On Tuesday evening, nearly 200 people packed the Vauxhall parliamentary hustings in St Mark’s Church, Kennington Oval, to hear and question seven candidates: Kate Hoey (Labour), Caroline Pidgeon (Lib Dem), Glyn Chambers (Tory), Joseph Healey (Greens), Jim Kapetanos (Animal Protection League), Daniel Lambert (SPGB) and myself.
It was a lively, wide-ranging and revealing debate. At times it was also entertaining – most people learned more from it and enjoyed it more than they did the Prime Ministerial debates on TV.
Kate Hoey said she “stood on my record” and emphasised her “independence” from the Labour Party. But she is standing as a Labour candidate and has supported the government’s budgets. She did not believe privatisation was good for the NHS, but has supported the setting up of Academies and transfer of council estates to housing associations. Hoey was also attacked for her disgraceful record of voting on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues: only voting progressively 14% of the times.
Just how far Hoey has travelled away from working class values was also revealed when she was asked whether capitalism could ever work for the majority. Despite the worst crash since the 1920s and the biggest round of cuts for 60 years, Hoey thought “life would be worse without capitalism as we’d only end up in some Stalinist dictatorship”. How little faith this lifelong parliamentarian and collaborator with Boris Johnson has in the working class!
Intelligent Tory?
Glyn Chambers started his contribution by claiming he was suitable for the job because of his “intelligence”. He then proceeded to undermine this bold claim by saying that Britain was “broken” because there was “less crime in the 1880s than there is today”.
D’oh – there were also fewer people and fewer laws. I drew applause when I exposed the fact that the Tories and The Sun were whipping up fear and divisions when in fact crime had gone down by 5% in the last year, according to the authoritative British Crime Survey, with bigger falls for violent crime, criminal damage and burglary. In fact only fraud and forgery were on the increase – Goldman Sachs springs to mind!
Small is beautiful?
Caroline Pidgeon traded on the more left wing pretensions of the Liberal Democrats: more progressive taxation, dropping Trident and tuition fees (though only after six years), and more social housing. But this was merely for electioneering. In office, the Lib Dems have proved as bad as Labour or the Tories. For example, in neighbouring Southwark, the Lib Dem/Tory coalition has rapidly sold of its housing stock and turned every single secondary school into a privately run academy.
Joseph Healy made some good points as you would expect – in particular exposing the fact that hate crime had increased by 47% in Lambeth recently. But the Greens, like the Lib Dems, were a) poor on the really big issues, and b) unable to explain away their record in office. For example, both Pidgeon and Healy answered a global warming question by going on about loft insulation. Sorry, but this is not good enough; we need to move rapidly from burning fossil fuels to using renewable energy sources, nationalise the power companies and implement a worldwide plan of production.
Knockabout?
Daniel Lambert of the SPGB started well, making some good points about the market, but faded badly. In particular, Lambert fell flat when he claimed that domestic violence was only the result of poverty. As Jim Kapetanos pointed out, it is far more complex than that. Indeed, aren’t women also victims of poverty? So why is it men who generally beat up and abuse their partners, not the other way round?
In fact, Lambert’s answer shows he has nothing to offer working class and oppressed people today except to wait for the SPGB to gain a majority in parliament. It reminded me of his callous remark at the Stop the War hustings that the Palestinians should “realise they cannot win and give up”.
Kapetanos was far more genuinely entertaining. He often used the platform to highlight the right wing agenda of the Countryside Alliance, of which Hoey is the chairperson. But he showed real understanding of social oppression, particularly for women and LGBT people.
Good response
It’s not for me to judge how well I did, though I received some very warm applause, for example, with the Anticapitalists’ call for all immigrants to be granted full citizenship rights.
After the meeting, we sold quite a few papers and distributed lots of leaflets. One young man asked me how he could get involved in political activities and another said he would definitely now vote for us. Many were interested in our May Day Rally in the YMCA, 40 Stockwell Road at 5pm on Monday 3rd May.
My thanks to Rev. Mike Starkey for organising the hustings and chairing the event with professionalism and impartiality. And most of all, thanks to the audience for coming and making it a thoroughly enjoyable meeting.
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