Haringey Socialist Alliance candidates and supporters out campaigning
Most of the anger at Keir Starmer’s Labour Party boosted the Green Party in the local elections in England.
But some of it went to independent candidates who challenged Labour’s record over Palestine and austerity.
The Your Party leadership endorsed around 50 individual candidates and gave its support to a range of local groups.
These included the Ealing Community Independents and Arise in Harrow, both in west London, the Redbridge Independents and Aspire in Tower Hamlets in east London and the Your Bradford Independent group.
These candidates ranged from principled socialists to small business owners, landlords and former Tories. This did not represent the socialist challenge that Your Party could have mounted.
Others stood without formal backing from Your Party. Shah Abdul Majeed Bakth of the Camden People’s Alliance (CPA) won a seat in the St Pancras and Somers Town ward in the north London borough with 999 votes. It built on the strong showing for Andrew Feinstein’s left challenge against Keir Starmer in the general election in 2024.
Socialist Pamela Fitzpatrick, standing for Arise, won a seat from Labour in Marlborough Ward in Harrow. She was a Labour councillor in the area before she was expelled for the crime of giving an interview to a socialist newspaper in 2021.
Two Oldham Group Party candidates, backed by Your Party, were elected in the Greater Manchester town. The Oldham Group had nine councillors who split from Labour in 2024 over Labour’s complicity in Israel’s genocide.
The Oldham Group supports Palestine, but does not share a broad set of socialist politics.
It was a similar picture in Walsall, where a Your Party backed independent, Ashfaq Ahmed, took a seat with 1,419 votes.
In Birmingham, 12 independent candidates won seats on the council.
Narendra Kandel, standing for Your Party in Greenwich in south London got a respectable 720 votes. And Laura Graham, a Your Party backed candidate, won 470 votes in the nearby borough of Lambeth.
Your Party-backed candidates got decent votes in West Lancashire Borough Council, where Ron Cooper won 18 percent of the vote but failed to win.
However, in many other areas, the vote for Your Party candidates was dismally low. The party’s candidates scored less than 5 percent in wards in Stockport, Cambridge, Coventry, Salford and Waltham Forest in east London.
Your Bradford Independent group has lost some of its councillors to Labour.
The Islington Community Independents in north London were hoping to take seats from Labour.
Palestine hunger striker and prisoner Amu Gib won just under 600 votes after a lively campaign in Finsbury Park ward.
Other independent candidates standing in Finsbury Park ward were formally backed by the leadership of Your Party. Sharon Matthew won 636 votes, while Sadiq Yusuf won 763 votes.
But it was the Greens who took seats from Labour in Islington, as they did in the other London boroughs of Hackney and Haringey.
In nearby Hackney, Ceren Sagir and Des Barrow, a Socialist Workers Party (SWP) member, received 389 and 269 votes respectively.
Some votes for socialist candidates give a glimpse of what could have been achieved if Your Party had become a mass organisation that put forward principled, socialist politics.
The Haringey Socialist Alliance (HSA) in north London won some impressive results. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) worked with broader forces to set up the HSA in anticipation of Jeremy Corbyn announcing a new left party.
In West Green ward, SWP member John Sinha received 781 votes, while Meryem Ulger won 880.
In Northumberland Park ward two SWP members, Alison Davy and Gary McFarlane, won 823 and 622 votes respectively.
In Bruce Castle ward, 528 votes were cast for SWP member Paul Burnham, and 599 for the other HSA candidate Amelie Cooper.
SWP member Miça Evans won 550 votes standing for the Ealing Community Independents.
She told Socialist Worker, “At the beginning, being a candidate was super overwhelming. I didn’t know where to start. I began with the streets near me.
“I soon found that the posh houses were not interested in what I had to say. So I concentrated on South Acton estate, the biggest housing estate in the area and the one most decimated by Labour’s austerity.
“I wore a Palestinian keffiyeh everywhere I went—Palestine was a massive issue. I always started by talking about cuts and austerity, the campaign to save the Michael Flanders adult day centre, and how Labour are trying to close 10 children’s centres in the borough.
“I told people I was active in West London Stand Up To Racism and how I had defended refugees in West Drayton. I spoke about the rise in Islamophobia—and people who are experiencing it really liked that, Muslim women in particular.”
The surge in Reform UK in the local elections makes the actions of the Your Party leadership all the more criminal.
The majority of Reform UK’s support comes from right wing and racist voters. But, in the absence of an alternative to Labour, many stick with the devil they know—or stay and home and don’t vote.
A socialist challenge at the ballot boxes had potential to break through in areas where the Green Party did not make advances.
The actions of the Your Party leadership flowed from the deeper structural logic of “Labourism”.
This sees parliamentary and electoral politics as most important to winning social change.
Of course, winning elections does matter. But, for revolutionary socialists in the SWP, elections are a terrain of struggle always subordinated to the aim of building up working class organisation and confidence to confront the bosses’ system.
Today, the opportunities for standing a socialist challenge to Labour have narrowed.
The local elections have confirmed that the Green Party is the dominant left of Labour force in England.
The key task lies in building the anti-racist movement and pushing for a higher level of working class resistance to Labour’s austerity.
Let’s throw our energies onto the streets and picket lines.
19 homes have been destroyed and at least 19 more damaged
Another Blairite gimmick
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