Elections in Swansea again (1987)

Party News from the October 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

On August 25. Swansea Branch found itself contesting a local election for the second time in four months. When the Conservative candidate who topped the poll at the May City Council Election died shortly after being elected, we decided not to lose the momentum we had gained by our May campaign and to stand again in the by-election.

As time was short we were unable to mount as extensive a campaign as in May, but, with the welcome aid of socialists from other branches, we still managed to leaflet all 10.000 voters in the ward, get some publicity in the local press and do some canvassing. What our doorstep discussions with voters showed was that we are now known in the area. When we canvassed in May, we had to go to a great deal of trouble to distinguish ourselves from the Labour Party and other organisations calling themselves socialist. This time the confusion hardly ever arose. On the whole people knew who we were and (at least approximately) what we stood for. And this greater familiarity of voters with our ideas was, we think, reflected in the voting. On a much reduced poll compared with May, our vote went up by 20 per cent numerically (from 50 to 61) and our percentage of the total votes cast more than doubled (from 1 per cent to 2.4 per cent).

Although the 50 votes we got in May have seemed very few by conventional standards, we were not in the least despondent about it. Our view was that we could not expect people who were, for the most part, hearing a completely new and different idea for the first time to immediately take it in, fully agree with it and go out and vote for it. To expect them to do all this in one fell swoop would have been quite unrealistic. What is not perhaps unrealistic, however, is for us to think that the August result shows that the idea is now beginning to filter through. Not that we would want to make too much of our modestly increased vote, but it is not perhaps too over-optimistic to suppose that the increase is at least partly due to the cumulative effect of people receiving our leaflets, hearing about us and in general having more frequent access than they would otherwise have to the socialist idea.

Now that we have a foothold in the Uplands area, we plan to be back again for the County Council elections in May when we shall again use the platform local elections give to put across the socialist case and. we hope, to consolidate and expand its influence in Swansea.

Swansea Branch

The full results of the August 25 poll were:

Jean Taverner (Conservative) 1460

Dereck Roberts (Labour) 851

David Howells (Green Party) 130

Howard Moss (Socialist Party) 61