Do you live in a Rotten Borough?

With this year’s county council elections only a few weeks away, we’ve undertaken new analysis that has revealed the parlous state of local democracy in England and Wales.
 
Evidence shows 21 million people are now living in the local government equivalent of ‘One Party States’ – with single parties holding undeserved supermajorities, and other parties incapable of providing viable opposition.
 
One hundred and four councils in England and Wales now have a single party holding in excess of 75% of council seats. In every case this is wholly out of proportion to the support the governing parties enjoy locally – and has given these administrations carte blanche on official business.
 
Of course all three major parties have ‘One Party States’ – which include both urban and rural authorities. 

ERS has defined ‘One Party States’ as authorities with a single party holding over 75% of council seats, leaving opposition incapable of providing any checks of council decision making. With a 2/3 alone majority parties have the ability to overturn standing orders, and change the way the councils are run. We’ve allowed the possibility of some party rebels offering pseudo-opposition to the one party state in their area.
 
Any decent democracy requires a viable opposition. But the 21 million living in local One Party States don’t have that luxury. These authorities enjoy power without real accountability – and council taxpayers deserve better.
 
We can’t rely on governing parties to keep themselves in check. Our councils need a critical mass of opposition for basic scrutiny to work – it’s what the public keep voting for. But our broken voting system is handing out fake supermajorities to parties out of all proportion to their real support.
 

The coming elections will barely make a dent on these One Party States, and it’s why they breed complacency. When councillors in Slough and Tunbridge Wells voted themselves pay increases they knew they were untouchable.
 
Quite simply no councillor and no council should be beyond the reach of voters.
 
It’s time for England and Wales to follow the lead of Scotland, and abandon First Past the Post for a fair voting system in local elections. Since they made the move in 2007 most of Scotland is still run by single party governments – but all councils now have vibrant opposition.
 
Fair votes have made Scotland’s One Party fiefdoms a thing of the past. There are lessons here for anyone who believes local democracy in England and Wales should be better.
 
It’s time to make the change: the solution is right in front of us. Fair votes in Scotland has worked. The same single transferable vote (STV) system the Scots use could offer Welsh and English voters so much more.
 
If you’ve been failed by local democracy we want to hear from you. Visit our Rotten Boroughs page and tell us your story…
 

The One Party States of England and Wales
 
Full data by region and party is available for download here…
 
The Lib Dems One Party States

Labour’s One Party States

Conservative One Party States

Why 32,000 people will be denied a vote in May

On Thursday 6 May, 27 county councils and 8 unitary authorities in England and Anglesey in Wales will hold elections. Sadly, they give us yet another example of the woeful state of local government.

The Electoral Reform Society is determined to lead the debate on how we build a better local democracy in Britain. The reality is that much of what occurs at local authority level impacts on the day-to-day lives of tens of millions of people. Their activities are therefore important.

Let’s take just one element of what makes a good local democracy – the way representatives are elected.

We’re been looking through the list of nominees for all the council seats as they are being released.

All the usual problems with the First Past the Post voting system are there for all to see.

This morning I did an interview with the BBC about the situation in Wiltshire. So let’s consider what’s happening there.

Apart from the fact that the majority of voters who do not support the dominant party in Wiltshire (the Conservatives) will not see fair representation of their vote, there’s a group of people who are even worse off.

That’s the 32,000 people who don’t get a vote at all. That’s right, an election with no vote. They don’t have to wait until May to find out who their councillor will be – we know now.

FPTP produces many Uncontested Seats, where there is only one candidate. These fiefdoms are strongly defended by parties who manage to engineer them, but what about the voters? The idea that 100% of those 32,000 people support one party is laughable. But small, single member wards often lead people to think ‘why bother’ when a dominant party is guaranteed to win, regardless of whether they have a majority of the vote or not.

There’s fair criticism to be made of the other parties for not standing, particularly Labour who are meant to be pursuing a One Nation approach to politics. The fact that they and the Liberal Democrats aren’t even going through the motions of putting up paper candidates speaks volumes about how politically rotten these boroughs have become.

Every vote must have value if we are to build a better local democracy. In the case of Wiltshire, the dominant party enjoys 45.3% of the vote, but wins nearly two thirds of the seats. That’s despite almost 55% of the community voting for other parties. There are similar examples to this in Labour and Liberal Democrat strongholds – it’s not particular to one party.

