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I’ve long disliked our voting system. It has given the Labour and Tory parties absolute Westminster power for years. But by their share of the popular vote they’ve been minority governments. That also correlates with a long-term decline in turnout, a decreasing engagement with politics, and many voters finding their votes count for nothing because they live in a ’safe’ seat: Only about 100 seats changed hands in this election.

These days I live in Glasgow. The definition of safe Labour territory. All seven constituencies here have returned Labour MP’s this time around, as they have done for years. But I got to wondering what the actual share of the vote was, and how behind Labour is this city, really?

The problem for me with the electoral system is that the way people vote has fundamentally changed. We used to vote for local candidates to represent us in parliament: our system – one that’s been unchanged for a long time – reflects that with local constituencies and individual names on the ballot paper. There was no broadcast media when it formed. However, despite this, voters now vote for and associate primarily with parties – and not individual candidates. This perhaps most recently exemplified by leadership debates, to the way the media reports the election, and the decline in local engagement (Glasgow South had just one hustings). I’d therefore suggest most voters would be hard-pressed to name their “preferred” party candidate as they go to vote: rather they’re mainly looking for party symbols.

I know there are proponents of First Past The Post – amongst them my returned MP – but low turnout in ultra-safe constituencies, and the disenfranchisement of many, is the price that’s paid. The electorates desire for representation by different parties are ignored, and often (although not in my constituency) more people vote for other parties than the winning candidate, than support them. This is not a long term sustainable approach.

I don’t hold for arguments for ’strong’ governments being ‘necessary’. Coalitions work in Germany, and many other places. They work very well in Scotland, as also does a minority government right now. To suggest we can’t get used to coalitions is to dismiss the electorate as unable to cope with compromise. Goodness me, wasn’t it actually refreshing to hear our politicians reflective about compromise this morning?

But is Glasgow as deeply Labour as it’s reputation suggests? I’m a bit of a statistics nerd, so I grabbed the published election results for Glasgow, and sliced and diced them to look at what the picture actually says about the preferences of Glasgow voters. You can download my spreadsheet here.

The detail is 417,578 people were eligible to vote in Glasgow, and 229,223 did so. A turnout of 54.89% – Compare that to the national average turnout of 65.1% (as of 4pm). 10% lower where there is a predominant assumption that Labour will win. To me that suggests that FPTP in safe seats (which is most), does not encourage engagement. Even if you add a little for the fact that the dynamic in Scotland is different, with the Scottish parliament controlling much of the ‘domestic’ agenda we see picked over in the national media.

If we look at how the votes were cast, based on the four main parties across the region, the SNP secured 17.32%, the Liberal Democrats 13.70%, Labour 56.2%, and the Conservatives 7.63%. Other parties just 2.83%. If we take the total vote and allocate out Glasgow’s 7 seats based on that – in a simple proportional way (it assumes people would have voted the same in different systems, but as we have no measure of what their preference would actually be, it’ll have to do), Labour would get 4 seats, the SNP, Liberal Democrat and Conservatives would get 1 seat each. Quite interesting to compare it to the Glasgow regional votes in the 2007 Scottish parliament elections (Labour 38.2%, SNP 27%, Liberal Democrat 7.2%, Conservative 6.7%, Green 5.2%).

So in short, 43.8% of people in Glasgow, who cared enough to vote, did not support the Labour party, for which the city is assumed to be loyal. Of course, Labour is still very much the dominant party even looked at this way, but it’s not the 100% support that the 7 returned Labour MP’s suggest. Plus turnout across Glasgow was 10% lower than the national average. If people actually felt their vote would matter, how much higher would it have been?

We have the system we have. Congratulations to the MP’s who were returned, and I trust and hope they’ll execute their tasks well.

My issue with the system remains that as a result of voting patterns shifting to parties, not candidates, and the voting system not reflecting that, a large proportion of the electorate are disenfranchised. Their votes do not count, because the boundaries are arbitrary, and we insist on returning the candidate with the most votes, not candidates that reflect the will of the people.

Solutions? I think the Scottish parliamentary electoral system is excellent. We maintain the constituency link that’s so important, and have regional MSP’s who are allocated based on share of the vote. The only draw back is the party list system that has, so I’d argue for a wider involvement of the public in selecting candidates – a primary of sorts – before they go on that shortlist.

