Socialist Councillors: There Aren’t Enough Of Them!

Coventry Local Elections

The Trouble With Socialist Councillors…

There Aren’t Enough Of Them!

The Socialist Party is to stand up to 12 candidates
in the local elections in Coventry on 10 June.

Rob Windsor, Coventry Socialist Party councillor

Three of these are the existing socialist councillors
Dave Nellist, Karen McKay and Rob Windsor. These councillors are a beacon
for socialist ideas in the city.

They show that there is an alternative to the ‘free
market’ – a system that condemns 314 million people to live on less than one
dollar a day while the Bush administration spent an astronomical $20 billion
on waging its colonial war against the Iraqi people and many billions more
on the occupation. 

The majority of the world’s population face an
increasingly unsafe and insecure future.

Whilst serving on Coventry council is a far cry from
changing the world there has to be a start somewhere and in Coventry, Socialist Party
councillors have led by example on the following issues, both as a minority
of three on a council of 54 and as the biggest component of the smaller
parties who hold the balance of power in the city:

  • Saved a day centre for the elderly by organising
    petitions and lobbies as well as speaking against the closure in council
    meetings.

  • Successfully argued against increasing pre-school
    education charges.

  • Fought for better use of local green space and assisted
    local groups in this.

  • Fought successfully for extra cash bids to regenerate
    the oldest shopping street in the city.

  • Campaigned against extortionate police charges to ensure
    that local carnivals went ahead.

  • Campaigned for regular and free bulky rubbish removal –
    this prompted the New Labour council to set up a one-off free clean up.

  • Helped beat off privatisation of the home help service.

  • Opposed PFI and housing privatisation and the New Labour
    council’s "Single status" pay structure that would have robbed
    council workers of between £2,000 and £10,000 a year.

Holding the balance of power we have:

  • Ensured concessions in the Arena Coventry Stadium deal
    guaranteeing trade union rights for construction and operational staff and
    ensuring jobs are marketed in Coventry. We also ensured that further finance
    discussions would be dealt with at full council meetings and that any extra
    land sale proceeds came back to the council and not the private company
    building the stadium.

  • While Coventry’s three New Labour MPs helped Blair push
    through university top-up fees, the three Socialist Party councillors ensured that the
    council took a position opposing fees.

  • Preserved social services for over 300 elderly and
    vulnerable people by refusing to accept Social Service cuts to ‘balance the
    books’ in advance of the council budget.

  • We ensured that over 200 job cuts were stopped and
    successfully applied pressure to put an extra £1 million into social
    services for vulnerable adults. We would have won more had the two Liberal
    councillors not given in so quickly and accepted the extra £1 million as a
    means for New Labour to get their budget through.

  • Campaigned against ‘regeneration’ schemes that propose
    the demolition of affordable homes with no replacement.

  • Campaigned for restrictions on squalid,
    multiple-occupancy housing.

  • Campaigned against school closures and reductions in
    nursery places.

We have held regular surgeries where the previous Labour
councillors held none. In addition, we hold special surgeries based on
groups of streets in specific areas within St Michaels Ward, which we
represent.

In late 2000 a power surge knocked out electricity on
four streets for two days and wrecked appliances. It was a prelude to the
further problems experienced nationally due to the lack of investment and
cuts caused by privatisation.

Socialist Party councillors campaigned for decent compensation
including helping organise an angry meeting of over 60 local residents to
face electricity chiefs. We produced at least three leaflets for every local
household on the issue. As a result 220 local residents received an extra
£100 just before Christmas.

We do not offer a magic wand, we are effective because
we organise with local people. Across the city many people have said
"I’d vote for you if you stood here" – we now want to give people
the chance to do just that in areas where we have not previously stood.
Where leaflets have gone out, people have immediately got back to us
welcoming our stand and often offering to help.

As we say on our leaflets, "The trouble with
socialist councillors is there aren’t enough of them!"


Election Launch

Over 50 people at the West Midlands election launch meeting heard Tony Mulhearn’s inspiring contribution on the struggle of Liverpool city council from 1983 to 1987.

Tony, one of the ‘Liverpool 47’ and a member of the Socialist Party, described how the Militant-led council [forerunner of the Socialist Party] connected with the working class in producing concrete and lasting gains to the conditions of working people in that city at a time of massive unemployment and the destruction of Liverpool’s industry.

The council built over 5,000 houses, most with gardens front and back, as well as improving existing council homes. They set up nurseries that were commended by educational specialists and built schools, sports centres and a park as well as creating some 10,000 jobs on the council and in the construction industry.

Small wonder that a worker at one of the council’s direct works depots thought Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was “a brickie”!

The meeting commended the heroic stand of the ‘Liverpool 47’ councillors who were surcharged and removed from office for fighting for working class people.

Coventry Socialist Party councillors compared Liverpool in the 1980s as “a city that dared to fight” to “Coventry – a city that didn’t try”! However, Dave Nellist described how, even with only three Socialist Party councillors, concrete gains for working people have been won, not least the extra £1 million put into the city’s social services budget after the Socialist Party refused to accept the New Labour “revised” cuts budget.


“If aliens were to land here they would think this an outlandish way to run the planet.

We want a socialist world where the wealth and power in society is owned and controlled by the people who make it – the working class and where it is distributed for the benefit of all the world’s peoples, not preserved for a minuscule minority of super rich companies and individuals shored up by puppet pro-free market governments”.

Rob Windsor, speaking at the West Midlands election launch