Andrew Smith - East Oxford electoral strategy meeting

An Electoral Strategy Meeting was held at the Town Hall at 7.30pm on Tuesday 2nd March with 9
people present.

The arguments of last time (5th February)were repeated a little but despite continuing
differences of opinion about the role of Respect in relation to AAS (eileen: I think this must mean Anti Andrew Smith!) we were
able to take some decisions which we felt were useful at this time.

We decided to use AAS as a temporary name which we can use for our
convenience until the way forward for a movement to contest the General
Election becomes clearer.

We will need a new name after June so please let us know if you think of a
good one. We still
believe that in this constituency we have a real chance of winning if we
co-operate and organise effectively.

We heard that Respect may be thinking about a change in its
approach to the EU elections. As things are so fluid and confusing we
decided that AAS would not have any further meetings to plan for the General
Election until after the EU elections in June. This will leave people free
to canvass and work for whichever candidate they choose to.

Donna Veluti encouraged as many people as possible to join Oxford Respect -
the launch meeting is on 9th March 7.30 at the Asian Cultural Centre, Manzil Way - in
order to be able to influence the selection of a candidate in the South East
region. The selection will take place on 14th March in Brighton. Hopefully it will be
possible to enable Caroline Lucas to keep her seat as a very able and
inspiring, strongly anti-war, MEP.
Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 22 June at 7.30 in the Town Hall. We
will need this to be a big meeting so please encourage everyone who has been
interested in the project to put this in their diary and come along in
June. By that time we hope it will be possible to see if we can find a way
forward that we can all support.

We are all united in the aim of having a candidate who can represent us
better than our present MP !

Sarah Lasenby