Work as if you live in the early days of a

Better Nation

Archive for category Elections

Festival of democracy posted missing

May 3

Posted by James in Elections, Local government | 20 Comments

Today’s election is not just the first STV local election not held on the same day as a Holyrood election, it’s also the first time the capital has voted since banning lamppost placards. In June last year the SNP and Tories voted the ban through, meaning Edinburgh, like Glasgow, Dundee and other local authorities, would be placard-free this year.

It’s a baffling decision, given the legal requirement, largely well-observed by all parties, to take them down promptly. When the turnout figures are published, it’ll probably be forgotten amongst the reasons given for low numbers.

In general I have less of a problem with low turnout than media commentators tend to do, and compulsory voting means we get results driven more by those who don’t really care about the results. But government and agencies at all levels should still be making it easier to vote (including a move away from Thursdays, or towards voting on more than one day), and easier to remember to vote.

It’s unlikely that placards ever change elections much, although 1999 may be an exception – a sea of Green placards across Edinburgh gave Robin Harper’s candidacy a boost. What they do do is remind everyone that there’s an election on. They spark conversations about politics, and they used to give the city a “festival of democracy” feel. The city allows placards for the Fringe and for the actual festival, which is fine – but is an election not equally worth promoting? Whoever wins in Edinburgh I hope this bizarre rule gets overturned before the city votes again.

Vote exhaustively, vote locally

May 2

Posted by James in Elections, Local government | 22 Comments

All too often local elections get billed as “a crucial mid-term test of support for the Government”, or even described as “the biggest opinion poll since the general election”. It’s intensely irritating and it should be ignored. Sure, Holyrood and Westminster have more powers, and sure, people’s opinions of the parties nationally will play out tomorrow. But a week’s worth of punditry about the national implications will be quickly forgotten – these elections will again elect local councils for a long five year term.

And they should be regarded as important in their own right. Local government matters, despite the long years over which power has been sucked from them by Westminster and more recently by Holyrood – notably, does anyone think they’re electing a local administration with the power to make tax choices based on the needs of their community? Local councils can cock up important transport projects or they can expand safe cycle networks, they can privatise and close down local services or instead pay a living wage, they can send their own leadership around in limos or make them walk, cycle or take the bus, and they set the tone for planning too.

It matters what the parties in office have achieved, and what are the other credible candidates offering? Do they have principles that matter to you locally? I’m in favour of independence, but it doesn’t tell you much about what SNP councillors or candidates would do, for instance. In Edinburgh their shambolic administration with the Lib Dems means the Nats will be marked down my ballot paper. Conversely Glasgow has been run by Labour for Labour alone, with incompetence and the whiff of something worse, and I’m not surprised to see Green councillor Kieran Wild arguing that that city needs a change too.

Also, your candidates matter, if you can find out enough about them to make an informed judgement. Until I moved house in the run-up to the 2007 local elections I lived in a ward represented by the Labour councillor who rammed the doomed Caltongate project through planning. If I’d stayed where I was he’d have probably got my last preference. If I lived in Aberdeenshire I’d look very closely at who backed the Trump application, or in Aberdeen who voted which way on Union Terrace Gardens.

The electoral system is the most proportional we get to cast, and not using all your preferences only makes sense if you genuinely can’t choose between two candidates – for instance, if there are two indistinguishable Tories standing in your ward and they’d get your last two preferences. SNP MSP John Mason recently posted his completed ballot paper on Facebook, which apparently isn’t quite a breach of the 1983 Representation of the People Act, and he’d only voted SNP with his first two preferences, despite it being a four member ward. John: is it really the case that you don’t care whether the other two councillors elected are Green, Labour, Lib Dem or Tory? Seriously?

Using all your preferences is also a particular kind of anoraky fun. In 2007 I had the pleasure of putting a 1 next to Alison Johnstone’s name – a good friend as well someone who knew would make a great Green councillor – then putting my least favourite Lib Dem last, and filling in the gaps. Personally, I tend to put the Tories second last with Lib Dems last, because at least the Tories tend to be more honest about their plans, but it’s not easy. This time I’ll need to work out where UKIP fit in amongst that tail end.

This is the first time Scottish voters have had a local election using STV without a Holyrood election on the same day. Turnout will be down, of course, but that may not be the disaster the pundits will claim it to be if those who do vote are those who care about their local area and vote both locally and exhaustively. Don’t worry about your country. Your local authority area needs you.

Greek election – drama predicted

Apr 30

Posted by Guest Blog in Elections, International | Comments off

A guest post today from our irregular Greek correspondent, Marinos Antypas, looking ahead to this Sunday’s elections. 

So here is my Greek pre-election digest. The political landscape is very fluid. What is certain is that the two once-big parties will see a halving of their combined votes. Traditionally being able to gather between 80 and 90% of the vote between them, they are now desperate for the 35% between them that would allow them to form a coalition government.

If we are to believe the opinion polls (which must stop 2 weeks before elections, so the last one we had was one week ago), Nea Demokratia are in the lead but are struggling to gather 20%. PASOK fluctuates between 8% and 15%, under its new President, Venizelos. Both parties have made it clear they are willing to form a coalition. Still, the percentage they need to form a government is conditional on how much of the vote goes to parties that do not manage to get into parliament.

