Socialist Alliance Election Victory in Preston

Chris Edwards | 02.05.2003 01:05

Socialist Alliance candidate beats Labour in Preston (just down the road from Burnley!).

While BNP fuhrer Griffin failed to get elected in Oldham (Ha!), a Socialist Alliance councillor was elected in Preston. Michael Lavalette won in Preston Town Centre ward with 546 votes, trouncing the Labour candidate by 106 votes.

We have also at this early stage in the evening had some other outstanding results with Gordon Rowntree in Middlesbrough getting 21% of the vote and coming just 100 votes behind the winning Labour candidates, Sue Wild in Barnsley in 17.7% and coming second, Urfan Akhtar in Telford with 14% again coming second and Andy Newman with 13% in Swindon.

The Socialist Alliance stood 161 candidates in the local elections in England. We had 50% more candidates standing this year compared with last and so far our percentage looks well up on last year's vote.

The SA sister party in Scotland, the Scottish Socialist Party, expects at least 8 victories to the Scottish assembly.

Bollocks to the BNP!

Chris Edwards

Comments

Hide the following 6 comments

Victory to the resistance!

02.05.2003 01:28

Well done to all involved in the Socialist Alliance campaigning in general, and especially well done to Preston SA. Victory to the resistance! Smash the Nazi BNP!

chris

Adolf Griffin

02.05.2003 01:43

Adolf Griffin

Spare a thought for poor old Griffin.

Bill

SA-Helping the Fascists more likely

02.05.2003 01:49

By splitting the labour vote.

Red Action

No support for Neo-Labour

02.05.2003 07:46

Ask yourself how anti-facist Labour are? Who strapped Afghanis on a plane and forcibly deported them with armed
guards? Who consistently makes policies which move further
and further towards the far right on immigration? Who leaves
human beings seeking asylum in destitution on the streets?

heather

Hold yer horses

02.05.2003 10:07

Not wanting to rain on anybody's parade - I'm glad that the SA got some good results - but the BNP outpaced the English left by quite a distance last night.

Fantastic result for the SSP though.

Skeptical

...because we live inthe heart of the monster

02.05.2003 13:28

However, you also have to bear in mind that the mainstream media gave the BNP acres of coverage in the run up to the election. There was even a half page article about them in "The Independent" (or was it "The Guardian"?--can't remember) just last week. The left, including the Socialist Alliance, on the other hand experienced a total media blackout (surprise, surprise).

Also, the tabloids have been spewing out a torrent of nauseating racist shit about asylum seekers for as long as I can remember. It has been relentless. Then, of course, you have had all the crap in the press about Iraq war-related Muslim "terrorism" that has been cynically linked to the asylum seekers issue. The BNP have also had the benefit of David Blunkett blurting out his idiotic diatribes about race issues every other week.

The only surprising thing, given all this media and state-related racism, is that the BNP didn't do better than it did.

The SSP had the advantage of having an already elected member of the Scottish parliament which meant that they couldn't be blacked out by the media in quite the same way.

Fozzy