2014 local elections: The TUSC results Overview – p3 Summary points – p4 A note on statistical methods – p5 Table One: TUSC results by council – p7 Table Two: The directly-elected mayoral results – p10 Table Three: Regional breakdown of the full results: Eastern – p11 East Midlands – p13 London – p15 Northern – p28 North West – p30 Southern – p34 South West – p37 West Midlands – p42 Yorkshire & Humberside – p46 Table Four: Candidates not part of the TUSC umbrella – p51 May 27th 2014 1 2 Overview A TOTAL of 554 candidates, standing in 507 wards in 86 councils, contested the local council elections on May 22nd under the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) umbrella. In addition, TUSC stood candidates in the directly-elected mayoral contests in Lewisham, Newham and Tower Hamlets, and in five by-elections in three councils without scheduled elections this year, that were held on the same day. In total 68,152 votes were cast for these candidates. Scheduled elections took place in 161 local authorities in England, to fill 4,216 seats in around 3,000 wards. Labour and the Tories had over 4,000 candidates, the Liberal Democrats 2,907, UKIP 2,155 and the Green Party 1,854. After TUSC, contesting 12% of the seats and 17% of the wards, the next biggest parties were the BNP (106 candidates, 2.5% of the seats), the Christian Peoples Alliance (61, 1.4%), the Liberal Party (43, 1%) and the English Democrats (31, 0.7%). Scale of the TUSC challenge The TUSC challenge was greater than anything attempted before in the four-year history of our coalition. In 2011, the first local elections seriously contested by TUSC, we fielded a candidate in 2% of the seats. In 2012 it was 4% and in 2013, when it was mainly county councils which were up for election, TUSC had a candidate in 5% of the seats, 120 in total. This year was on a different scale. But it was also on a different scale to any historical left-of-Labour comparator. The highest number of candidates ever stood by the Socialist Alliance, for example, was in 2002, on the same four- yearly local elections’ cycle as this year’s contests (including the London boroughs). The Socialist Alliance stood 204 candidates in those elections, in 187 wards. This really was, as we said, the biggest left-of-Labour electoral challenge since the immediate aftermath of world war two. The breadth of candidates Another significant feature was the breadth of the candidates who came forward to stand. There were 53 candidates who were members of the RMT transport workers’ union, one of the constituent organisations, of course, of TUSC. But then there were 19 Communication Workers’ Union members who were candidates, 18 members of the National Union of Teachers, 16 PCS members, and 20 members of the University and College Union. From the big Labour-affiliated unions, there were 74 Unison members standing for TUSC and 130 members of Unite. There was also political breadth, around the agreed TUSC core policies (see http://www.tusc.org.uk/policy). The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition is, as the name states, a coalition. Alongside leading trade unionists and individual socialist councillors sitting in a personal capacity on the national steering committee, there are five organisations with official delegates to the committee: the RMT transport workers union, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Resistance, and the TUSC Independent Socialist Network, representing unaffiliated members of TUSC. These latter are an important component of TUSC – there were 141 candidates (25%) who, when completing the TUSC Authorisation Application form question, ‘are you a member of a political party or group?’ entered ‘none’. But there were also candidates who are members of more socialist organisations than those currently participating on the national steering committee – as has been the case since TUSC’s formation. This year there were candidates standing under the TUSC umbrella who were members of DayMer (a socialist Turkish-Kurdish community group), the Pan-African Congress, the United Socialist Party, the Labour Representation Committee, and nine members of Left Unity and two Respect members, all with the rights guaranteed in the TUSC rules to promote their own 3 organisation in their election campaign as they so wished (see http://www.tusc.org.uk/16861/14- 11-13/How-TUSC-Functions on the TUSC website). However, while TUSC strives to be a broad coalition, there are still other forces yet to be involved. The TUSC national steering committee has previously invited Left Unity, Respect, the National Health Action Party, the Socialist Labour Party, and the Communist Party of Britain to join our coalition with the full rights of a participating