My take on the 2026 Council Elections in Newcastle...
At the very outset, I am compelled to say that I hold an unwavering belief in the founding principles of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, and all other companion parties in the World Socialist Movement, as established in 1904. The 10-point declaration of the SPGB correctly holds that Capitalism is utterly unreformable and needs to be replaced with a leaderless Socialist society, established through electoral means. This perspective is known as the impossibilist position, but it works for me. Only once in my life, the 1989 European election, did I have the privilege of voting SPGB, so I have at times followed the line of the SPGB in writing WORLD SOCIALISM on ballot papers when there is no Socialist candidate. In such crucial votes as the election of a Tyne & Wear Police Commissioner or the referendum on PR (remember that?), I doubt my actions held much sway, but you have to stand up for what you believe in.
However, I am also a pragmatist when it comes to material conditions. As a Branch Secretary for UCU for approximately 15 years, I believed in voting in a way that best served the interests of my members under Capitalism. An example of this is my knowledge that workers’ conditions were best served by remaining in the EU, which is one of the billions of reasons I voted Remain in 2016. A decade on, the implications of that terrible day continue to haunt this country and may, in 3 years’ time if there isn’t a sea change of popular opinion, result in the most repressive set of anti-worker laws since before the Great Reform Act of 1832 being introduced to the statute book. Also, as a weary supporter of largely meaningless, anodyne forms of milksop progressivism, I rejoined the Labour Party in advance of the Corbyn experiment, after having to jump through some hoops as a result of the ideological wreckage of my misguided decision to stand for the loathsome, failed Trot venture TUSC in the 2014 council elections.
The Corbyn experiment started off with such promise, but the tactical catastrophe that was partly to blame for the abject schooling Labour got in the December 2019 General Election, whatever the sinister reasons behind that debacle, disenchanted me from reformism forever. I think also the abject failure of Your Party to get off the ground shows how the Corbyn experiment is doomed to failure. For some reason though, I never got around to cancelling my Labour Party membership, which gave me the chance to vote in the last leadership election. Guess what? I voted for Keir Starmer, incredible as that may seem. I had fondly expected that he would me some kind of safe pair of hands, with a degree of competence guaranteed when it came to running the country. The events since the unexpected landslide of 2024 have told a very different tale. We don’t need to list the failures of this corrupt, genocidal, repressive regime here, as I’d like to focus these words more on local considerations than national or global ones, for reasons that will become clear imminently.
Having endured the misfortune of being born and brought up in Gateshead, specifically Felling, that scenic fishing village on the South Bank of the Tyne, I sought to extricate myself from that area as soon as possible, leaving when I was 19. After University and all that palaver, I become a resident of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1990. Since 1998 I’ve lived in High Heaton, in the wards of Dene and Manor Park. To clarify, I haven’t moved house in that time; the boundaries and ward names have changed. For that entire period, the Liberal Democrats have held all 3 seats in my ward. Obviously, I have never voted for them. However, the repulsive political infighting in the controlling Labour group on Newcastle City Council, that saw my good friend Nick Kemp ousted from his role as leader on trumped-up charges that had no foundation and that he was utterly exonerated from, not to mention the disgraceful sidelining of Jamie Driscoll in his attempts to run for North East Mayor, were probably the final straws that saw me finally withdraw any pretence of supporting Labour in the recent council elections. I made this clear in the following Facebook post on January 29th.
