“The real hard work starts on Monday”: #CanaryCandidates Dave Nellist, Rachel Maughan, & Brian Agar react to exit poll

Reacting to the exit poll, Transform candidates Rachel Maughan and Brian Agar said they’re holding out hope that Jeremy Corbyn has managed to win in Islington North, and are hoping that Andrew Feinstein has managed to defeat Starmer in Holborn and St Pancras. As Maughan insisted, though:

The real hard work starts on Monday

The left will have to come together to offer a meaningful, transformative alternative to the government, and Maughan stressed that she’s “ready to hold Keir Starmer’s Labour Party to account from Day 1”.

TUSC’s Dave Nellist: “No fundamental change” after exit poll

Dave Nellist is the leader of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) and is backed by Collective – which is bringing together voices on the left to build a “mass movement that will eventually transform into a new political party”. And reacting to the exit poll, he said:

If the exit poll is correct then Keir Starmer could have a Tony Blair 1997 sized majority. But the British economy is a lot weaker than it was in 1997.

And no matter what the size of the parliamentary majority, public services are woefully underfunded, and the same workers who had to go on strike in transport education, health and elsewhere will have to do the same thing again under a new Labour government.

There will be no fundamental change of economic direction, and in the words of Pete Townsend it’s “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. The sooner the left unions and leading figures like Jeremy Corbyn can pull together a new working class political party, the better.

Reflections from the campaign trail: “This is the start of the unity of the left”

Earlier in the day, Agar sent a brief reflection on his campaign, insisting:

If you’ve got a decent voice on the left and you can speak a bit of sense… don’t give up hope on it. Just keep talking. Keep telling people what you do, what we do, what we want to do, what we want to build, and it will come. It might not come this time. But we’ll be big enough next time.

Maughan, meanwhile, said:

What really inspires me the most is the engagement with the younger generation and seeing people who really, after years of not having any hope, start to think that there is an alternative, that Labour and Tories are no longer the way forward.

And she added:

This is the start of the unity of the left and hope for the future.

Featured image via the Canary