This is a tricky one: if say 20% of the vote goes to parties that do not manage to pass the national 3% necessary to get them into parliament then the coalition or the first party needs only 35% to form a government of 151/300 majority. If the percentage of such votes is small, say 1%, then the coalition or first party needs something closer to 40%, with a graded variance for the scenarios in between.

Now if ND gets 20% and PASOK get, say, 15% (35% between them) what about the other parties?

The Left: It looks like SYRIZA (the leftist coalition party) will come second or third with 12-15%. KKE (the Communist Party) will get around 11%-12% and the Democratic Left (Eurocommunists) around 10%-13%. The Greens (the Left Greens rather than the insignificant Right Greens) seem likely to get in Parliament with 3-4%. So the Left combined gets between 36-44%. Thus SYRIZA is urging post-election cooperation and the formation of a Left Front government.

The Right: It looks like the leading party to the Right of ND is a new party, the Independent Greeks, led by an ex-ND conspiracy-theorist MP. The party has a religious right profile and in the polls gets 10-15%. Scandalously, SYRIZA has announced that it would accept a vote of confidence from the Independent Greeks so as to form a government (supposedly with the General Secretary of the KKE as PM!). LAOS, the Le-Penist extreme-right, is struggling to get into Parliament with an estimated 3%. Its votes have been absorbed by the Golden Dawn (Neo-Nazis), who seem to be getting 5% of the vote (scary stuff!). So the extreme-right seems to collect between 18-21% of the vote.

Neoliberals: The two neoliberalist parties seem to be struggling to get into Parliament. They are both pro-IMF, and it seems unlikely that they can both get 3%, so a safe assumption is that one will just manage to get into Parliament. Both are led by ex-MPs, one by the defeated presidential candidate for ND, and daughter of Mitsotakis (the old ND PM), Dora Bakogianni.

So the three ‘blocks of power’ are:

Pro-IMF (ND+PASOK+Neolibs) 35-38%
Anti-IMF Left: 36-44%
Anti-IMF Right: 18-21%
Weird Left-Right Coalition (Anti-IMF Left+Independent Greeks): 46-59%

Now why does this balance of power matter? Only the leading party can normally call for a coalition, yet if this fails it is believed that the President of the Republic, if he is willing, can seek to prevent further elections and chaos by giving the coalition formation order to the second party, which might be SYRIZA.

In any case it will be extremely difficult for a pro-IMF coalition to govern if it does not have at least 165 seats in Parliament, the number necessary to elect a new President of the Republic. If their Presidential candidate is not voted in, then elections will have to be called again.

Politically speaking, it will be difficult to rule if the two pro-IMF parties do not gather something around 45-50% of the vote, for then the anti-IMF parties on the Left and Right will always be able to protest that this is a sham democratic process.

So as you can see the situation is precarious. No one knows what the results will be in an election contest which is universally recognised as the most significant of the Republic.

picture credit – teacher dude

An SNP-Labour coalition for Edinburgh?

Apr 29

Posted by Guest Blog in Elections, Local government, Parties | 13 Comments

A guest this lovely Sunday from Rory Scothorne. Rory is an Edinburgh University student, political blogger and part-time music writer who once had a tweet quoted in the Scotsman and won’t let anyone forget it, although he can’t remember what it actually said. He blogs about Scottish and UK politics at Scotland Thinks, where his writing has been generously described as ‘swivel-eyed’ and ‘a load of codswallop’.

There are few certainties in Scottish politics, but you can always be fairly sure that Labour and the Scottish National Party won’t get on. Since devolution, the enmity between Scotland’s two biggest parties has sizzled with the mix of hatred and grudging respect that characterises the most established of foes.

There are obvious reasons for such a gulf. In the high-school playground of Scottish politics, the SNP are the exciting new kid in town, arriving with a style, self-confidence and controversial past that catches everyone’s eye, allowing them to usurp the established authority that Labour’s long-serving head prefect has begun to take for granted. No wonder they’re upset.

To the SNP, Labour’s dogged loyalty to the union and all its perceived inequities is a betrayal of the Scottish people, abandoning us to distant Tory governments in exchange for a few jobs for life on the green benches in London.

Since Willie Wolfe pulled the SNP over to the left, both parties have been competing for dominance of a similar ideological territory, but their inability to separate on policy leads them both down a spiral of personality politics and cheap sniping.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

It’s precisely that ideological similarity that makes the animosity so frustrating. It turns it into an almost fraternal conflict, a tragic spectacle where we’re all secretly rooting for them to put their differences aside and remember their love for each other. Jimmy Reid, Alex Neil and Jim Sillars all started out in Labour and ended up with the SNP, and the transition for them was not about some tectonic shift in values – merely a realisation that the kind of society they hoped for could best be achieved outside of the United Kingdom.

Of course, nobody really expects Labour and the SNP in Holyrood to put that single, profound difference aside and join forces for social justice. The constitution is far too important an issue in this country to be sidelined.