“Here’s a serious political post… in the wake of Jamie Driscoll being unveiled as the Green Party candidate for Monument ward, I’ve been thinking about what will happen in this May’s council elections in Newcastle. Being honest, I don’t see Labour or the Tories winning a single one. Newcastle isn’t the city it used to be, thankfully. It’s largely a vibrant, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, tolerant and inclusive place to live. The vast majority of residents are in favour of socially progressive policies, rather than race hate, endless rounds of austerity, the suppression of free speech or support for Israeli genocide. Just witness how Heaton has about 1,000 Palestine flags flying and zero Union Jacks. As a consequence, I see the Green Party (who I’m voting for, despite still being a member of Labour) winning in every bohemian and multi-ethnic part of the city. Even the upper middle class areas will vote progressively in electing Lib Dems. The Fash will win in Walker and the white West End, despite being taken over by the failed Tories who got us into this mess in the first place, because that section of society seem to prefer simple lies to the complicated truth. Of course, the blame lies entirely with the capitalist system, which is what we really need rid of. #HelterSkelter #comingdownfast”
On the day after polling but before any results were announced, I forecast Newcastle would elect 30 Fash, 29 Green, 16 Lib Dem and 3 Independents, no Tories and no Labour, resulting in a Green / Lib Dem coalition, which as yet hasn’t been formally agreed, though must surely be a matter of time. I don’t want to tell you I was right, but I nearly was. The results saw the following councillors elected: Liberal Democrats 25, Greens 24 (with the highest number of votes), Fash 24, Independents 3 and Labour 2. No Tories, much to the disappointment of those performative narcissists in Leafy NE3 who’d returned one last time, which is why I’d probably have gritted my teeth if I lived in Gosforth and voted Lib Dem.
We’ll come to the reasons for those scores in a while, but let’s rewind a bit first. In the middle of March, I received an email from Labour Party headquarters, from the Complaints and Disciplinary Team in the Governance and Legal Unit, stating -:
“We are writing to inform you that the Labour Party (the Party) has received an allegation that you have committed a Prohibited Act contrary to the provisions of Chapter 2, Clause I.5 of the Labour Party Rule Book (the Rule Book), namely supporting (as may be defined by the NEC) any political organisation that the NEC in its absolute discretion shall declare to be inimical with the aims and values of the Party.”
There was a load more censorious shit after that which I won’t bore you with, but basically, one of the regional goon squad snoopers had been scrolling through social media, looking for indications of dissent and disloyalty from members and hit the jackpot with my post, which had been deemed sufficiently serious for me to face expulsion for activities contrary to the Labour Party’s constitution. Imagine if we still had Clause 4 with the current shower of neo-Liberal shitbags at the helm? Anyway, I didn’t bother replying as they had me banged to rights, so I cancelled my monthly direct debit the same day. Party HQ, showing its real sense of priority, soon contacted me by phone, letter and email, asking me to restart my subscription. I didn’t bother. Frankly, I’d only ever been a paper member since I rejoined, as the local ward meetings are held at Heaton Stannington FC and you’ll probably know that’s not an institution I’m ever likely to set foot in.
Thus, with the umbilical link to a Labour Party I’d first joined in 1979 finally severed, I cast my vote for the Green Party in Manor Park ward, knowing that I probably lived in one of the safest Liberal Democrat strongholds in the whole city. So it proved, as Hubbart, Stone and the other one whose name I can never remember, romped home with thumping majorities and no doubt congratulated themselves of the opportunity to run the City in the same, farcical and incompetent manner they did between 2004 and 2011. This result in the petit bourgeois enclave between Jesmond Dene and the Wills Building was entirely expected, for reasons of history and social demographics as much as national trends. In a sense, if we ignore the historical fact that Newcastle was Labour controlled from 1974 to 2004 and from 2011 to last week, effectively the same is true of almost every other ward in the city.
I understand and accept that the Fash won in Gateshead (including Felling), South Tyneside and sunderland (unsurprisingly) and are now the official opposition to Labour in North Tyneside, but despite having been brought up in Gateshead and worked for most of my professional career in South Tyneside, sunderland and North Tyneside, I’m not au fait enough with the local conditions on the ground in those boroughs to make any detailed comment. I would make the observation that the North Shields ward returning a Green councillor may be down to some of the electorate mistaking exactly what kind of Green was on offer.