organisation – or at least to discuss electoral collaboration. But, while there was some collaboration locally, these parties decided to stand candidates separately from TUSC on May 22nd. Their results are listed at the end of this report. National media boycott The BBC, acting on behalf of all the broadcasting companies, produces guidance policy for coverage of each election, including a minimum threshold of the number of candidates a party must stand before they qualify for ‘fair coverage’. Unfortunately, although we ended up with candidates in nearly 17% of the wards – above the BBC’s criteria – this time TUSC fell short of the seat number threshold. The result was an almost total boycott of TUSC in the national broadcasting and print media, with just one item on the BBC’s Daily Politics show, a 20-second clip on the News At One, a similar length item on Radio Four, but nothing on ITV, Sky or Channel Four. The only national newspaper to mention TUSC was The Independent. The steering committee is resolved that this should be the last set of elections where TUSC does not meet the minimum thresholds. Summary points Table One presents the TUSC results aggregated on a local authority basis, with the full results for each ward, including the votes of all the other parties’ candidates, given in Table Three. Table Two records the results of the TUSC candidates in the three directly-elected mayoral contests. Significant features of the results include: ■ The total vote for all TUSC candidates on May 22nd was 68,031, comprised of 64,098 votes for the council candidates and 3,933 votes for the three mayoral candidates. ■ The TUSC national steering committee member, Southampton councillor Keith Morrell, expelled from the Labour Party for voting against the cuts, was re-elected for his Coxford ward with a 43% share of the vote, with Labour coming in third. ■ Other notable ward results were Dave Nellist’s 29.7% in Coventry St Michael’s ward; Terry Simmons’ 21%, Paul Quinn’s 19.7% and Sue Wright’s 19.2% in Salford’s Little Hulton, Weaste & Seedley and Barton wards; Brendan Tyrrell’s 18.1% in Halewood South in Knowsley; Dave Gibson’s 17% in Barnsley Central; Ibrahim Avcil’s 14.4% in Haringey’s Northumberland Park ward; and Kieran Wilson’s 14% in Redbridge ward in Southampton ■ In 31 councils TUSC stood in over 30% of the wards. In five of these councils TUSC’s average ward vote was over 5%, topped by Salford (9.9%), and followed by Haringey (6.9%), Barnsley (6.4%), Southampton (5.7%) and Newham (5.5%). ■ In 21 councils – one eighth of the councils with elections on May 22nd – TUSC polled over 1,000 votes. ■ In ten councils, TUSC’s score was over 2,000 votes, led by Waltham Forest (5,482 votes), Haringey (4,166), Southampton (3,308), Lewisham (2,735, in addition to the 1,354 votes for 4 TUSC’s candidate for mayor), Sheffield (2,657), Coventry (2,592), Hillingdon (2,260), Enfield (2,162), Salford (2,150), and Tower Hamlets (2,144, plus 871 for the mayor). ■ Across the 506 wards contested by TUSC in the scheduled elections, 17% of the total, the mean average vote for TUSC candidates was 3.4%. A note on statistical methods The results for TUSC candidates for each council where a seat was contested are given in the regional breakdown of results. A figure for the percentage of the vote won by TUSC is also given. How this later figure is worked out is straightforward in a contest for one seat – the percentage figure for the TUSC candidate being the percentage of all the votes cast. But what about multi-seat contests, where two or three councillors were elected from the same ward? How to present such results, particularly where a party fields just one candidate in a two or three-seat contest, is a controversial question of psephology. In an example from the 2011 elections, in Leicester’s Rushey Mead ward the single TUSC candidate polled 272 votes, outpolling one of the Liberal Democrat candidates. It is a fact that 4.9% of the 5,524 people who voted in Rushey Mead used one of their three votes for TUSC. But they actually cast 13,917 votes. So if all the ward’s candidates’ votes were recorded as a percentage of the 5,524 actual voters, the total number of votes would be 300%. So the method we have used since 2011 is to record the TUSC vote (or the highest TUSC vote in a ward we have fielded more than one candidate) as a percentage of the aggregate of the highest votes of all the parties contesting the ward, the highest vote being taken as a maximum expression of a particular party’s support. In the Rushey Mead example, this aggregated the highest Labour vote (2,789), the highest Independent (1,039), the Tories’ highest vote (861), the top Lib Dem vote (556), and TUSC’s 272 votes, a total of 5,517.