The following appeal was published on 25 February by TUSC (Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition), the electoral coalition that the Socialist Party participates in. Since, the results of the Your Party CEC elections have been announced. Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘The Many’ slate won 14 seats, Zarah Sultana’s ‘Grassroots Left’ slate 7, with three independent candidates elected.
Socialist Party members are amplifying the call to ‘get socialism on the ballot paper in May’, and as part of that will be among those submitting their candidate applications to the TUSC steering committee by the next 14 March deadline.
With the inaugural Central Executive Committee (CEC) of Your Party beginning its term of office on 27 February, it’s now time to seriously organise to get socialism on the ballot paper in the elections taking place on 7 May – with the official deadline for candidates’ nomination papers to be submitted to councils’ Electoral Services departments just weeks away.
And the election battlefield has just got bigger! After yet another U-turn by Keir Starmer’s increasingly beleaguered government – reinstating elections in 30 councils which it had previously cancelled – there will now be 136 local authorities going to the polls this year, alongside the contests for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd. (A full list is available at tusc.org.uk)
Of the councils with elections in May, 73 are currently led by Starmer’s Labour Party, with 2,200 or so Labour councillors defending their seats. With no deposits needed to stand in local elections, everyone who was inspired in July last year by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s call for a new party to take on the rigged system should ask themselves: why couldn’t I be on the ballot paper to help build an alternative to the establishment parties?
The process of moving from last summer’s declaration for a new party to actually establishing its first elected leadership body has indisputably been a fraught one. Serious differences have come to the surface and, disappointingly, the potential that was there at the outset for a new mass workers’ party to be formed has not been realised. Nevertheless Your Party has been established and its members and supporters could still play an important role in what lies ahead.
TUSC’s offer
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), which as it says is a coalition of leading trade unionists and socialists from different organisations or none, has not ‘chosen sides’ – but offered instead its support to all steps towards the still vital goal of a new mass party of the working class, including a serious intervention in the May elections. It was TUSC supporters, for example, who sponsored the amendment at the November Your Party conference to “prepare for the May elections with a bold anti-austerity stand”, including by the organising of local no-cuts ‘people’s budget’ conferences.
This amendment, which also recognised the “huge opportunity” that the 2026 local elections in particular offered to socialists to “expose and cut across all the pro-austerity parties, not least Reform UK”, was agreed by a 90% yes vote. The hope of Your Party members and supporters now will surely be that the differences of the past few months won’t stop the election opportunities identified then from being seized. And not in local areas only, which unfortunately will not have an impact on the national political debate, but across the country – by achieving the widest possible presence for a socialist alternative, including in the media.
Fair media coverage
But that means standing a sufficient number of candidates. The official Ofcom threshold for the number of local election candidates needed to qualify for a legally prescribed minimum ‘fair media coverage’ is 840 – one in six of the around 5,000 council seats up for election. Surely the chance for Jeremy and Zarah to appear in party election slots which must be carried by all broadcasters on all their platforms won’t be spurned? The ‘fair media coverage’ also legally obliges the broadcasters to cover a manifesto launch and ensure participation in regional debates and discussion shows, and mentions in news reports on both TV and radio, setting the tone for broader media coverage.
Is this not worth fighting for? And if it is, is it really inconceivable that from the tens of thousands of socialists, trade unionists, anti-war protesters and community campaigners who responded to the summer 2025 call, 840 candidates couldn’t be found? Without, remember, any election deposits being necessary – the £500 charge made on candidates in parliamentary and mayoral elections – which don’t apply when standing for a council seat?
In reality, what’s at stake is either a fragmented election campaign, probably with some local highlights but not properly recognised nationally, or the possibility of a campaign that combines the local highlights with a national presence. Think, for example, what the narrative will be from the elections on 8 May, the day after polling day, if even the best results won by Your Party supporters are buried in the ‘others’ column? While Reform, and probably the Greens and the Liberal Democrats positioning as the ‘progressive alternatives’ to Starmer’s Labour in England, are portrayed as the gainers?
There are still practical questions that need to be resolved to achieve a national challenge; not least how to meet the Ofcom stipulation that the ‘fair media coverage’ threshold applies only to candidates that appear on the ballot paper using the name of a party registered with the Electoral Commission or one of its supplementary ‘registered descriptions’.
That is why TUSC, with the experience of organising hundreds of candidates in an election network – 748 was our peak number, in 2015 – has reached out to the new Your Party CEC for urgent discussions. Meanwhile, a Q&A guide to some of the questions around this issue that may be in the minds of Your Party supporters is published on the TUSC website (tusc.org.uk).
But our basic appeal is simple – not to miss the opportunities that are there in May but to help get socialism on the ballot paper!
Visit tusc.org.uk for the full list of elections in May, Elections 2026 Q&A guide, TUSC candidate application form, and more
