view of our result in the South East, where last time both the SLP and No2EU got over 10,000 votes, and in view of the SLP result here in Wales this time, I've changed my mind about the significance of votes for them. I think people vote for the SLP, perhaps mistakenly, for the "Labour" not the "Socialist" in the title, while I don't think votes for No2EU are "left" votes at all (after all, there can't be more than two hundred SPEW and CPB members together in Wales if that).What is interesting about the result in Wales is the areas where we did best. No surprise about Swansea where we've a branch and have contested elections before. It's the other two. The top one. in percentage terms, is Rhondda Cynon Taff, which includes the Rhondda Valley, an old CP stronghold. It must have been the 1930's style logo proclaiming "The World for the Workers" that adorned the front of our manifesto (this was one of the areas where we had Royal Mail distribute it). Despite Cardiff being the area where we got the largest absolute number of votes we did not do well there because over 80,000 voted there.But the big surprise is equal second with Swansea was … Gwynedd (also where we came nearest to matching No2EU.) This is the Welsh-speaking area of Wales where we got some (justified) complaints from irate Welsh-speakers there that we hadn't even a word of Welsh on our manifesto. We targetted this area for free distribution of our manifesto by Royal Mail because it contains Bangor University.We contested Wales mainly for the election broadcast of course but the distribution of the manifesto clearly had an effect in two areas. And if we contest elections in Wales again we must include something in Welsh, even if only the Object and/or a link to an article in Welsh on our website.On a wider political level, as the British nationalist party UKIP easily beat the Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, there is not the remotest chance of Wales becoming an independent state.
The count took place in 67 "local council areas", corresponding to the 67 local councils in the area. These figures were then sent on to the regional returning officer in Southampton who then collated them and applied the D'Hondt (a famous Belgian) rule to attribute the 10 seats proportionately. Four of us attended separate counts, Rob in Dover, Danny in Sevenoaks, Sean in Hastings and myself in Southampton.The full result dor the South East Region is:UKIP 751,439Tories 723,671Labour 342,775Greens 211,706LibDems 187,876Ind from Europe 45,199English Dems 17,771BNP 16,909Christians 14,893Peace Party 10,130SPGB 5,454Roman Party 2,997Your Voice 2932Liberty GB 2494Harmony Party 1904The turnout throughout the region was 36.5%.The result confirms our past experience that there is some relationship between our vote and the Labour vote, i.e that we do better in Labour areas. The South East is a solid Tory area with Labour in this election getting only 14.5% of the total vote. The combined Tory/UKIP (and UKIP are essentially Tory eurosceptics) vote amounts to 63%.The results from the local counting areas were posted on boards at Southampton civic centre when they came in. Our highest number of votes was in Brighton & Hove at 397 and our highest percentage (twice our average) was in Oxford where we got 221 votes. In both these areas we beat the BNP, as we did in Lewes (just north of Brighton). In fact the collapse of the BNP vote is a feature of the election. In Southampton, for instance, their vote fell from 2,848 in 2009 to 528 last night. Most of course will have gone to UKIP.Our next best in terms of votes was 249 in Southampton. Reading at 114 was disappointing, less than Basingstoke's 116. Others were we got into triple figures were Milton Keynes (182), Medway (171), Portsmouth (162), Canterbury (159), Hastings (113) and Shepway (100). Our worst results were 22 in Surrey Heath and 20 in South Bucks. A word of caution, though, absolute figures are not comparable in view of the varying number of voters in the different areas. We will have to wait for the full local area results to be put on the internet before we can draw up a list of where we did better than average.Besides the publicity we got for the socialist case, the election has already identified areas where we should concentrate our follow-up: Oxford, Brighton and the Medway.
We've just received an application to join from someone who saw Danny Lambert on the BBC2 Daily Politics Show last Monday. Here's their answer to the last question:
Quote:What are your views on religion and its relation to the Party’s case for socialism?:Religion is the greatest enemy of reason, peace, and brotherhood. It takes children and teaches them hate. It teaches them superstition. It divides them. It pays lip-service to contentment but sanctions selfishness. It talks about peace, but ends in war. It promises enlightenment but offers only wanton ignorance.Relevant and surprisingly undogmatic article here from one of the Trotskyist groups within LU which reflects the arguments for reformism that Stuart and Jools seem to be putting forward:http://links.org.au/node/3858
Sorry, Robbo, you got the wrong end of the stick. I wasn't saying that slump conditions are best for us. In fact I hold the opposite view (more workers turn to nasty nationalism as in the 30s and again now). What I was saying is that at the time many members did think this and dropped out when capitalism proved able to improve working class conditions, including their own, compared to the 30s.We also had our own "Revisionist" controversy which mirrored that started by Bernstein in the German Social Democratic Party at the turn of the century with some mermbers arguing that this development showed that a gradual evolution to socialism, e.g. more and more services becoming free, was possible (read the articles by Frank Evans in Forum and the arguments of Tony Turner). They and others left. We now know of course that it was the post-war boom that ended in the mid-70s that was exceptional not a standing pool of 5-6% unemployed that has existed since.