Thankfully there is a solution to these problems!

Scotland has now successfully held two rounds of local elections using a fairer voting system – and the results stand in stark contrast to what we are seeing in England and Wales. Using the Single Transferable Vote has abolished the phenomenon of Uncontested Seats (down from 61 wards in the last FPTP election to zero in the two STV elections). Voters get more candidates to choose from and they have significantly increased the chances of someone they vote for getting elected.

It’s only one piece in the puzzle of building a better local democracy. But the advent of the county council elections serve as a timely reminder that a change in the voting system can lead to a change in the way politics is done at community level.

You can find out more about the difference STV has made in Scottish Local Elections here
 

An Ordinary Election

Andrew Burns, Labour Leader of Edinburgh City Council
 
On Thursday the 3rd May 2012, I was elected for the fourth time to represent a Ward within the City of Edinburgh Council area. It was a real privilege to be given local residents’ trust once again, and I’ll do all I can to repay that over my term.

That election was the second time that Edinburgh – and the rest of Scotland – used the proportional, Single Transferable Vote (STV) system to elect its Local Councillors. The first two elections I took part in (in 1999 and 2003) were under the First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) system.

And by 2003, the last time I was elected under FPTP, I was part of a ruling Council Administration that had 55% of the seats – therefore an outright majority – on only 27% of the votes!

Being partisan for a second, that was obviously great, but as a democrat I found it pretty near impossible to defend.
 

 
So – as someone who has always been a long-standing supporter of fair votes – I was delighted to eventually be elected by that proportional system in 2007. It led to 5-Parties being represented on the Council and a much fairer balance of Councillors between those Parties. I say that, even though it led to the following 5-years, being years in Opposition for my Party and I, that’s democracy!
 
Last year the use of STV really has become quite, quite normal for electors in Edinburgh. I witnessed no difficulties amongst voters using the system, and everyone (literally) I have spoken to understands perfectly well how to cast their votes … after all, it really is as simple as 1,2,3!
 
Not only was re-elected, but I’m now leading a Labour-SNP Coalition which will help run the City of Edinburgh for the next 4-years. On a personal level, I’m obviously delighted.
 
But, much more importantly, as a democrat I can easily defend last year’s results as 5-parties once again have their fair share of councillors in accordance with the support they received from the voting public.
 
Thursday the 3rd May 2012 really was an ordinary election, in every way.

2012 Scottish Local Government Elections, 3 May 2012, Report & Analysis, by Professor John Curtice is available for download here…
 

STV’s Second Outing

In 2007 Scotland began using the Single Transferable Vote (STV) for local government elections. The First Past the Post system – once used for all public elections in mainland Britain – was consigned to history.
 

May 2012 marked the second outing for the system, and the first since elections to the Scottish Parliament were ‘decoupled’.

Today we launch our report into that election. We have sought to understand what that change has meant for Scotland’s voters, to see how the public and the parties have adapted, and if expectations – of both supporters and critics alike – have been borne out.
 

The first STV vote clearly saw massive changes in how elections and local democracy worked in Scotland.
 

Voter choice more than doubled, uncontested seats became a thing of the past, and the rotten boroughs that once plagued Scotland were undone.
 

2012 has shown modest, but measurable improvements. What we are witnessing is evidence that both voters and parties are becoming more adept at making the most of the possibilities presented by STV. We are seeing a new system bedding in.
 

Fair Votes in action – click for a larger infographic

But, as expected, the first local elections since decoupling did see a dramatic drop in voter participation. Turnout in this election was 39.1% – a 14% drop from the last election. That figure may remain head and shoulders above the 31% that turned out in English authorities that year, but that will be of little comfort to anyone with concerns about the health of our democracy.

STV in Scotland has not been a silver bullet for all the ills of local government. Only modest gains on gender balance mean councils will remain “male, pale, and stale” until we see real progress from parties on candidate selection.

Yes, more action is needed but the system is ensuring that more voices are being heard on more councils than ever before.

There are clearly lessons for those in England and Wales who believe their local democracy can and should be better.

2012 Scottish Local Government Elections, 3 May 2012, Report & Analysis, by Professor John Curtice is available for download here…

The New Politics of Coalition Government

Here we find ourselves, trapped in the dreaded hung parliament scenario, and despite some nightmarish predictions from our tabloid fortune tellers—economic collapse, societal breakdown, nuclear apocalypse—things seem to be ticking along okay.

