THE TRADE Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) will stand for council elections in just five Coventry wards.
Ahead of the local elections on May 3, TUSC has announced candidates in Henley, Lower Stoke, Radford, St Michaels and Sherbourne who will fight on an anti-austerity platform.
The party will hope to gain its first seat at Coventry council having stood in all 18 wards in previous elections.
Party leadership say they want to circulate the radical anti-austerity message of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader and build support for his ideas.
Former city councillor and MP, Dave Nellist, the TUSC candidate in St Michael’s, explained: “TUSC will be standing in most major towns and cities on May 3rd, but on a more selective basis. Our message will still be the same – we need councillors who are going to stand up to austerity and the cuts.
“TUSC has been fielding candidates on a 100 per cent anti-austerity socialist platform since our formation in 2010, but we have recalibrated our electoral activity since Jeremy Corbyn’s welcome victory as Labour leader in 2015.
“In Coventry, councillors do have the choice to oppose the cuts. Working class people should not be paying for the capitalist crisis.
“We want to see cuts in community centres, adult education, libraries and youth services reversed – and charges to parents of children with disabilities for school transport cancelled.
“Given the latest increase in PFI (private finance initiative) car parking charges at Walsgrave, we will be calling for these ‘Profit from Illness’ schemes to be scrapped, and for the council to use its powers to block the planned £267million of cuts in the local NHS.
“We are the sixth richest country on the planet, yet thousands of Coventry children are living in poverty.
“We need a socialist society that can, through public ownership of the key sectors of the economy including the banks, plan the enormous resources that exist for the benefit of the millions, not just the millionaires.”