I know many people disagree it’s necessary to reform our voting system (not least, my MP), but the cost of not working to revise the system to ensure that it reflects the wider will of the people will be reducing turnout, reduced engagement in politics, and a continuation of the strange situation where a handful of ‘marginal’ seats determine who actually takes power. The voters in a hundred or so constituencies are where Governments are decided, not the country as a whole, and that can’t be right.

Glasgow may well always be heavily Labour, but it saddens me that a large minority of voters – such as myself – are being ignored, simply because we have an outdated voting system that reflects a bygone age.

Anybody visiting my website over the last few months would be excused for thinking it’s a running website. There was a time when I was motivated to write more about politics, and to write more about technology (the original purpose of this weblog). All that’s fallen by the wayside in the face of my training for the London Marathon, my focus on Glasgow parkrun, and running my own business. But my political mojo has, to some extent, returned of late, helped by the farcical situation with MP expenses and all that’s come from it. I don’t think I have anything particularly radical or novel to write, but I’ll write it anyway.

The way some MP’s have behaved has certainly been deplorable, and the biggest damage isn’t so much the waste of public money and the arrogant way with which it was treated by our representatives, but the damage it’s done to an already weak confidence in the political process.

Sadly the only beneficiaries will be the ‘fringe’ parties of the right, which seem to gradually be gaining more airtime and print space. As I write this, in Somerset, I can see a UKIP poster, and that’s pretty much the only poster I’ve seen close to home. But then this area has always been either a Tory or LibDem area. I just wish there were strong, alternative, centrist voices to compensate: The Lib Dems are mired in the same mess (more by association than headline-grabbing expense idiocy some Labour/Tory MP’s seem guilty of) Green party perhaps springs to mind, but they seem to be drowned out in collective hand-wringing at the BNP and UKIP’s PR campaigns. It almost feels like the fear of their doing well is causing more attention to be paid to them, creating a feedback loop that brings us the very thing we don’t want.

Electoral reform has also been on the agenda of late. And about time too. But I just hope it’s not a knee-jerk reaction. It does need time and a proper, balanced, debate. I’d much prefer a PR system that maintained the constituency strong link, and led to a more representative parliament (in both houses). The Scottish System works very well in my view. Sadly the establishment seems to forget they serve us, and not the other way around. They are only there at our sufferance, and goodness knows the country’s patience has been tried in the last month or two.

A General Election is tempting, but I side with the ’sort your house out THEN go to the people’, rather than booting them out and getting the next lot in. This Autumn would work well in my view. A fixed term parliament is certainly the best proposal I’ve heard from the Tories in a long, long time (even if it’s not in the slightest bit new, good to see them adopt it). Of course, it’s now inevitable we’ll get a Conservative administration. On the whole I’m not too bothered – If anything I’m a big believer in the need for a periodic change (be nice if we could limit administrations to a couple of terms!) – but my biggest fear is not the politics of economics, education, defence, etc, but the ‘conservative’ (small c) moralising we’ll risk getting.

Ironically, perhaps, the best thing is that it has at least energised people into paying more attention to what our representatives are up to. Sadly it’s very negative and alienating right now, but I hope this will eventually lead to considered and effective reform, and a greater demand for freedom of information, and openness in the corridors of power. Political parties have to do a much better job of seizing this moment and delivering what, I think, people are demanding.

I’d suspected the next General Election would be quite interesting even before the MP Expenses and financial crises hit. Gordon Brown can’t expect anything other than a resounding kicking (deserved not least for simply failing to deliver on the hopes so many of us had), but if the Tories – very much mired in the problems themselves – don’t find a way to propose the radical changes now being demanded of our politicians and political system, there’s a real danger of even more radical change being forced on them.

Something that has puzzled me since it became apparent that rejected ballots were going to be one of the major stories from the recent election, was the lack of solid examples of what form the rejected ballots were taking.

As a result, we had politicians weighing in with broad statements. Whilst they or there representatives were, I’d imagine, present at the count, I’m grateful for Pat the Chooks who was an observer during the voting process, and provides some welcome detail:

During the count, the reason for this high rate became obvious: the majority of rejected parliamentary papers had two votes in the left-hand, the regional, column and no vote in the right-hand, the constituency, column. Candidates and agents were drawing the conclusion that voters were being misled by the instruction at the head of the sheet of paper, which read, “You have 2 votes …”.

