A couple of Sunday Herald news stories over the past couple of weeks may have passed by even the most dedicated of Scottish Politics sports fans out there, but their future impact on Holyrood should not be underestimated.
The first story reported that Labour would allow Scottish Parliament candidates to stand on both the constituency and the list ballots with the second reporting that existing regional Labour MSPs would not be guaranteed a space at the top of the party lists at the next election.
This didn’t make much of a splash given we’re still a full 3.5 years shy of the next Holyrood contest but this latest show of strength from Labour leader Johann Lamont could be tantamount to handing out P45s to the majority of Labour MSPs at the Parliament.
For example, had Labour stalwarts Ewan Aitken and Lesley Hinds been at the top of the Lothians list as well as standing in Edinburgh Eastern and North West respectively, that would have meant no MSP jobs for bright young things Kezia Dugdale and Neil Findlay. Former councillors such as Anne McTaggart and Hanzala Malik wouldn’t have tripled their salaries overnight had grizzled former constituency MSPs Charlie Gordon and Pauline McNeill been included on the party lists. Similar remarks can be made across all the regions of Scotland, where constituency MSPs were caught blind sided and battered by an SNP tidal wave. These same individuals are no doubt chomping at the bit to get involved again. The challenge for the current list Labour MSPs is to stay high up on their regional lists and try to win the candidacy for a winnable constituency. That’ll be no easy feat for most of them and creates the risk of Labour jostling for position amongst themselves rather than fighting together to beat Yes Scotland in the run up to the 2014 referendum.
This could all be read as a damning assessment of the current crop of Labour MSPs, but more likely it is an overdue correction of the party’s ill-considered approach to Holyrood elections that has given their rival parties an unnecessary advantage in avoiding scalps. Too many researchers and councillors were promoted before their time, perhaps best symbolised by Anne ‘public speaking for dummies’ McTaggart reportedly hiring Stephen Purcell to act as a quasi-MSP on her behalf.
It didn’t need to be this way.
Had Nicola Sturgeon lost Glasgow Govan for the third time in four attempts it’d have been no problem as she’d have been guaranteed the SNP’s first regional list in Glasgow. Had Iain Gray lost East Lothian (as was so very nearly the case), Labour would have suffered the ultimate humiliation of losing their party leader. And yet, placing their leader so perilously close to the edge of the electoral cliff was not a risk worth taking.
The SNP has in the past made similar mistakes, less so out of poor strategy and seemingly due to a calculated resentful envy, effectively deselecting impressive individuals from being MSPs by holding them far down the list and/or banishing them to Labour heartlands to fight for their political future. Furthermore, they clearly also didn’t see the 2011 result coming given Alex Salmond joked that he barely knew who some of the new crop of MSPs were, a comment that lost its funny side when we all learned that the SNP had carelessly let an alleged wife-beater into Parliament alongside them.
This casual approach to the list system, all quite distinct and distant from the voting public, was furthered in this parliamentary term. John Finnie and Jean Urquhart leaving their party is one example. Being voted into the Scottish Parliament strictly as an SNP MSP only to leave that party over an issue that the Scottish Parliament has no control over takes a certain type of stubbornness. Another example is today’s news, John Park stepping down as an MSP to join Community, allowing the next person on the 2011 ballot list (Jayne Baxter) to join the Parliament.
Let’s be clear, the good people of FIfe didn’t vote for Jayne Baxter. They didn’t vote for John Park either of course, they voted for Labour bums to boost the number of Labour seats. Button pushers basically, and the same can be said for all parties as this is a Holyrood issue rather than one for a specific party. I’m sure a lot of good work gets done at the committee stage by all politicians but, at the end of the day, they are there to represent their constituents and how many Scots could name their regional MSPs?
Johann Lamont’s move is also an example of how little power the public has over which individuals will be in place at their Parliament and also the extent to which Holyrood operates a two-tier system of MSPs.
It is perhaps telling that the most recognisable regional MSP at Holyrood is Margo MacDonald, the only MSP that didn’t have the luxury of party coat tails to glide her into power. The same could be said of the Greens, who I would argue are the next most recognisable list MSPs. This is all save for the party leaders lacking constituencies, of course.
