News from the GLA South Western Front

It's the case not the face that counts

Today's Richmond and Twickenham Times has a full page on the six candidates standing in the South West constituency. Unfortunately, it is about who I am rather than what the Party stands for. The information on our candidate was not supplied by us but was taken from Wikipedia. The nearest it gets to saying what we stand for is where says I am a "speaker and writer about a moneyless and wageless society". We have agreed, though, to supply a photo for the online version despite that for us it's "the case not the face" that counts, on the grounds that a "face" will attract more people to read what's underneath it than just plain text. But don't worry, the chosen photo shows a Party banner in the background saying "Abolish the Wages System".

The same paper's online edition also carried a report on the hustings in Twickenham on 12 April (here)

The Surrey Comet only has a page on 5 of the 12 candidates for mayor and nothing on who's standing for the GLA but we can't really complain as they had published two letters from us. The Liberal candidate will have more reason to as she's never been mentioned and the UKIP candidate might not have liked being reminded on the front page that he once denounced the "gaystapo" (on the other hand, maybe he accepts that any publicity is better than none).

We have now finished distributing our quota of one-third of the 30,000 election manifestos and only have 1000 or so, found at Head Office, left to do. By chance, they have been distributed more or less equally between the three boroughs of Kingston, Richmond, and Hounslow. This was not the plan as the intention was to concentrate on Hounslow where the branch meets. 11-12000 is slightly more than a token coverage as it's only about 4% of the total number of postal drops in the constituency.

A hundred were distributed in Oxford as on a visit there for a William Morris event (saw the room in University College where Morris gave his first talk as a socialist entitled "Art under Plutocracy", part of which we first republished in 1907 as Art, Labour and Socialism) I noticed that nearly all the streets near where I was saying had houses displaying "Vote Green" or "Vote Labour" posters in their windows. They all got the only leaflet I had with me (our GLA manifesto). Assuming that those displaying posters are among the 5% of the population said to follow politics this is a self-selected target and 100 delivered to them should be the equivalent of 2000 delivered to all doors. It will also serve here as a reminder that, after contesting both the Euroelections in 2014 and the General Election last year in Oxford, we are still around. More of the leaflets will be distributed at the Mayday trade union event in Oxford on Saturday.

Tomorrow [today the 30th] we will be having a street stall in Kingston but not in Brentford as announced.