Also many blamed the concurrent STV system, but Pat notes that the electorate seemed ok with that. Indeed, spoilt ballots on the STV system were much smaller. In my ward of Pollokshields, part of the Glasgow council election 149 out of 9567 – that’s 1.6% were rejected, much closer to ‘normal’.

It’s a shame that the sample ballot the press are seemingly obliged to show seems so clear and, well, concise. Here in Glasgow the regional ballot was huge, and the print quality wasn’t especially crisp. I’m also decidedly unimpressed with party names being abused (eg. “Alex Salmond for 1st Minister – SNP” to get them at the top of the list (More on this from Doctor Vee)).

Others have noted that the comment “you have TWO votes”, on one piece of paper was particular vague. However, it comes down to educating the voter ahead if time what the difference is between constituency and regional votes.

It’s Pat’s conclusion that “the problem with the process is not the electorate, as some have asserted, nor the voting paper, but the failure properly to inform and educate the electorate how MSPs are elected and why the regional vote matters.“. On the whole I agree: Educating people about the mechanics of the democratic system has to be for the better.

What’s clear is STV worked, and so did the counting systems (if rather slowly: They should be fixed/improved, but we shouldn’t allow the Luddites to force a return to manual counting), but the MSP election was badly messed up by poorly considered ballot layout, and insufficient effort to inform the public ahead of time. Education, Education, Education? Who said that then?

We’ve started to receive flyers for the forthcoming elections here in Scotland. We’re voting for MSP’s, as well as city councillors, here in Glasgow.

The Scottish Conservatives were the first we received for the local elections, and I always make a point of reading what they have to say. Interesting to note that their candidate David Meikle has setup a weblog and a website.

All good to see, although I’m some way off of coming to any sort of decision, much less deciding on what my priorities are for the local, and Scottish parliament elections, beyond deciding that the SNP are clearly in need of some basic economics knowledge (spend, spend, spend) and will receive short shrift from me if they ever ask for my vote. They’re really a party I have a problem with before we even get past their name. That said, a useless factoid for any readers interested is to point out that the SNP is – I understand – the only left-wing nationalist party in Europe.

One useful – non-political – item I did learn from the Conservative flyer is that the local elections will be held using the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system. This means voters will be much better able to express themselves, and should really result in a better balance, and representation of councillors: All too often the Labour-rosette wearing donkey gets voted in here.

So perhaps that’s my overriding objective: To make sure the council has a full representation of views. I’m also deeply cynical about the two year freeze in council tax we’ve had. Welcome for sure, but leaves me deeply suspicious of the controlling Labour administration simply playing politics. The council tax is already higher than I ever paid in London, and whilst water-rates do get included in the figure we have an eye-watering £2,200 to pay each year: A bitter pill to swallow when I’m very uncertain the council actually does a particularly efficient job (unless it involves putting bollards around a hole in the ground and ignoring it for six weeks; Then they’re very good), and I’m suspicious it’ll go up in the next few years – above inflation – before freezing again before the next election.

I’ll be posting more on both the local council elections in the next few months. Mr Milke can probably expect some comments on his weblog at last; But he certainly deserves credit: I’m hoping the other candidates will do similar and enable us all to put questions to them in a format that’s significantly better than cornering a volunteer who’s just pushing pamphlets through letterboxes and giving them grief.

Ah, the old chestnuts of Religion and Politics. Don’t ever bring them up in the pub, so the saying goes. The reason is you’re probably going to upset, annoy or become enemies-for-life with your former friends and drinking buddies, and that’s no way to behave. In a pub of all places.

Personally, I’m all for a bit more discussion about politics – there’s just not enough talking about the subject, and lets face it football and rugby do get a bit boring after a while. We’re also becoming too reliant on newspapers for our opinions. For me, argumentative atheist that I am (or at least like to think I am), there’s just not enough talking about religion. That old chestnut of ‘proof’ and ‘no self-referential arguments’ is a simple request on my part, but I’m yet to get much more than that that when religion comes up in conversation. I fear, however, that many friends are well versed with my view point and have developed subtle tactics to change the subject (”Isn’t Vista great”, or “I’m thinking of getting an iMac”, or “look at my new phone), or at least haven’t visited this website and/or we’ve not seen each other in ages, so we have plenty of other stuff to go on about…

But I digress. If ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ are considered inappropriate for pub conversation, how come religion and politics are considered appropriate for mixing in our second, revising, chamber of parliament? Our beloved government has today unveiled their proposals for the reform of the House of Lords. In itself a good thing, but the glaring horrendous exemption is that bishops from the Church of England are to keep their seats.

