Local elections 2018: the TUSC results report

From the TUSC website

The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) stood 111 council candidates in 33 authorities in the local elections on May 3rd, contesting 101 wards.

The stand-out result was the victory of TUSC national steering committee member Keith Morrell, one of the three Putting People First group of anti-cuts councillors that sits on Southampton council.

The next best score was recorded in Kirklees council's Crosland Moor & Netherton ward, with TUSC winning 701 votes for a 14.2% share.

The best performance in a single council was achieved in Waltham Forest, with TUSC polling 2,841 votes across the 12 wards (out of 20) contested there.

A report of the campaign, with details of the full results of every TUSC candidate, has been prepared by the TUSC National Election Agent (see the draft report at http://www.tusc.org.uk/txt/424.pdf ), and will be discussed at the next TUSC national steering committee meeting on May 23rd.

Summary points from the report include:

■ This was the most selective local election stand that TUSC has taken in its eight-year history, following the general re-calibration of its electoral policy after Jeremy Corbyn's welcome victory as Labour leader in September 2015.

■ There was not a single TUSC candidate on May 3rd standing in a direct head-to-head contest with a Labour candidate who had been a consistent public supporter of Jeremy Corbyn and his anti-austerity policies. TUSC only stood against right-wing, Blairite Labour councillors and candidates.

■ There were 31 Labour-led councils in which TUSC contested seats on May 3rd. These councils had voted for around half a billion pounds of further cuts to local jobs and services in their 2018-19 budget-setting meetings earlier this year.

The councillors who supported this could not be seen as 'anti-austerity councillors' in any definable way.

■ The Labour candidates in the seats contested by TUSC included 32 councillors who had publically backed the leadership coup attempt against Jeremy Corbyn in summer 2016, signing a national Open Letter of support for the right-wing challenger Owen Smith.

■ The stand-out result for TUSC was the victory of Southampton councillor Keith Morrell. Keith was re-elected with a 46.9% share of the vote in his Coxford ward, up from 42.7% when he first stood independently in 2014 after his expulsion from the Labour Party the previous year.

■ The next best score was recorded in Kirklees council's Crosland Moor & Netherton ward, with TUSC polling 701 votes for a 14.2% share.

The other TUSC candidate in Kirklees polled 285 votes, 6.4%, in Ashbrow ward. Both candidates are key organisers of the Hands Off Huddersfield Royal Infirmary campaign which has conducted a two-year long struggle to stop the closure of the hospital's A&E department.

■ In just under one fifth of the wards it contested TUSC polled five percent or more of the vote. The mean average vote for TUSC council candidates overall was 3.7%.

■ Including the results from this year's more selective stand, just under 380,000 votes have now been cast for TUSC's 100% anti-austerity socialist platform since the formation of our coalition in 2010.

In a situation where Labour is still so clearly two-parties-in-one, the report concludes - with many local 'Labour' candidates standing more ferociously against Jeremy Corbyn than they do the Tories - the task is still there to make sure that politicians of any party label who support capitalism and its inevitable austerity agenda are not left unchallenged.

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