Counterfire members report from their localities on the election results and what they indicate for the next tasks for the movement

Bristol – Nathan Street

Former Shadow Minister Labour’s Thangnam Debbonaire has lost her newly named Bristol Central seat to the Green Party Co-Leader Carla Denyer, one of just six previous Labour MPs to lose their seat.

In 2017, Debbonaire received the fourth highest majority in the country, boosted by one of the largest CLP memberships, yet today Greens have won the seat by over 10,000 votes (24,539 for Denyer, 14,132 for Debbonaire).

In the May 2024 local elections, the Greens continued their steady progress locally to win 34 of 70 seats as the leading council group. They’ve used this popularity as a springboard to position themselves as the left-alternative to Starmer’s Labour in other Bristol constituencies at the General Election. This is despite the party locally focussing almost exclusively on campaigning to win Bristol Central.

In Bristol East, Bristol South, Bristol North West and Bristol North East, the Green Party gained a 22.5%, 20%, 17.3% and 14.7%, an increased vote share compared with the last election, to move clearly into second place behind the existing Labour MP in each seat.

Labour’s vote share itself has eroded in each of these seats, except Bristol North West, where it’s very slightly increased. The Conservatives, Lib Dems and Reform are marginal forces in these constituencies. These seats will be clear target seats for the Greens at the next General Election.

Indeed, Bristol East may have even been winnable this year with some dedicated campaigning. Some seats did feature pro-Palestine independents– but their vote share has been small, with the Green candidates able to win the lion’s share of voting expression on this basis too. In Filton and Bradley Stoke, the Tory MP, since the constituencies creation in 2010, Jack Lopresti, has been defeated by the Labour candidate Claire Hazelgrove, turning around a more than 5000 vote difference, into a new 10,000 majority.

North London – Orlando Hill

The anti-war, pro-Palestine movement displayed a show of strength in the electoral results in North London. In Tottenham, the independent socialist candidate Nandita Lal standing against David Lammy, the incumbent Labour candidate and shadow foreign secretary, came in third place. This was after six weeks of campaigning. Nandita ran a grassroots campaign on a very low budget and was proudly pro-Palestine. Lammy won but with a 20% drop in his majority. His victory speech was drowned down by shouts demanding him ‘to tell us about genocide’. Lammy had been heavily criticised for abstaining on the ceasefire vote in November and for failing to sign two early-day motions calling for an end to sales of arms to Israel.

Nandita Lal, a mother of two and who has lived in Tottenham for ten years, defines herself as an activist and not a politician. She was selected in an assembly of pro-Palestine activists. Her campaign was a continuation of the movement calling for a ceasefire and will continue after the election. 

In Holborn and St Pancras, Andrew Feinstein, a former member of the African National Congress, came in second place with 18.9% of the votes. Keir Starmer came first but with a fall of 17.3% in his majority. Feinstein and Lal endorsed each other’s campaigns and both spoke in each other’s rallies. At one of Lal’s rallies, Feinstein thanked her for being one of the first candidates to endorse his campaign. He said he was incredibly proud of her standing against Lammy, a man who demonstrated ignorance about his old boss, Nelson Mandela.

At a US Republican Party event, Lammy stated that Mandela would not have supported the students’ encampments. One of the reasons Mandela visited the US after his release from prison was to thank the students for their encampments against Apartheid. According to Feinstein, if Mandela were alive, he would be campaigning for Lal and all the other pro-Palestine candidates. 

Hackney saw the re-election of Diane Abbot although with a fall 10.4% from 2019. One of the reasons could be that she had run as a Labour candidate. Many of her supporters felt uncomfortable about displaying her Labour poster which looked like something from the National Front. Some houses decided to display her red and yellow poster from 2019.

In Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn won with over 24 thousand votes, 49.2% of the total. Labour saw a fall of 29.9% of its votes. It probably would have been more, but some voters had not realised that Corbyn was running as an independent. Most of the campaign was spent having to remind people that he was no longer a Labour candidate.

At the very beginning of the campaign, Labour was predicted to win with 43% against Corbyn’s 38%. Yet by the end of the campaign there was a sense of optimism. The word in the street was that Labour, in despair, was reallocating their activists to Islington North. Corbyn ended up with more votes than Starmer’s 18,884.

In his final speech to a crowd assembled in Highbury Fields, Corbyn thanked the one thousand volunteers who as soon as the elections had been called flocked to support him.  As he said speaking to the camera, ‘they can’t get rid of me easily, because they can’t get rid of you. We are doing this together.’

Doncaster – John Westmoreland

Across Doncaster and South Yorkshire there was a clean sweep for Labour in yesterday’s general election. South Yorkshire has been at the centre of right-wing racist and culture-war campaigns for the past decade, and seeing the Tories wiped out, and Reform unable to gain a tangible result is good news.

