With the inaugural central executive committee (CEC) of Your Party beginning its term of office on February 27th, it’s now time to seriously organise to get socialism on the ballot paper in the elections taking place on May 7th – 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 https://www.tusc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Elections-directory-2026-FINAL.pdf

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 opportunities that May provides

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.

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... (continued)

After yet another U-turn by Keir Starmer’s increasingly beleaguered government – reinstating elections in 30 councils which it had previously cancelled – it is now possible to compile a definitive list of where council elections will take place this year, on May 7th, alongside the contests for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd.

Every autumn, for over a decade now, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) has produced a directory of where council elections will be held the following spring as a resource for local campaigners and last October we did so again. But, as we said then, it was very much a provisional directory and exactly where elections would take place was unclear, and “won’t become so until February or even March, just weeks before polling day”. Now, however, there is clarity, and the new, final directory is available at https://www.tusc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Elections-directory-2026-FINAL.pdf

Get organising

Clive Heemskerk, the TUSC National Election Agent, said: “Now that the final list of where elections are being held is clear, the task of organising the biggest possible presence of socialists on the ballot papers must be urgently stepped up. The official deadline for getting candidates’ nomination papers into councils’ Electoral Services departments is April 9th – just seven weeks away”.

“One other thing that has been clarified is that the number of local election candidates needed to meet the broadcast media’s threshold for a legally prescribed ‘fair media coverage’ – including party election broadcasts, coverage of a manifesto launch, participation in regional debates etc – is 830, one in six of the council seats up for election”.

“With the anger at the establishment politicians so palpable, is it inconceivable that individual trade unionists, anti-war protestors, community campaigners, and members of different socialist organisations – including those participating in the formation of Your Party – couldn’t reach that figure?”

“Of the 136 councils with elections on May 7th, 73 are currently led by Starmer’s Labour Party, with just under 2,200 Labour councillors up for re-election. With no deposits needed to stand for a local election seat, the question is: why couldn’t YOU be on the ballot paper to help build an alternative to the establishment parties?” ■

A Guide for Candidates and Agents in the 2026 Local Council Elections is available as a downloadable PDF at https://www.tusc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/2026-Guide-for-Candidates-Agents.pdf

A recent exchange between the Green councillors group in Sheffield and TUSC and Your Party supporters in the city has again raised the important question - what can councillors actually do to resist the austerity agenda facing local public services?

Sheffield council provides over 500 public services to the city’s half-a-million plus population – ranging from housing, schools, social care, libraries, parks, youth services and culture, to pest control, waste disposal, street maintenance, 16 cemeteries, and more. It employs over 8,000 workers, including those in its capacity as a local education authority. Since 2022 it has been run by a coalition of the Labour Party (with 36 of the 84 councillors), the Liberal Democrats (27 councillors), and the Greens (14 councillors). There is one Reform councillor and no Tories, in the fifth-biggest city in England.

In the run-up to setting this year’s council budget the Sheffield Your Party ‘proto-branch’ organised a No Cuts People’s Budget conference to discuss a ‘needs budget’ for the city and invited the Green Party councillors to participate. Now that Zack Polanski has been elected as the Green Party leader, the letter of invitation said, “we appeal to you to consider taking the bold stand of proposing a legally balanced No Cuts Needs Budget by using reserves and prudential borrowing powers”.

“Such a People’s Budget”, the letter went on, “could mobilise support from local trade unions and local communities to pressure the Labour government into restoring lost funding, and by your example inspire other councils facing the same or worse budget situations to follow the same course of action”.

“This government has already made several policy U-turns under the threat of parliamentary revolts; how much more pressure would be several large councils standing up for local people refusing to implement any more cuts? Set a No Cuts Budget and demand the government fund it”.... (continued)

The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) All-Britain Steering Committee has produced a new guide for candidates thinking about contesting the local council elections taking place in 2026 on Thursday May 7th. 

An annual publication, this year the guide includes an explanation of how TUSC will be working with Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party to ensure the widest-possible co-ordinated presence of socialist working class anti-austerity and anti-war candidates in May’s contests.  This is in the context that the 2026 local elections will be a unique challenge for Your Party, as recognised in the party’s founding documents, given the “time constraints” of the official nomination process for the elections and “the absence of agreed branch structures” for the new party with its first elected leadership not taking office until March.

As the guide states, as a result “there will almost certainly be Your Party supporters who want to stand as a clear anti-austerity, anti-war socialist candidate but will not be able to be agreed as an official Your Party candidate in time”.

It goes on, however, that “they will be more than welcome to use one of the TUSC descriptions to distinguish themselves from right-wing or non-political ‘Independents’ on this occasion if they wish”, and explains how that can be done.