But what about local government? There’s no doubt that the parties instinctively dislike each other just as much at a local level as they do nationally, but there’s not really much sense to that. After all, SNP councillors can’t legislate for a referendum. Nor can Labour councillors vote against one. That central issue that pushes the two parties apart is completely irrelevant at a council level.

That’s why it makes a great deal of sense for the SNP to consider the Labour Party as coalition partners. The voting system means it’s going to be hard for either to get many majorities without coalition, but if they refuse to try working together that will be a struggle. In many local authorities it’s unlikely that the Liberal Democrats or the Greens will manage to get enough of the vote to top up either Labour or the SNP and take them past the halfway mark, while both will be deeply reluctant to join an unholy union with the Tories while that party leads such an unpopular administration in Westminster.

Edinburgh is a prime example of where this can happen. The capital’s Lib Dems will suffer heavily from the compounding effects of leading an unpopular local administration and joining an even more unpopular UK one, and may well be unable to take Labour or the SNP up to the 29 seats needed to form an administration. The Greens won’t win enough either. There could be an SNP minority with a Conservative confidence and supply deal, but that’s a huge political risk considering the Tories’ unpopularity.

If the SNP become the largest party, Tom Buchanan’s recovery from surgery places Steve Cardownie as the obvious choice for the city’s next leader. He defected from Labour to the SNP in 2005, claiming conversion to independence and stressing his frustration with New Labour. I suspect that’s a frustration shared by many of his former colleagues across Scotland, who might just take a certain subversive glee in pairing up with the Nats.

It was, after all, a makeshift coalition of SNP, Labour and Greens that brought down the Lib Dem/Tory proposals for ‘Alternative Business Models’. They’ve demonstrated a willingness to work together on centre-left goals, and coalition would be an opportunity to demonstrate that they can both put their shared social-democratic vision for Scotland ahead of the cheap party politics that demeans public debate in this country. The symbolism of such unprecedented co-operation taking place in Scotland’s capital would be a breath of fresh air in a city that sorely needs it.

The Fascists are not on the march

Apr 27

Posted by Malc in Elections, International | 24 Comments

We have a guest of a most special sort today. Our dear friend Malcolm Harvey, a founding editor of Better Nation and more recently an occasional Thinker of Unpopular Thoughts, considers the real meaning of the Front National’s first round poll results in France.

I don’t pretend to be an expert in French politics, but I guess I know a little more than some. I’m what you’d call an interested observer of elections (which you would never have guessed from my previous involvement with this blog). I have to say though, I was a little surprised by – what I’d characterise as the – rather hysterical reaction to Marine Le Pen’s polling 18% in the first round of the Presidential election.

The first thing which should be pointed out is that this was only the first round. The French use a run-off system to decide their President. The first round is open – and there are often as many as 10 candidates to choose from. The two candidates with the highest share of the first round vote go forward to a second (and final) round two weeks later. So voters have what you might call more freedom – they can make their first vote a vote for their clear preference, or make it a protest vote, with the knowledge that the President will not be decided until the second round.

We’re often hearing (from the likes of John Curtice) that the Scottish electorate have become much more “sophisticated” in their distinguishing between UK, Scottish, European and local authority elections and altering their votes accordingly – and it would appear the French are equally knowledgeable about how to best operate their electoral system.

The second thing I’d point out is that Marine Le Pen’s party – the Front National – are not the party of her father. Though they do maintain what would colloquially be described as a “right-wing” ideology, since she took over the presidency of the party has had much more of an economic – and dare I say it, populist – focus. A Eurosceptic, Marine Le Pen advocates French withdrawal from the Eurozone – and also opposes free trade, supporting a form of protectionism instead. In a time of economic recession, when the EU has proved unpopular and the Eurozone itself is falling apart, you can understand why this would be a popular position, and one which voters might well support.

But it isn’t only an economic position. It is a position which is consistent with what, for want of a better phrase, would pass for French nationalism. Until very recently, France was the epitome of a centralised state, to the point that regionalism was totally disallowed and the use of distinct regional languages (Breton, Basque, Occitan) was actively stamped out. There was “one France”. The point I’m emphasising here is that the French nation was above all else. And while this policy has been discontinued, the attitude – the primacy of Frenchness over others, the protection of the “one France” – remains in some places, and can go some way to explaining a vote for the Front National.

Of course, there will inevitably be those who subscribe to their anti-immigration views. But to characterise this as a “rise of fascism” is, I think, overstating the case. For the above reasons – the economic position of the Front National, and the fact that this was only the first round of the election – mean that categorising those who voted for Marine Le Pen as “extremist” or “right-wing” is somewhat simplistic. Indeed, some might even have been attracted to them for their anti-nuclear position (evidence for James that even those who would otherwise be beyond the pale can have some redeeming qualities!).

The majority of that 18% was, in my opinion, a clear protest vote. With the second round on 6 May, we’ll see what that 18% do. Perhaps some of them – those who feel that neither Sarkozy nor Hollande offer them a clear option – will stay at home. But many will choose their “least worst” option in the second round, an indication, perhaps, that while they wanted to display some kind of protest in the first round, they will return to a more moderate position in the second.