Don’t get me wrong, Johann Lamont has made the correct decision here. Too many of her colleagues have left the chamber and one has to wonder if the lack of talent on the Labour benches has had a hand in the estimable John Park’s decision here. Would the Parliament still enjoy the skills and personalities of Andrew Wilson, Susan Deacon, Duncan Hamilton, Derek Brownlee et al if the voting system better reflected public regard for our MSPs rather than the invisible hand of party favour? We can only guess.
There is no clear solution here, and indeed the current d’hondt system may yet be the least worst option. We could have open party lists but then the voting would be skewed in favour of those with surnames higher up the alphabet, an arguably inferior method of selecting list MSPs than letting party’s sort it out internally, with cloaks on and daggers drawn.
STV is an attractive option though and change is surely inevitable given the various cracks in the d’hondt system just waiting to be exposed or taken advantage of. Opening Holyrood up to the public rather than allowing parties to close ranks behind an arcance voting system has to be a priority.
For me, the main result from Johann Lamont’s decision is that it reinforces the philosophy that to get ahead in politics you need only impress your party and not necessarily the public. The Denis Canavan’s and Margo MacDonald’s are a rare sight these days, truly independent backbenchers with something fresh and original to say. John Park was amongst the closest Holyrood had on the party benches to something similar, but alas he has understandably handed in his badge in and opted for a different challenge.
Who’d be an MSP these days? It’s a question with a depressingly narrow (and narrowing) band of answers, and that should concern us all.
#1 by BM on December 3, 2012 - 8:29 pm
“We could have open party lists but then the voting would be skewed in favour of those with surnames higher up the alphabet, an arguably inferior method of selecting list MSPs than letting party’s sort it out internally, with cloaks on and daggers drawn.”
There is of course no reason to list candidates alphabetically on a ballot, or any reason for this to necessarily result in Andersons being advantage over Zettucis. Candidates could be ordered by the party, or ordered randomly by computer or lot, or (As is the case in Norway) ordered alphabetically, but with prioritised candidates marked out in bold.
The system used for municipal elections in Norway is sufficiently complicated to be worth describing in detail here. When you go to vote, you must select the ballot belonging to the party you want to vote for. On the ballot, the prioritised candidates are marked out in bold. You can leave your ballot blank, and deposit it as is, and this will count as a vote for the party. You may also put a cross next to any candidate to give them a “personal vote”, which re-ranks them on the list (the prioritised candidates already have personal votes assigned to them on every ballot, which can also be removed!). Finally, you have the option of writing in candidates from other parties at the bottom of your paper. Each one of them will get some portion of your personal vote. I have no idea how they work out the results, but this is a very open list which still advantages the candidates the parties decide are most important.
#2 by Andrea on December 4, 2012 - 12:33 am
“The first story reported that Labour would allow Scottish Parliament candidates to stand on both the constituency and the list ballots with the second reporting that existing regional Labour MSPs would not be guaranteed a space at the top of the party lists at the next election.”
I think the 2 moves are strongly related. If you allow constituency MSPs to stand on the list too (to improve their chances of election), it would be pointless to rank them low anyway because current list MSPs are unmovable (you must be really bad to lose a trigger ballot). For ex, it would have meant Johan Lamont ranked at bast 4th in Glasgow regional list in 2016 behind Anne McTaggart ( I strongly suspect she would have not passed the 2012 Glasgow deselection process if she had not gone to Holyrood in 2011).
I don’t think current list MSPs have much to fear from constituency MSPs. Constituency MSPs will probably beat them but it’s not that SLAB can go on and losing many more constituncies (and if they do, they will likely pick up some list seats to compensate). It’s new candidates from outside Holyrood (probably from Council Chambers as you indidcated with the Edinburgh names) that they need to fear.
#3 by BM on December 4, 2012 - 8:08 am
Labour don’t need to lose more seats for the current list MSPs to be in danger – they just need to maintain the levels they have. Any seats “gained” on the list won’t go to the current list MSPs, but to those who stood in a constituency and lost – and remember, a lot of them aren’t in parliament right now, and so push the current MSPs further and further down the list.