In the new constituency of Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme, we got rid of the odious Nick Fletcher, an anti-woke culture-wars champion who lost to Labour’s Lee Pitcher by over two thousand votes. Pitcher’s vote came mainly from the former mining communities, where previous infatuations with Boris Johnson and the Brexit Party were abandoned. But Fletcher came unstuck courtesy of Reform taking votes in the rural Isle of Axholme. The votes show anti-Tory sentiment as much as enthusiasm for Labour: Lee Pitcher (Labour) 15,122; Nick Fletcher (Conservative) 12,811; Irwen Martin (Reform) 8,487.

A similar result in Doncaster Central affirms the damage that Reform has done to the Tories where the candidates were neck-and-neck. The Tory, Nick Allen, got 7,964 votes just ahead of Surjit Duhre, Reform, on 7,886 votes. Labour’s Sally Jamieson’s vote of 17,515 has to be seen in the light of a divided right wing. Tosh MacDonald stood for the Workers Party of Britain and campaigned to get the pro-Palestine vote and got 758 votes, which, sadly, didn’t make a dent in the main parties.

The big winner in Doncaster was Ed Miliband in Doncaster North who smashed his Tory opponent. Miliband took 16,231 votes to Tory Glenn Bluff’s 7,105. Reform didn’t stand.

However, analysis of the Labour vote reveals that the main story is about Tory collapse. Lee Pitcher’s vote was slightly less than Labour’s losing candidate, Caroline Flint, in the 2019 election. And Labour’s votes in Doncaster Central and Doncaster North were up by 877 and 491 respectively. Hardly a landslide.

The other parties made little impression. The Green Party candidates each got over a thousand votes. The Lib-Dems, similarly, have little to celebrate.

Overall, the Tories’ 2019 euphoria about a ‘Red Wall turning Blue’ can be seen for the hype it was. The ruling class will be reassessing their political options just like us. Labour, at the moment, is carrying the hopes of corporate and finance power, and the trade-union bureaucracy too – quite a meeting of minds. There is no surge of working-class enthusiasm for Labour and our interests will have to be fought for outside parliament.

Redbridge and Waltham Forest – Lucy Nichols

Labour won big across Redbridge and Waltham Forest.

Leanne Mohamad won a huge number of votes in Ilford North, reducing Wes Streeting’s majority to just 500 votes. This is fantastic news and a testament to the power of the Palestine movement, to which Leanne has been central.

Although frustrating that Leanne missed out by just 528 votes, it puts a huge amount of pressure on Wes Streeting. Leanne fought her campaign around two major issues; Palestine and the NHS. The Labour Party has proven unable or unwilling to provide real solutions to either of these crises, and in Ilford North this has translated into 15,000 votes for a candidate who is very strong on both of these.

In Leyton and Wanstead, a very safe Labour seat, Calvin Bailey won with a majority of 14,000, followed by the Greens and Conservatives. Calvin Bailey has been tipped as a future defence secretary and was in the RAF before joining the Labour Party, in addition to being parachuted into the seat, to the upset of local Labour Party members.

The independent candidate, Shanell Johnson was a Labour councillor until leaving the party over Palestine. Shanell won a respectable 4,173 votes on a strong socialist platform, in an area that has traditionally been very well-off and liberal.

Further out towards Essex, Iain Duncan Smith won in Chingford and Woodford Green, not out of any huge popularity for the Tories in the area but due to Labour’s deliberate self-sabotage in ousting left-wing Faiza Shaheen. The vote was therefore split between her and Labour – although it would’ve been a close call between Labour and the Tories anyway.

In Ilford South, former head of Redbridge council, Jas Athwall is the new MP. Noor Begum, the independent pro-Palestine candidate came in second place, with a very strong 9,600 votes.

Clearly the Palestine movement has had a big impact on Redbridge, with almost 30,000 votes for pro-Palestine candidates. It would be easy to feel deflated that these votes did not translate into a pro-Palestine candidate, but this is huge news for the movement, which must now take stock of the election results and continue to campaign outside of Parliament.

Shipley – Simon Hewitt

In Shipley, a seat which had been held by the hard-right Tory Philip Davies, independent socialist Nagbea stood on a programme well to the left of Labour. The campaign put a particular emphasis on solidarity with the people of Gaza, and on a call for an immediate ceasefire. Standing in the election allowed Nagbea and his team to raise these issues in the constituency and to put socialist ideas on the agenda.

The campaign was well received, but ultimately Nagbea’s vote was squeezed by a strong vote for Labour. This is completely understandable: people wanted to get rid of Davies, in particular, and the Tories, in general. And that is the main story of this election nationwide: people have had enough of the Tories and want change. Keir Starmer, of course, talked a lot about change during his campaign. But in reality, he will not break in any fundamental way with the Tories’ agenda. The job of socialists in the coming weeks and months is twofold: we must join with the bulk of the country in celebrating the Tory defeat, but at the same time we must point to something better than Starmer has on offer.