So much for this country being secular in it’s central establishments.

So much for this country being fully democratic in it’s central establishments.

Just so it’s clear, I’ve no problem with men or women running around on Sunday morning wearing silly outfits and even sillier hats, muttering to themselves and a few others about imaginary friends. What folk do in their own time is their business. I just get upset when they start trying to get special treatment, seek exemption from laws and to (try and) push their strange views of the world on others, in particular me, or the vulnerable, or trusting. Like children, in schools, with state money.

But when it comes to the religious professional getting involved in politics, I get rather concerned. So much so in fact, I start coming up with very very simple requests: That if you espouse to speak on behalf of people in our democratic establishments, you demonstrate that by seeking election. Some bright spark many years ago realised that quite a few people seek to speak on behalf of many other people, and that a great way of filtering out the genuine was to ask everybody to say who they wanted to speak on their behalf. Voila! Democracy.

So, by that simple argument and – dare I suggest – egalitarian approach – we get a representative democracy in which views can be expressed fairly. So on that note it’s fair to say I want a fully elected second house. The religious should feel free to apply, and I’d welcome their voice in parliamentary debates if they had such a mandate. Anything less – especially of one particular religion getting preferential treatment over others – is really asking for trouble, either to charges of illegitimacy, corruption, protected interests, or favouritism. As it is, with the Bishops and their silly hats and ermine gowns ensconced in our democracy every other religion will demand equal treatment, and then I fear we’d have no room left for anybody who actually has a democratic mandate!

It’s simple: They all get equal treatment, and – if you actually do “represent” a large enough body of people – you really shouldn’t have trouble getting in. Right?

Roger Darlington drew my attention to an IPPR report arguing for compulsory voting (See theIPPR report here, and also the BBC coverage). As I say in my comment to Roger’s post, I’m not convinced by the case for compulsory voting, just as I’m not convinced for the case of state funding of political parties (not least how do you decide how much to give to which party?).

If it ever comes to fruition though, I very much hope there will be an official way of registering dislike of all options, either by not marking the ballot, or (better still) marking a ballot with a specific “None of the above”. Not voting is not purely “I can’t be bothered”, many people simply dislike the options, feel they’re all as bad as each other, and need a way of registering such views. I’d think this would actually be a good option now, regardless of the matter of compulsion.

Low turnout has many causes, not least that the politicians, as evidenced by this weeks meltdown at cabinet level (4 ministers making headlines when they’d rather not be), seem unable to win (or keep) public trust/confidence, engage with the people convincingly (too much soundbite and media focused politics), and convince an apathetic public that voting is the way to enhance their personal situation, as well as the environment, country and world we share.

I’ve previously argued (see here) that the first-past-the-post voting system is a flawed mechanism, leaving people disenfranchised: We have a Government elected on about a third of the ‘popular vote’: More people didn’t want Blair in power, than did. What message does that send that ‘every vote counts’, especially to those of us stuck in safe seats.

I’ve always voted where I’ve been able to (I’ve only missed one ballot, and that was due to our travels to Australia etc.). Whilst I’ve varied my votes across the entire political spectrum, and feel that voting is an important civic duty, compulsion just doesn’t strike me as the way to solve the lack of engagement in politics.

Compulsion therefore strikes me as a last-ditch and rather desperate act, tackling the symptoms and not the disease.

Readers of my various posts over the course of the recent general election will have realised that I’m a proponent of electoral reform in this country. Therefore, I’m very pleased to see the campaign launched by The Independent has attracted some serious attention See the makemyvoutecount.org.uk website too

The most senior politician of all, Tony Blair, has been asked for his opinion on the growing calls for a review and reform. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm has been somewhat muted since the heady days of the 1997 election campaign manifesto which read:

“We are committed to a referendum on the voting system for the House of Commons. An independent commission on voting systems will be appointed early to recommend a proportional alternative to first-past-the-post”

The 1998 Jenkins commission report (set up by Blair) in 1998 backed a Proportional system. So it’s ironic that Blair should now be saying that “…there are no plans to change the present system.“

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