Scottish Councils – May 3^rd – 7^th 2012.

It seems  a little curious to be thinking and writing about , say , who becomes convenor of Clackmannanshire Council [  8 SNP ; 8 Labour; 1 Independent ; 1 Conservative ] where they might have to draw lots to decide on which man or woman assumes that office. Almost simultaneously , Greeks and the French are voting in ways that might determine the future of the Eurozone  , and with that our next 5-10 economic years in Scotland the wider UK .

That kind of choice  [ not Clackmannanshire  alone,  obviously ] is  what has filled our Saturday , Sunday and Monday papers and news broadcasts  here in Scotland to a greater extent than the implications of those elections in France, Greece, [ and Serbia and Armenia] so it’s worth giving those local elections a bit more thought  .

I am not going to sift my way through the detailed analysis of voting figures in this ward.... of that council ... and how many first preference votes were secured by the Green party where I live ; though  quite a lot actually and he topped the poll on 1^st preferences.

That kind of analysis  is not my favourite cup of tea.

I can do it ; however:

A ] Others have already done it  ; and I’d recommend the following for some fine detailed analysis

http://burdzeyeview.wordpress.com/

http://lallandspeatworrier.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.gerryhassan.com/category/blog/

B] The prime data available is still in PDF form and I object to using a calculator to add figures up when a range of Excel files will soon [should soon ?]  be available to us all  .

C] Diving down  through  several levels of analysis [ as happens when you try and  calculate on the 7^th or 8^th stage of STV transfer  ] sometimes seems to me to run the danger of overstating the considered  deliberate choices of the ‘rational elector ‘. There is some marvellous material for this in the various LPW reviews of different Glasgow wards , with some entertaining byways . So we can see that  some  ‘Unionist’ votes transferred to the Greens and the SNP , and Gail Sheridan of Solidarity picked up Conservative transfer votes !

D] Such fine grain detailed scrutiny  can also lead to over indulgence  in ‘ angel dancing analysis’. So , for example , the suggestion that the SNP had variable success in their ‘voter management  strategy ‘ [ and how West Wing is that phrase ?] appears , on the face of it , to have some weight . It is among the reasons cited for SNP Edinburgh group leader Cardownie just scraping in,  and why former Depute Lord Provost Rob Munn  failed to be elected and his colleague McVey was. That latter defeat  is also attributed by some to the ‘alphabet ‘ problem in ballot papers . This strikes me as an even thinner argument ; we are not choosing between Aristotle and Zarathusa are we?.   Here’s a thought ; maybe in a city where local issues [ aka:  the trams ] were important , the voters attached most blame to the Lib Dems but also remembered the SNP group involvement as well – particularly in Leith which now gets all the disruption but none of the trams .

Elections by STV - Learning  new rules of the game  ?

So anyway …some further random observations about these elections …………

It seems that parties are slower to learn about how electoral systems work than are voters .

Back in 1999-2000 I chaired a committee that looked at ‘Renewing Local Democracy’ in Scotland , and most of our recommendations were legislated for in the Local Governance [Scotland ] Act . Top of the list was the introduction of the Single Transferable Vote for council elections and this was the one  issue that divided the members of the committee as the minority opposed the STV recommendation   . 

One of the reasons why the majority of us recommended STV,  rather than the system employed in the elections for the Parliament was that we thought it a system that provided greater equity of status to different representatives than did the constituency /list system [AMS] used at Holyrood [ and Cardiff].

It  was also apparent  at that point that there was likely to be a need for both parties and electors to be educated and informed about different forms of voting system than the long standing ‘X’ plurality system .  I recall thinking , at the first elections to the Scottish Parliament , that only the Green Party and the Scottish Socialist Party  had thought about how the  new system worked, others followed on at later elections  . A lot of voters got that :  indeed as a I also remember from that time it was often said that or Labour voters in Lothian  it made the choice obvious: Labour in the constituency – Robin Harper on the list . In Glasgow , ditto the constituency , Tommy Sheridan on the list .