Since the result became clear, the leaderships of all three major parties acted in uncommonly diplomatic fashion to reach a workable outcome. While David Cameron and Nick Clegg were busy hammering out a coalition arrangement, outgoing Chancellor Alistair Darling was meeting with European counterparts to agree a swift response to the Greek debt crisis. It was hardly the politics of inertia.

By the time Gordon Brown had handed over to his successor last Tuesday night, the public and press were already warming to the new politics of compromise and cooperation. The Tories are spinning the coalition as a “government in the national interest”, which seems a curiously empty boast until you consider that it is the first government since the Second World War that can claim in good conscience to represent a majority of British voters. Nearly sixty per cent of votes were cast for Conservative or Liberal Democrat candidates on 6^th May. It is right that we have a government that broadly reflects this. That is why on Sunday Lib Dem party activists recognised the coalition’s legitimacy, striking the appropriate note of cautious optimism.

But this was a freak result. Under our “First Past the Post” system of elections, hung parliaments are an aberration. Had the Labour Party polled as many votes as the Conservatives, they would easily have won another clear majority of seats in the Commons. We can safely ignore Tory claims that reducing the size of parliament or re-jigging constituency boundaries will somehow restore fairness to our elections. They are wrong, and this standpoint has been repeatedly disproved by academics across the political spectrum. First Past the Post will always deliver freakish results.

If we want “big tent” government in the national interest, election after election, we need to fundamentally reform the voting system. We need a voting system which affords each party the number of seats it deserves. The Liberal Democrats polled 23% of votes at this election, but won only 8.7% of seats. Under their proposed system, the Single Transferable Vote, they would have won roughly 25% of seats. The Single Transferable Vote retains a link between MPs and constituencies, unlike the oft-criticised system of pure proportionality we use to elect MEPs, and allows voters to choose favoured candidates from each party. It has been used in Ireland for the past eighty years and is popular with Irish voters.

Over the years, many arguments have been put forward for the preservation of Westminster’s Victorian voting system. Some of them have been absurd, such as Daniel Kawczynski MP’s claim that we don’t need it because his constituents don’t care (a ComRes poll suggests 62% of Britons would support a proportional voting system). But others, such as those tendered by the respected Conservative academic Lord Norton of Louth bear closer inspection.

Lord Norton argues that a hung parliament is a politician’s parliament, where policy is the result of post-election bargaining. He argues also that smaller parties like the Liberal Democrats get to “call the tune”. And he contends that far from enjoying a majority mandate, the present coalition actually commands the definitive support of not one single voter (there being no Con-Lib option on the ballot paper).

In light of recent developments, we can put Lord Norton’s arguments under the microscope. Do they stand up to scrutiny? Let’s start with the post-election bargaining that is a feature of any coalition system. Aside from the rushed decision to introduce a 55 per cent dissolution resolution, the coalition agreement thrashed out by the two parties clearly takes as its basis the two party manifestos pitched to the British public before the election. All the policies announced so far have either been Conservative or Lib Dem manifesto commitments, or compromises lying somewhere between the two. They have not been conjured out of thin air.

As for the accusation that the Liberal Democrats have called the tune, we only have to look at the make-up of the new coalition to see that the Conservatives are the senior partners. Indeed, the proportion of Lib Dem cabinet positions roughly reflects the ratio of Lib Dem to Conservative votes. This is how coalition governments are formed across Europe—in places like Germany, where Angela Merkel heads a similar blue-yellow cabinet, as well as in the Low Countries and Scandinavia.

The only of Norton’s arguments to have some merit is his contention that First Past the Post makes it easier to kick out an unpopular government. But this is because single-party governments tend to be elected on such piffling mandates in the first place. Anyway, in Germany, where a very proportional system is in place, regime change happens about as frequently as it does in the UK.

Thanks to their foresight and equanimity, David Cameron and Nick Clegg look set to dispel many of the myths surrounding the issue of proportional representation. We might see that coalition governments can get things done. We might find that consensual politics can be decisive politics. And, after an era of presidential “sofa governments”, stage managed by the spin doctors, we can hope for a return to the collegiate parliamentarism of yesteryear. But without a reformed voting system this will remain the exception that proves the rule.

A version of this article appeared first on Left Foot Forward