Looking at the post-election map of Newcastle, it is clear that there has been a cataclysmic change in local representation, resulting in the comprehensive ghettoisation of the city’s politics, on class and ethnic lines, as well as ideological ones. To deal with the outliers first; the Chapel ward in the north west, which basically consists of the large private 1970s estate of Chapel Park and parts of West Denton. On first glance, it would have seemed this once safe Labour territory, would be a Labour / Fash marginal. However, same as in 2018 and 2022, it elected 3 Independent councillors. Kenton, in the north of the city, returned the only 2 successful Labour candidates at this election. Again, like Chapel, it seems traditional patterns of voter loyalty came into play. The Independents of Chapel and the Labour ones in Kenton are well-established, popular councillors who do the proper dirty, donkey work for their constituents. Email them or ring them up with a problem and they’ll try to sort things out for you, regardless of who you are or in which box you placed your X. So, at least in those areas, the politics of an earlier generation, focussed on who will get the bins emptied, roads maintained and look after early years education, still come into play. I can offer no explanation, other than the obvious, why the third councillor elected in Kenton, was a Fash, with the other Labour candidate trailing in 6th, more than a thousand votes behind her party colleagues.
While there were 2 other mixed wards: Castle (in the far north of the City, comprising of the historical villages of Brunswick and Hazlerigg, where there have been recent and significant amounts of new housing, resulting in the ward having its boundaries redrawn to include the vast Great Park estate), returning 2 Lib Dem and 1 Green and dear, benighted Walker, where a massively popular local Green candidate topped the poll, followed by a brace of Fash, the rest of the city, from the river to the airport, voted tribally.
Other than contempt for Labour, from all sectors of the city population, I don’t think tactical voting was an issue in Newcastle. If you look at the map of results, the Fash took all of the white West End, whether that be areas of grinding, inexcusable poverty and hideous social deprivation such as Benwell and Scotswood, or the lower middle-class areas of semi-respectability such as Throckley and Newburn. While immigration may be an issue for the uneducated and unemployable residents of Denton Burn, this is certainly not the case in semi-rural Walbottle, which has probably the same population demographic as it did when the city council, under its current guise, became an entity back in 1974. The same is true of Walkergate I believe, but the stupidity of residents there waving the 12, 39 or 40 buses past as they head towards Byker and on through town and up the West Road, knows no bounds. Bear in mind, the single thickest man in the whole city lives in Walkergate and you can see why the flags they’d rather fly round Appletree Gardens are the swastika and the Star of David. I guarantee you that the politics of hate, fear and ignorance are embraced willingly by the overwhelming majority of Fash voters, who probably think that their new councillors will return Newcastle to being the mythical, homogenous white city with full employment and massively regenerated housing that it never was. Hopefully, it will dawn the dismally hard of thinking in the electorate that they’ve been sold a pup by buying into the Fash’s rhetoric, long before the next general election, otherwise my declining years will be spent systematically ticking off the destruction of the last vestiges of human rights and the welfare state in this country. I don’t think it is being alarmist to say that if Farage’s Fash or, even worse, Lowe’s Ultra Fash, are returned to power in 3 years’ time, it will be the last chance any of us have of voting for anyone.
But let’s look at the positives for Newcastle as a city in the wake of these results. Firstly, with a combined total of 49 councillors, the Greens and the Lib Dems will no doubt form some sort of coalition. In terms of socially progressive and inclusive community politics, this can only be a good thing. Remember, in 2024 we didn’t have any race riots in Newcastle, unlike every other town in the North East. That simply isn’t our multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, largely tolerant and totally inclusive city’s ethos. We voted Remain in 2016 remember. There is a huge groundswell of progressive, inclusive political thought and ideology in many parts of this city. It was of no surprise that Byker, Heaton and Ouseburn went Green. These wards are inhabited by the grandchildren of those 1970s radicals who were part of the extra-parliamentary left in the good old days. Monument too, but that is also a multi-ethnic ward which, like Arthur’s Hill, Elswick and Wingrove, saw the Asian community decamp, en masse, from Labour to the Greens. That must be a salutary lesson to Labour regarding their anti-immigration rhetoric and slavish support for Israeli genocide. You reap what you sow. As for the rest, the vast swathes of 1930s semis in the north and north east of the city voted Lib Dem. They have done before and will do again, because the seeming death agonies of Labour give those who reject the irrelevant Tories and hate the authoritarian rhetoric of the Fash, no realistic choice.
Let’s look forward to the next General Election in 2029. Who will I be voting for? WORLD SOCIALISM.
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