by Berkay Kartav, South London Socialist Party organiser
The socialist challenge in Lewisham’s mayoral election began by challenging Lewisham Council’s stringent conditions on our electoral statement. Every candidate can have a statement in booklets sent out by the council to every household in the borough.
There are certain rules around what you can and cannot include. But it seems Lewisham Council has one rule for socialists and another for others.
We were told that advertising the details of a public meeting, where our candidate will be speaking and answering questions about why we are standing is “unacceptable and must be deleted”. Even though the neighbouring borough Croydon has allowed our mayoral candidate’s meeting details to be in the booklet.
The council told us that we can’t include any contact details, for example the email address of our candidate or our website, or a QR code linking to a newsletter about the record of when the Socialist Party had elected councillors in Lewisham in the 2000s. But another candidate had his Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, website, and a QR code.
We were told that our contact details were not allowed, because this is “explicitly a call-to-action to join a political movement/party, engage directly with the campaign and make contact with campaign organisers.”
The Green candidate was rightly able to ask “will you join me?” in his statement, and included a website link. But, outrageously, socialists were barred from asking if people would like to help our campaign.
The council also requested we remove a short paragraph referring to the record of Greens in areas where they have been in power, voting for cuts. We asked them to justify this, and they couldn’t. So, we kept that paragraph, and it still got published.
Mayoral booklets circulated by the council are a good opportunity, especially for smaller parties with limited resources like ours, to get across our message to voters in Lewisham. Having contact details, like other candidates were allowed, is an opportunity for voters to ask more questions and, if they wish, help campaign against Lewisham Labour’s brutal cuts. But we were denied this opportunity by Lewisham Council.
Despite these restrictions, Socialist Party member Jay Coward, standing for Lewisham mayor for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), has used the election statement to put forward a fighting socialist alternative — a no-cuts budget that meets our needs, and a mass campaign to twist this Labour government’s arm into paying up, instead of forcing workers to pick up the bill.