#4 by flyingtrain on December 4, 2012 - 11:05 am
There is a bit of misunderstanding that needs to be cleared up here.
First, there are no trigger ballots for labour list msps. There is a nomination process and then all the party members in an area, vote via the stv system to rank the candidates. As such, a new neww name could easily come top of any labour regional list, they would just need to win enough votes. Currrent list msps are in no way guarenteed to be at the top of a list and this has not changed with lamonts comments.
2nd, though stv could be seen to be an improvement regarding openness, and i am a fan and think we should use for holyrood based on 5 member constituencies, it is in no way something that willl solve all ills. Unless you force all the parties to stand the maximum number off candidates for the positions available, all the partiees will only nominate the number they think they can win, maybe plus 1 in hoping for a good result. This means in pratice that the public get very little conttrol over the `perssonality` they vote for, they only get to choose from who the parties nominate, and this is in the hands of the local parties.
A way to solve this could be the system detailed above, where the parties must nominate for all positions available and can `highligght` who there prefered candidates is (are). Again though, in practice, the parties at the top off the list (based on name or random) will always do better than one at the bottom, purelly because many voters look for the party name first aand not the candidates name.
#5 by BM on December 4, 2012 - 12:43 pm
“Again though, in practice, the parties at the top off the list (based on name or random) will always do better than one at the bottom, purelly because many voters look for the party name first aand not the candidates name.”
In Norway they have individual ballots per party, sorted randomly on a series of shelves in the voting booth. It’s a mess of a system…
#6 by Jeff on December 4, 2012 - 1:01 pm
Yeah but, come on, who’d want to be like Norway 😉
#7 by Doug Daniel on December 4, 2012 - 1:56 pm
Having scrutinised the results of the Aberdeen council elections a few months back, I’m no fan of STV, for the reasons mentioned by flyingtrain. It just leads to parties trying to predict the result and put candidates forward accordingly, which in turn leads to candidate lists being reliant on the previous election (before election: “hmmm, we didn’t get enough votes for two candidates last time, so let’s just have one this time.” After election: “oh bugger, we’d have gotten two after all, and now we’ve let a Tory in!”)
In STV, if a party is likely to only get two candidates elected, then they put forward their two favoured candidates and they both get elected, just like if they had been the top two choices in the List system. So it’s a false choice, and can lead to parties getting fewer elected members than they are entitled to.
STV solves nothing that can’t be sorted by parties using the party list system properly, because Labour’s problem is that they had a stubborn attitude to the list. Then again, for every Anne McTaggart who seems like an advert for the failings of how Labour used the list system, there is an Andy Kerr or Frank McAveety whose absence makes you glad they used it the way they did.
Perhaps we just need to start off by recognising every system has its flaws, and deciding which flaw we find least troublesome? Personally, I think the open list system is about the best we could go for, or failing that, how about letting the public decide the order of party lists before the full election?
(Note: Bill Walker was elected as a constituency MSP, so the carelessness that saw him elected had nothing to do with the list system!)
#8 by Andrea on December 4, 2012 - 3:53 pm
@flyingtrain
So basically it was a piece of bad reporting by Sunday Herald?
Didn’t SLAB have a “top vacant list place should go a woman or BME candidate” rule in 2011 (which changed a couple of positions, in West Scotland and Glasgow IIRC for ex)? Didn’t that imply that sitting list MSPs were expected to go on top?
@BM
Your “to those who stood in a constituency and lost – and remember, a lot of them aren’t in parliament right now” are basically my “new candidates from outside Holyrood”, aren’t they?
People who would have stood only in FPTP constituencies until 2011 but that can now also try for a list ranking possibly coming ahead of current list MSPs
#9 by BM on December 4, 2012 - 6:00 pm
Yeah, I mis-read, and took constituency MSPs to be shorthand for any Labour candidate standing in a constituency – but I also thought that was the whole point of this, getting the political talent lost at the last election back into parliament?