Upbeat and in the margins: the British Trotskyist Left and their exceptionally poor election results

Only eight out of forty-one Trotskyist candidates secured more than one per cent of the vote in the 2010 general election. But how do parties cope with, and explain, such results? John Kelly writes that Trotskyist organisations saw the vote share as not reflecting the actual level of support for their policies. Many would also highlight positive features of the campaign, such as new party recruits, while others thought the result was due to tactical voting, and hence actually not that bad.