One of the visitors to West London's public meeting last Tuesday on the Euroelections was the cartoonist who does the "Seen & Heard" political satire cartoon each week in Private Eye and will be doing one on these elections in next Wednesday's edition. It will be interesting to see if it contains any echo of our "EU in or out, it doesn't matter either way" position.
stuartw2112 wrote:To believe that socialist reforms are not possible due to the nature of capitalism, you'd have to believe that Marx's laws of capitalism are basically the same in nature as Newton's laws.No, you don't. You just have to face the fact that capitalism cannot be reformed so as to work in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary workers and their dependants. The economic laws of capitalism (priority to profit-making) may not be as rigid as iron but they exist and do impose themselves on governments, even in the end of well-meaning reformist ones. Isn't that the lesson of the Labour Party's failure over the years?What do you and Jools think that "Marx's laws of capitalism" are? Just guidelines or a some code of practice that capitalist firms and government don't have to follow if they don't want to or can be forced not to follow by popular pressure?LU, Owen Jones, etc believe that the way out of the present slump and its accompanying austerity is government spending on housing, schools, etc., i.e a return to the failed and discredited doctrines of Keynes. Is this what EP Thompson meant? Perhaps I shouldn't have asked as he may well have done.
DJP wrote:Actually despite the media harping UKIPs percentage of the vote has actually fallen.http://www.libdemvoice.org/about-that-ukip-earthquake-farage-partys-national-voteshare-down-on-2013-40267.htmlAlso:http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/11232555.Labour_retains_Hastings_council_as_Ukip_loses_only_member/%5D/Not so much Mugsborough after all. That passes to Basildon and other towns in Essex.
When the Oxford Mail published a full list of the candidates standing in the elections they mistakenly used Militant's logo instead of ours. Candidate Max Hess wrote asking for this to be corrected. The correction, with a barbed comment but reproducing one of our logos below, appeared here (scroll down).
There was no post-war slump and with more or less full employment in the 50s working class conditions improved compared with pre-war days, with workers acquiring household goods and even cars.
stuartw2112 wrote:Left Unity has stood on a (currently) "unrealisable" set of socialist reforms, the SPGB stood on a platform of one big unrealisable socialist reform. I don't see the difference..The difference is that socialism is unrealisable at the moment because people don't want it but will be realisable when a sufficient majority do, while the wish list of attractive reforms to capitalism put forward by the likes of LU and TUSC are mostly inherently unrealisable because of the nature of capitalism and wouldn't become realisable even if a majority wanted them (in fact strict Trotskyist strategy is based on this being so).And of course it was the workings of capitalism itself that opened the way for heightened anti-capitalist criticism not Owen Jones or Caroline Lucas. Anyway, why should we thank them when what both of them are proposing (state capitalism in the one case, small-scale capitalism in the other) is not the way-out?
We promised to scrutinise Left Unity's local election results. They stood 7 for Wigan Council, 2 in Norwich, 1 in Exeter and 1 in the London Borough of Barnet. Here are the results:Wigan: 85, 88, 252, 85, 78, 79, 129Norwich: 52, 44Exeter: 39Barnet: 107Their best results were in Wigan where one of their candidates got 8.8%, with the others averaging 3-4%. Elsewhere it was the same as us.For comparison (and the comparison can only be rough as the wards outside London are smaller and elect a single rather than 3 councillors) our results were:Lambeth: 81, 49, 46Islington: 90.Clearly LU are not a new force making a breakthrough but yet another small party in the bottom league, alongside us and TUSC. And of course they canvassed votes on the basis of a wish list of unrealisable reforms while we stood just for socialism.
The results for the three wards we contested in Lambeth can be found here:Clapham Town: http://moderngov.lambeth.gov.uk/mgElectionAreaResults.aspx?XXR=0&ID=112&RPID=24614579Ferndale: http://moderngov.lambeth.gov.uk/mgElectionAreaResults.aspx?XXR=0&ID=114&RPID=24615788Larkhall: http://moderngov.lambeth.gov.uk/mgElectionAreaResults.aspx?XXR=0&ID=118&RPID=24616396As it happens, the results in the two wards we contested both times (Ferndale and Larkhall) are almost exactly the same as last time in 2010.More later.
Letter from Rob Cox, another of our candidates, published in yesterday's East Kent Mercury (somewhat belatedly as yesterday was polling day):
As the Regional Returning Officer had supplied me with a document authorising me, as election agent, to visit any polling station in the South East Region I decided to exercise this right by visiting one in Long Ditton, Surrey. It was in a school annexed to a Liberal Jewish Synagogue (a change from the usual Christian Church halls). The polling clerks had never had such a visit before. There were no voters there. I chatted to them and then to the representatives of the Tories, Liberals and UKIP outside and gave each of these one of our leaflets though they were there for the local borough elections.As I was leaving two policemen entered the polling station. I wouldn't have thought they have the right to unless called. I hope not anyway as in some countries this would be regarded as intimidatory. I didn't challenge them as my car was partly parked on double yellow lines, but I will check with the Returning Officer.Earlier I had voted in London where the ballot paper was over 2 foot long. The one in the South East will be shorter as there are only 14 lists there compared with 17 in London.