The guide also contains information on the official regulations governing the elections, based on publications produced by the Electoral Commission, along with some tips and pointers drawn from the previous experience of socialist election campaigners. 

There will be around 4,342 councillors elected this May and, with no deposits needed to stand for a local election seat, the question is: why couldn’t YOU be on the ballot paper to help build an alternative to the establishment parties?  The guide shows how you can. ■

The 2026 Guide for Candidates and Agents in the Local Council Elections is available as a downloadable PDF at https://www.tusc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/2026-Guide-for-Candidates-Agents.pdf

An application form to use the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition name and emblem on the ballot paper, or any of the other eight descriptions TUSC has registered with the Electoral Commission, is available at https://www.tusc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/2026-Application-form-Cllr.docx

The campaign for the trade unions to take the lead in building a new working-class party, launched last May with a petition under that title (at https://www.change.org/TradeUnions-LaunchANewParty) and a 1,000-strong national meeting in July, is continuing its detailed work in each individual union.

The first month of the new year saw three meetings organised, for activists in the Unison public services union, the Communications Workers Union (CWU), and the GMB general workers union, reports from which are published below... (continued)

The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) all-Britain steering committee has welcomed a new petition launched by leading trade unionists calling on the Green Party leader Zack Polanski to mobilise his party in the struggle against local council austerity.

The petition – launched by 20 current and former members of trade union executives, at https://c.org/r55nStyRBm – makes an opening appeal to Zack “to ensure that in this year’s local council elections no candidate shall appear on the ballot paper on behalf of the Greens who has not made a public commitment to vote against all cuts and closures to council services, jobs, pay and conditions should they be elected as a councillor on May 7th”.

These are the first set of elections being fought since Zack Polanski won the Green Party leadership last summer denouncing the ‘system rigged for the rich’ – and, with local public services still facing an unbearable funding squeeze, opposing all further cuts and closures should be a no-brainer.

As the petition says, while “we cannot expect Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, the Lib Dems, the Tories or Reform to join the struggle to defend local public services… we should not expect anything less from those who have spoken against the establishment’s austerity agenda”.

The trade unionists’ petition further asks that Zack Polanski “instructs all current Green Party councillors to make the same commitment for future council budget-making meetings, including in the 40-plus local authorities where the Greens are presently part of the council administration”. The Greens do have a substantial presence in local government and if their hundreds of councillors were to take such a stand – and a protest movement organised to back them up – who could categorically say that Starmer and the chancellor Rachel Reeves wouldn’t be forced into another U-turn?

The central battle remains to get the trade union leaders to build on the heroic resistance of those like the Birmingham council bin-workers fighting wage cuts and poorer services, but a widescale councillors’ rebellion would open up a new front. That’s why the trade unionists’ petition to Zack Polanski deserves all our support... (continued)

The latest meeting of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) all-Britain steering committee, held on December 10th, welcomed the successful launch of Your Party at its Liverpool conference at the end of November.

There were different views expressed, inevitably, between the different components of the TUSC coalition on various aspects of the conference, and the foundation process of Your Party more generally.

But, once again, the steering committee was united in pledging to help in any way it can to take forward the fight for a new, mass party of the working class – and, in particular, to discuss with the Your Party interim leadership agreed at the conference how best to maximise the opportunities provided by the elections in May next year to build a working class, socialist anti-austerity alternative to the establishment parties... (continued)

The November meeting of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) all-Britain steering committee was the first opportunity for the different component parts of TUSC to share their thoughts on the Your Party founding documents that were published on October 17th.

The documents, signed-off by the six-strong Independent Alliance group of MPs – Shockat Adam, Jeremy Corbyn, Adnan Hussain, Ayoub Khan, Iqbal Mohamed and Zarah Sultana, who are acting as the temporary stewards of the party’s founding – can be accessed on the Your Party website at https://www.yourparty.uk/founding-documents/ and have also been brought together by TUSC for ease of reading into a single pdf at https://www.tusc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/YP-founding-documents.pdf.

In the steering committee discussion assessing the prospects for the party, which had now reached a reported membership of 50,000, a number of criticisms were aired of the foundation process so far. But there was also recognition that the potential is still there for a democratic, socialist, working-class party with trade unions at its core to be the possible final outcome.  And that on this basis it was still vitally important for TUSC to help towards this goal in any way that it could... continued

A ‘Wales Trade Union Conference on the Crisis of Political Representation’, hosted by Cardiff Trades Council on 18 October, pledged to support only candidates and parties that will stand up for the working class.

That was the main conclusion reached by over 50 trade unionists from 11 unions who attended the conference backed by five trades councils in Wales, the Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union executive, the civil service union PCS Wales, and a long list of trade union branches, along with Disabled People Against Cuts and the campaign group ACORN.

