ALB
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Here is the result from the Oxford Local Counting Area:http://www.oxford.gov.uk/Library/Documents/Elections/Declaration%20of%20results.pdfNote that, as well as us getting more votes than the BNP and the equally nasty "English Democrats" ("English jobs for English workers"), even the LibDems got more votes than UKIP as Claudia pointed out. Sounds like an oasis of sanity where parties lose votes if they shout "immigrants out".
One other obvious way to follow-up this election is to seriously consider contesting Oxford West & Abingdon and Brighton Kemptown in next May's General Election. We've got members and now supporters and contacts in both.
Just seen the results for London:http://londoneuroelections.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/European-Election-Results-for-London-Region-2014-181KB-pdf.pdfand see that No2EU, supported by SPEW and the CPB together, got 3804 votes, or 0.17%. Confirmation that London is less xenophobic than the rest of the country, but surely this must mean the end of this organisation as I can't see Bob Crow's successor as RMT General Secretary wasting any more of the union's political fund on it (and SPEW never really believed in it anyway but were just going along with it to get Crow's money for TUSC).
Someone on our facebook page has worked out the percentage we got in each of the 22 "local counting areas" in Wales. Some interesting points arise (which might require the above analysis to be revised).Those with an above average (above 0.19) are:Rhondda Cynon Taff 0.29% (147 votes)Gwynedd 0.27 (80 votes)Swansea 0.26 (139 votes)Ceredigion 0.23 (48 votes)Vale of Glamorgan 0.22 (76 votes)Merthyr Tysfil 0.22 (26 votes)Wrexham 0.21 (63 votes)Neath Port Talbot 0.21 (73 votes)Cardiff 0.20 (160 votes)Bridgend 0.20 (60 votes)On the surface these have nothing in common. Our election leaflet was delivered by Royal Mail in parts of the Rhondda, Gwynedd, Swansea, Wrexham, Neath and Cardiff. Members and sympathisers distributed a limited number in the Vale of Glamorgan and Bridgend, but none were in Ceredigion. In fact there (which includes Aberystwyth and its university) all they would have had would have been the election broadcast, other BBC Wales interviews and what they saw on the ballot paper. Gwynedd and Ceredigion are, with Anglesey, the most Welsh-speaking areas of Wales. What distinguishes them is that there is a well-established university in both, Bangor in one and Aberystwyth in the other, which means that they will have a younger, more outwardly-looking group. This would go some way to explain why we nearly outvoted No2EU in both these (48 to 56 in Ceredigion and 80 to 100 in Gwynedd). UKIP did badly there with the Welsh Nationalists topping the poll. But unlike Scottish Nationalism Welsh nationalism is leftwing (its current leader even claims to be a socialist).I'm not sure what the implications of all this are for our future activity in Wales but there must be something there to build on in time for the Welsh Assembly elections in 2016.
Ed wrote:Unless of course we put that down to votes being cast for us in the SE due to the lack of 'competition' from left wing parties. In which case perhaps we did not convey the fact that we are not a left party strongly enough.Actually, the result in the South East in percentage terms is almost exactly the same as it was in the London Region last time, in 2009, when we got 4050 votes (0.2%) when faced with both SLP and No2EU "competition":http://spgb.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/result.htmlWithout such competition this time we still get 2 in a 1000 votes. So, I don't think we can be accused of vote-catching opportunism.
Ed wrote:I thought we recieved a higher percentage of the vote in the south east than we did in Wales. 0.19% in Wales compared to 0.23% in SE. Unless of course we put that down to votes being cast for us in the SE due to the lack of 'competition' from left wing parties. In which case perhaps we did not convey the fact that we are not a left party strongly enough.I think my hypothesis (confirmed by other examples) that we do better in Labour than in Tory areas still stands. As the results from Rhondda and to a certain extent Neath (areas where we had our manifesto distributed to every household) show, if we had had them distributed in the other ex-mining and solid Labour areas too (where our results were ridiculous: 23 in Blaneau Gwent, which includes Ebbw Vale were Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot were MPs, and 26 in Merthyr, where Kier Hardie was once MP) we'd have got more votes in Wales. Whether they'd be fully socialist rather than nostalgic trade union conscious votes is another matter.As I said in the thread on the election in Wales I don't regard No2EU as being "left" even in the confused sense of this term. If it's any consolation to you, when I spoke in the hustings in Lewisham someone asked all those on the platform who considered themselves leftwing to put their hand up. I didn't (nor did Lewisham People before Profit) while No2EU, the Greens and the National Health Action Party did.
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).