 Even in 2011 , the  Labour Party still appeared to struggle with understanding how the electoral system worked – or still denied that it might work in the way it did in May last year . With one exception , Sarah Boyack in Edinburgh and simultaneously on the Lothian list, leading Labour candidates  were solely nominated in constituencies and those on the list were lesser lights in the party . Result : a self-decapitation strategy by former Labour Ministers that could have been avoided if Labour had followed the logic of the election system it legislated for in creating the Parliament .

This time round,  in the 2^nd local government elections held under STV, most electors seem to have got the hang of it . Papers were still spoilt inadvertently [ and of course some deliberately ] by using ‘X’ but not as many as some had feared .

There also appears to be some  evidence that most parties have learnt how the system might work best for them . Sometimes, of course , they still appear to   deny the logic of the system they attempt to work through,  as we can see this time round in a few places .

The first prize for electoral nouse must surely go the SNP campaign in Dundee    ; 15 councillors needed for a majority ; 16 candidates ; 16 elected. That’s a double top by any standards  .

Elsewhere,  both the SNP and Labour parties were trapped  by their own rhetorical assertions of being ‘winners ‘  into nominating too many candidates. This was  certainly in contrast to the last time round , when the SNP generally nominated too few candidates  . The intriguing question – relevant to both parties – is whether where &  when  they did this it was a  consciously self-destructive course of action  , or that they  simply didn’t work out what the implications  might be. Chest beating can be  an amusing activity  for observers to watch but as a political strategy it lacks  something .

Are elections  really a battle ?

In a nice column in The  Scotsman 7^th May  , Lesley Riddoch discusses and criticises the obsession that  both the major parties in Scotland parties have with ‘winning ‘ . Indeed the broadcast media this weekend  have been  filled with ever more complex constructions of what ‘winning ‘ might mean in such a distributed and semi-proportional system of election . For my money the best that can be said is that the elections were  a score draw for the two biggest parties  with even the monstering the Lib Dems  received in some areas  [Edinburgh; Aberdeen & Fife ] not repeated to the same degree  elsewhere [ e.g. the Highland Region].

But if they are a battle ?

I have taught Strategic Management in HE for a number of years . If you do that you get to  know that in almost every textbook , the early pages contain references to the strategy of war usually referencing Sun Tzu as a highly implausible model for modern management  . I’m not a fan of the warfare analogies but feel licensed to muse upon them in relation to these elections  by the repetitive headlines that the Sunday Herald gave to it’s election review on the 6^th  . “The battle for Glasgow …the battle for Edinburgh …the battle for the Highlands “.

Even before that I had been thinking about how the battle and warfare analogies applied to the positioning of these elections ..and remember  not all battles are the same .

Take the Lib Dems for example. A classic example of an attempted political ‘ defence in depth ‘ . In a number of  contests  they ran a smaller number of candidates than they had elected last time round  ,  for example Aberdeen , Edinburgh , Aberdeenshire [ I think ] hoping to huddle down with one candidate in most wards and hope the storm passed them by and hoping they’d survive . Some did ; some didn’t.

In a swathe of West coast councils Labour and the SNP were in a Viking ‘shield wall’ battle ; pushing and shoving at each other and hoping their side could push harder . It worked for Labour in the 4 where they got a majority,  and in Falkirk both shield walls stayed just where they started . It worked for the SNP – just – in  two of the Ayrshires, including the site of the Battle of Largs , and almost in Clackmannan and Midlothian .

Elsewhere , the SNP seemed to be following something of a ‘Haig’ approach . Blow the whistle ; kick a football; troops over the top; some of them may get through; others we mourn and bury .

......and after the battle ?

I think the point that could be taken from the piece by  Lesley Riddoch  is the difficulty that all parties can face ,  in respect of each other and in addressing electors , when at the end of what they describe as fierce battle they find they have to work together in some way – for a fixed period of 5 years and in  abody that cannot be dissolved  .

Now admittedly,  councils actually don’t have to make as many genuinely disputed  decisions as they claim they have to ; they can leave [ delegate ]  a lot to officials and  just leave the machinery of government rolling on . But in the current climate they are going to have to make decisions , and some hard ones.

Remember , in 23 councils there isn’t a party with 50% + 1 of the councillors elected .
How they manage over the next 5 years will be very interesting – and in some cases surprising  and it will be interesting to see if they do better/different than the 6 majority councils we have now.