The conference was promoted as a forum for trade union reps and members to discuss “the way forward for our movement after 15 years of austerity, cost-of-living crisis and racism”. It was prompted by deep concerns over Labour’s continued austerity programme, its scandalous attacks on the Birmingham bin workers, and its shameful response to the horrifying massacres in Gaza. It was originally conceived before Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn’s announcements about a new party, but the developments concerning Your Party obviously gave this event even greater relevance... (continued)

As Keir Starmer’s Labour government prepares for yet more austerity in the Autumn Budget, while Reform continues its rise in the polls, the need for a new working class alternative becomes ever more urgent.

But the moves to a new party suffered a setback in mid-September as disagreements within ‘Your Party’ emerged, inevitably amplified by the establishment media. And, while the show is now back on the road with membership opened (at https://in.yourparty.uk/users/sign_up) and the founding conference set for the end of November, the reconvened ‘Trade Unionists for a New Party’ meeting on Monday 13 October was aptly timed to discuss the role of the organised working class in these developments.

With over 570 registrants and over 300 screens taking part, including a number of watch parties, hundreds of trade unionists tuned in to discuss the way forward. And if you missed the meeting you can catch a video of it at https://youtu.be/NrkKi845lGk.

A successful Holyrood 2026 conference took place on Saturday October 4th in Glasgow on the theme of building a trade union, socialist and working class election challenge for the Scottish Parliament election next year.

Despite Storm Amy causing major transport problems, and with Glasgow’s main train station closed entirely, 80 people turned up the conference from all eight Scottish parliamentary electoral regions. 

The conference had been prepared over the last five months by a Conference Organising Committee. Decisions around speakers and the democratic organisation of the conference were reached by consensus at the COC.

The committee was made up of representatives from the Scottish Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (Scottish TUSC), Socialist Party Scotland, the Scottish Left Alternative (SLA), the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), Collective Scotland (set up by activists around Jeremy Corbyn) and vitally, trade union reps in a personal capacity from Dundee City Unison, Glasgow City Unison, and the Unite Housing Association branch as observers. The Communist Party of Britain declined participation. 

A motion was discussed, debated and mostly agreed by the organising committee to put to the conference (see the final agreed version at the end), bar the final bullet point on where to stand on the demand of an independent socialist Scotland. This was further discussed in a lively and democratic debate at the conference which, at its end, agreed overwhelmingly to "help prepare a united socialist, trade union and working-class election challenge in as many parts of Scotland as possible for next May”... (continued) 

As meetings of Your Party supporters take place around the country one of the immediate tasks we face is to get ready for the elections that will be held on 7th May next year – now just over six months away.

Having said that, working out exactly where there will be elections in 2026 is not as straightforward as it sounds!  Yes, there will be contests for the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd in May.  But whereas every autumn for over a decade now, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) has produced a directory of the council elections to be held the following spring as a planning resource for local campaigners, this time, however, no such certainty is possible.

That’s because Keir Starmer’s New Labour Mark II government is imposing ‘reorganisation’ plans on local government, in the biggest changes in England since the 1970s – to make it easier, they hope, to carry out their austerity agenda to cut and privatise local public services by weakening local democracy.  They are pushing through the merger of district and county councils into larger and more remote single bodies and increasing the number of directly-elected ‘super mayors’.  In doing so, 66 councils that have scheduled elections for May 2026 but which are affected by reorganisation, may have them cancelled.

The same thing happened this year with nine council elections that should have taken place cancelled just weeks before polling day.  So for a second time in two years a full picture of where local elections will be held in England in May will not be clear until February or March.  This casual attitude to democracy is in itself another example of the increasingly authoritarian character of the Starmer government, and how it tries to hide from a reckoning with the electorate.

What we do know, however, is that elections will definitely take place for all 32 London borough councils and 40 other Metropolitan district and district councils.  And that also on the same day there will be Mayoral elections in Watford and the London boroughs of Croydon, Hackney, Lewisham, Newhamand Tower Hamlets. 

So our estimate is that May 2026 will see, as a minimum, at least 3,452 councillors elected in 1,537 wards.  And we have listed the councils concerned in what this year is a (very) Provisional Directory of the May 2026 Local Elections, available at https://www.tusc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Provisional-2026-elections-directory.pdf  

There may eventually be more elections than we have included here as definitely on, probably many more.  But what there certainly will be is a significant enough electoral opportunity for Your Party supporters, trade unionists, anti-war protestors and working class community campaigners to organise to give their verdict on the Starmer government and put forward at the ballot box the socialist alternative that we need... (continued)