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‘If Labour want Bristol to stay red, we need better candidates’
As I was knocking on doors on election day, it was clear that Carla Denyer was going to win in Bristol Central and she was going to win by a big margin.
It was exciting, hopeful and – by that stage – inevitable. But it wasn’t always inevitable.
Back in early 2022, my then Labour Party branch in Bristol West met on Zoom to decide whether or not to reselect Thangam Debbonaire as our Labour candidate for the next general election.
is needed now More than ever
I made the argument that Debbonaire was not the right person to fight the election for Labour.
During the pandemic, she had sided with landlords as shadow housing secretary.
She had sided with the police who brutalised protesters on the streets of her constituency.
And she had abandoned progressive rhetoric around the climate and migration in pursuit of her own (now truncated) career.
The meeting voted to reselect Debbonaire by 66 votes to three.
If Labour had chosen a left wing candidate instead – someone whose values matched those of the constituency – I doubt the Greens would have taken the seat early on Friday morning.
Bristol Central now has a Green MP and it’s going to have a Green MP for a generation or more.
In every election since Caroline Lucas won Brighton Pavilion, Labour have tried to take the seat back, and they’ve failed every time.
Once you lose a seat to a third party, it’s very hard to win back.
Labour only won back those seats that they had lost to the Liberal Democrats in the 2000s because of the coalition, and it seems unlikely they can rely on the Greens to prop up a Tory government in the near future.
Bristol Labour now have a choice: do they heed the warning they have been given or do they put their fingers in their ears?
The Greens have surged to second place in all four other Bristol seats without doing any serious work in any of them during the run-up to the 2024 general election.
With the kind of well-resourced, organised campaign the Greens ran in Bristol Central this year, any of the other seats but especially Bristol East and Bristol South will be at risk for Labour next time.
Labour can only fight back by having candidates who reflect this city.
None of Bristol’s Labour MPs broke the whip to vote for a ceasefire in Gaza while children were being murdered at an inconceivable rate.
They all obsequiously followed the party line and ignored whatever conscience they have.
How could any of them defend their seats against an avowedly anti-genocide candidate?
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Read more: Greens focus on Gaza as key issue in Bristol Central
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The pitiful number of votes for the transphobic Kellie-Jay Keen on Thursday demonstrated that Bristol is not a city where that kind of bigotry is welcome.
Yet Bristol South’s newly re-elected Labour MP Karin Smyth has supported a group, Labour Women’s Declaration, which has been described as an anti-trans organisation.
While in the run-up to May’s local elections, Bristol North West’s Darren Jones, now in the cabinet as chief secretary to the treasury, tried to use Clean Air Zones as an attack on the Green Party.
Bristol is one of the most climate and environment conscious places in the country, if not the world.
Jones’ Reform-esque tactics show how unrepresentative of the city he is.
The Labour MPs who won their seats in Bristol this year were saved by the Green Party’s laser-focused targeting of Bristol Central.
They cannot count on that next time.
If Bristol Labour members want those seats to stay red, they need to do their duty and give the electorate better candidates.
This is an opinion piece by Joe Rayment, a former Labour councillor and former member of the Labour executive committee in Bristol West
Main photo: Rob Browne
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