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London by-election – The fight for fairness

Oct 1

Posted by Jeff in Democracy, Elections, Parties | 12 Comments

I know this blog has a raison d’etre of bettering the nation of Scotland but I’m going to briefly interrupt proceedings to post on London council elections. No wait, where are you going, come back! This’ll only take a moment…

The London Borough elections of 2010 saw 1,861 councillors elected to their posts. I don’t know what the expectations were for the Green Party in the UK’s capital but they returned 2 councillors which I would ordinarily have thought was a poor result but, from the little I know of how elections work here, I know infact that it was actually just an unfair result.

There is an upcoming by-election for nearby Kentish Town in the area of Camden next month and this could see the Green Party increase its number of councillors by 50% if it were to win. Labour are probably favourites and, were they to win, they would increase their representation in the city by 0.114%. A bit of a difference you could say.

Indeed, if one were to look at the 2010 election results as a whole they would see what an uphill struggle the Green Party is fighting against in a local context.

The Labour party won 876 councillors, the Conservatives 717, the Lib Dems 245 and the Greens, as I say, 2. This result was with 3,388,437 votes for Labour, 3,301,966 for the Conservatives, 2,094,530 for the Lib Dems and 443,498 for the Greens.

Put another way, Labour received 3,868 votes for every councillor position it won, the Conservatives received 4,605 votes for every councillor, the Lib Dems received 8,549 votes for every councillor and the Greens received a whopping 221,749 votes for every councillor.

All parties talk of wanting fairness, all parties talk of a new politics. So, not that I’m suggesting the local Green Party isn’t up for a challenge, but shouldn’t all the other parties just sit out this Kentish Town by-election and let an organic justice take place?

Sadly it doesn’t work that way so it’ll be an old-skool winner takes all affair in Kentish Town. Good thing the Greens believe fairness is worth fighting for because they have a battle on their hands on that score.

Source: Borough Council Election Results

Labour holds its Ed in its hands

Sep 25

Posted by Jeff in Democracy, Parties | 7 Comments

So the results are in and Ed has pipped his big brother to the Labour leadership by 51% to 49%. Not that a small winning margin necessarily dilutes one’s margin. Deputy Prime Minister Clegg beat Chris Huhne by a tiny amount and he’s done alright for himself.

I suspect it is less the scoreline that will undermine Ed and more a cantankerous Balls as Shadow Chancellor, a man with an unswerving, unnerving belief in his own abilities who may struggle to shout his ego down and stop believing that he should really be in charge. Will those internal briefing reflexes kick in if it doesn’t work out with Ed in charge? We’ll have to wait and see.

Similarly, I can’t see David Miliband wanting to go through this ordeal only to remain as Shadow Foreign Minister for four long years. I wonder if big brother is considering the private sector.

On policy, the cheers from the Tory HQ will have been genuine but potentially misguided. Genuine because Ed’s assertion that Darling’s pre-election stance of halving the budget in 4 years is ‘just the beginning’ suggests a worryingly complacent return to increasing spending but misplaced because although the coalition-friendly media’s narrative is that Cameron has won the argument on cutting the deficit, we don’t have the detail of this year’s £9bn of cuts, let alone next year’s £41bn. If the public is thinking that Osborne isn’t so bad as Chancellor after all then they may be ignorant to the wave of pain that’s on its way.

What say the Greens? Well, I suspect that their already stifled voices will be even harder to hear now as Ed’s genuine green credentials are more than sufficient for a regrettably disinterested public.

Another aspect to this result is that strong union support for Ed suggests weak MP support. How quickly will Alan Johnson, Tom Harris, Jim Murphy etc slide their support for David as squarely behind Ed? I suspect Labour’s period of introspection will continue largely unabated.

The new Labour leader may have the unions on his side and the policies in his corner, but does he have his party at his back?

Holyrood 2011 – Policies or Personalities?

Sep 24

Posted by Jeff in Democracy, Elections, Parties | 2 Comments

With it now 93 days to Christmas, it is getting tantalisingly close to the day when we find out who has been a good girl or boy and suitably rewarded therein. I personally can’t wait for that bleary-eyed morning with a rotund, jovial man bearing his gifts of knowledge. Yes, that’s right, the Holyrood election 2011 is drawing ever nearer.

Above all else, the public deserves one thing from our representatives at election time and that is dividing lines. With the centre left a particularly crowded field it is difficult to see where, or even if, these dividing lines will open up between now and May. Indeed, I fear that the inertia that has crept in at Holyrood of late will result in personality rather than policies being the only real criterion for a disaffected public. That thought crystallised yesterday morning when I read this excerpt from The Herald’s coverage of the minimum pricing issue:

LibDem health spokesman Ross Finnie warned that there was a risk of an “entirely polarised debate” and that everything the SNP Government said on alcohol was “rubbish”.

There is no doubting that alcohol is a fight that Scotland is currently losing on many fronts; health-related, crime-related, education-related and even reputationally. It doesn’t take long for a Scotsman abroad to bear the brunt of a crass comment about his/her homeland and booze, with or without bumping into Prince Philip.

However, as Ross Finnie has pointed out, the two main parties are not close to reaching any agreement in this “polarised” debate and while the Lib Dem spokesman tries to portray himself as the reasonable alternative, he undermines that objective by bizarrely calling the Government’s proposals “rubbish” when they are, at the very least, reasonable and valid.

The Conservatives have their own valid argument, a libertarian approach that seems to revolve around some mythical ‘squaddie’ who has longed to come home from Afghanistan and tuck into some cut-price cider. The Greens, most impressively but inconspicuously of all, have looked at the SNP’s proposals, thought they looked fair enough and have been onboard ever since. Once again the silent heroes of the piece, if only there were more of them alongside Patrick and Robin.

Most parties have circled around this policy area, and many others, that they all agree need addressed but they have contrived to allow their personalities to get in the way of an optimal policy where everybody wins.

Will this be the template for the election campaign?

With the amount of money that Scotland will be given to spend over the coming years set to drop sharply, one can’t envisage that any of the parties will be able to pull together an attractive manifesto, not while balancing their numbers that is. This may well drag all commitments to a horribly vague middle-ground and leave the voter little choice.

There should be clear policy dividing lines on local taxation (SNP/Lib Dem – Local Income Tax, Greens – Land Value Tax, Tories/Labour – Council tax/to be decided) and minimum pricing if it remains an issue but I cannot envisage these topics being the main talking points of the election campaign. Cuts and jobs/economy are the main issues and all parties want less of the former and more of the latter. Not many dividing lines there.

One would expect the SNP to hold an advantage over the other parties with the mighty Salmond consistently leading polls that focus on party leaders. One could also argue that the SNP has had a relatively successful four years policy-wise so perhaps, with Labour so far ahead in the polls, I should not limit the crucial factor of the 2011 election to these two considerations.

The main personality question will depend on whether the main Opposition party, Labour, continues to oppose all spending cuts by the SNP Government or seeks to offer an alternative budget. To this end, January 2011 will be a crucial period as voting begins on the budget for 2011/12.

Was Labour to continue playing the politics of decrying every job loss, every project scrappage and every decrease in expenditure then the result of 2011 will depend on whether the public responds favourably to such a strategy.

Scotland would be best served by a substantive policy debate, not a squabbling contest built on inflated egos and unshakeable truculence, but I guess we’ll just wait and see which of the two awaits us.

Why I’ll probably vote No to the Alternative Vote

Sep 21

Posted by Malc in Constitution, Democracy | 48 Comments

Arguably, the main price of coalition for the Conservatives was the commitment to hold a referendum on electoral reforms – specifically on AV.  That was the Lib Dems red line (or orange line, I guess) issue – they want a system which is more proportional and, incidentally, one which will deliver them more seats.  But I’m not convinced that AV delivers on the first of those aims (though it probably will on the second – but that is probably a lesser concern).

So, why am I verging on being opposed to AV?  Well, several reasons.  First off, don’t confuse me for a First Past the Post apologist (see Harris, T – and while I don’t agree with him here, his point is well made).  I’m not.  I do believe we need electoral reform, and that we need a system which delivers a more proportional – more fair – outcome, one which provides much more in the way of a correlation between the votes cast for a party and the seats won by the same party.  You will note in that previous sentence I didn’t just say “more” but “much more”, and this is partly where AV does not deliver for me.  Yes, it will be (marginally) more proportional than FPTP but it does not go far enough to be proportional.  All we would be doing is making sure that voters in each constituency gave one candidate over 50% of the vote – and on a larger scale, all that would do is make landslides even bigger (since people would tend to vote for a popular party further down the ballot, even if they were not their first preference).

The second reason I’m opposed is that AV (whether the referendum is won or lost) precludes a properly proportional system being implemented – probably for the next 30 years at the very least.  What do I mean by that?  Well, it’s taken, what, three hundred years (and several reforms to the franchise) to get to the point where politicians are thinking about changing the electoral system, and even then they can’t agree on what to change it to.  So now we’re to have a vote on a system which is marginally more proportional than the current system, and it is a lose-lose situation for me.  If AV wins, we’re stuck with a system which does not adequately provide any real proportional element to the system.  If AV loses, we’re stuck with the status quo – a FPTP system which ignores the preferences of up to 70% of the electorate in any single constituency.  Either way, we’re unlikely to see any further change to the electoral system for the foreseeable future.

Without trying to be too negative here, I blame Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats for putting me in this position – its rock and hard place stuff.  Do I vote ‘Yes’ in the referendum, and end up stuck with a system which is in no discernible way a massive improvement on the FPTP system we currently use?  Or do I vote ‘No’ and make us stick with the not-proportional-at-all system we currently have until we get offered something a bit better?

I’m inclined to go for the latter.  There are other reasons, but those outlined above are the main two – the lack of proportionality and the fact that it precludes moving to a more proportional system.  I’m sure you (particularly the Lib Dems, who don’t much like it either, but will probably vote for it anyway) disagree as, indeed, my co-editors do – why?

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Is it time for compulsory voting here?

Sep 2

Posted by Malc in Democracy | 22 Comments

Having read this piece on Wales Home, I thought this was an issue worth flagging up here.  Should voting in the UK be compulsory?

Unlike Marcus Warner, the author of the Welsh piece, I’ve always been instinctively against compulsory voting. At heart, I’m a liberal. I think the state should be as small as possible, that it is a necessary evil, and it should only force the public to act in ways which are congruent with Mill’s ‘Harm Principle’ – that is to say, we cannot harm others. Other than that, I think we should be left to get on with our lives by ourselves.

But compulsory voting is an interesting idea for me, because it raises another classic liberal idea, that of participation in democracy. Rousseau believed that only in the act of voting were citizens truly free and that subsequently we became prisoners to what those whom we trusted to act in our interests decided. In essence, compulsory voting would be ‘forcing people to be free’. And I’m not convinced we should be forced into this.

There are other reasons to be sceptical too – if forced to vote, you can ‘sell’ it to the highest bidder (less in monetary terms than policy terms, though I wouldn’t rule out the former), a new brand of ‘consensus politics’ to make sure you connect with everyone and the fact that people are abstaining for a reason, a lack of engagement with politics, is not really addressed by forcing participation in elections. Also, if we were to do this, we should be doing it because it is right – and that compulsory voting wins over these arguments – and not simply because we fear ever-decreasing turnouts diminishing the legitimacy of our institutions.

In truth, I don’t know. The latter point is one that hits home in my mind, despite my scepticism. If our political institutions lack legitimacy (and you can see that in the Welsh Assembly, with legitimacy only just recovering from the 7,000 votes separating victory from defeat in the 1997 referendum) then the public engagement with those institutions suffers – and they further lose legitimacy. It’s a vicious circle, and one which deserves some kind of action.

Is compulsory voting the answer? In this round of constitutional reform, the answer appears to be no. But should it be? I don’t know seems like such a cop-out answer. And yet, that’s what I appear to be saying.  I do recognise that a low turnout in elections lends itself to questions about the legitimacy of those elected – and indeed, in the institutions themselves.  But if we are “forced to be free” (and I’m using that in not quite the way Rousseau did, though if his assertion that we are only truly free when electing our representatives is correct, then it follows) then the legitimacy that we are bestowing upon those who represent us appears to be artificial and manufactured at best.

In short, compulsory voting doesn’t solve the problem in re-engaging the public with politics, nor does it re-instil a sense of belief in the political structures, a belief which had been waning even before The Telegraph went to town on those whose expenses were not quite proper. Compulsory voting would serve only to draw back into a political process those who had lost faith in politics, those who remained unconvinced by the system they were forced to be a part of.

That paragraph seems to finally put me on one side of the debate. Compulsory voting would not do what was intended of it, therefore why should we adopt it? I almost feel daft, having raised the concept and now knocked it down.  Does anyone think it worthwhile discussing the idea?

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