Local Election Summary
Yesterday saw about a third of UK local council seats up for election. For those of you unfamiliar with the UK electoral system, we have 2 kinds of elections: local elections and general elections.
In General Elections the country is divided into local constituencies, and each constituency votes for a member of parliament to represent it in the House of Commons. The leader of the party with the most MPs becomes the Prime Minister.
In Local Elections, the country is divided into local Councils, each of which has multiple seats. When the clear majority of seats of a local council are held by a single party, that party is said to "control" the local council. Many councils are consequently in the "No Overall Control" bracket. These councils form the local government, dealing with local issues like school budgets, refuse collection, town planning etc. The local government has no authority over laws as passed by MPs, but does have local power in some issues.
Yesterday, some 176 councils were undergoing elections, with approx 4,000 seats between them. For comparison, there are 22,000 council seats in total across the country.
There are times when being proved right makes you unhappy. This is one of them. Most of the councils have now declared their results (enough for fairly accurate percentages anyway) and we see the BNP winning more new council seats than the Liberal Democrats. In these seats, the BNP previously had just 5 councillors. Now they have (at least) 20; before the elections they had just 20 across the whole country, and it didnt take long for them to happily declare they had doubled their number of councillors. Admittedly, that's just 0.5% of the number of council seats up for grabs here. But it's still enough to worry me, if for no other reason than the simple fact that this number is disproportionately small for lesser parties. But as I mentioned previously, what really worries me is the lack of anxiety over such a group increasing in power.
My claim about the disproportionate result above is founded on the UK election system being biased towards the two "main" parties, and naturally as the ones in power they don't want to update the system that favours them. Here's a simple example:
On the basis of results in 700 key wards, the BBC is projecting the national share of vote at a general election would be as follows:
CON 40%, LIB DEM 27%, LAB 26%, OTH 7%. (link)
And yet the percentage of seats won looks like this:
CON 43%, LIB DEM 22%, LAB 30%, OTH 5%
i.e. the two main parties have 7% more seats than they have % of votes. Notably, despite having fewer votes, Labour have (significantly) more seats than the Lib Dems. In general elections, this tends to be even more biased - in a similar way to the number of councils controlled...
CON 39%, LAB 15%, LIB DEM 7%, OTH 2% (no overall control in 37%)
In a general election, the NOC councils would HAVE to go one way or another (even a 1-vote majority would win) and consequently the CON/LAB percentages rise even higher still. This is generally because most areas tend to be either pro-CON or pro-LAB, with LD and OTH supporters spread all across the country.
So despite having more voters than labour, the Lib Dems control just HALF the number of councils, whilst the tories (with just a third more voters) controls over 5 times as many. Democratic? Representative of the people's will? I think not.
I might comment about the firing of Clarke despite Brown supporting him. This topic and its hypocrisy and U-turns needs a post of all its own.
In General Elections the country is divided into local constituencies, and each constituency votes for a member of parliament to represent it in the House of Commons. The leader of the party with the most MPs becomes the Prime Minister.
In Local Elections, the country is divided into local Councils, each of which has multiple seats. When the clear majority of seats of a local council are held by a single party, that party is said to "control" the local council. Many councils are consequently in the "No Overall Control" bracket. These councils form the local government, dealing with local issues like school budgets, refuse collection, town planning etc. The local government has no authority over laws as passed by MPs, but does have local power in some issues.
Yesterday, some 176 councils were undergoing elections, with approx 4,000 seats between them. For comparison, there are 22,000 council seats in total across the country.
There are times when being proved right makes you unhappy. This is one of them. Most of the councils have now declared their results (enough for fairly accurate percentages anyway) and we see the BNP winning more new council seats than the Liberal Democrats. In these seats, the BNP previously had just 5 councillors. Now they have (at least) 20; before the elections they had just 20 across the whole country, and it didnt take long for them to happily declare they had doubled their number of councillors. Admittedly, that's just 0.5% of the number of council seats up for grabs here. But it's still enough to worry me, if for no other reason than the simple fact that this number is disproportionately small for lesser parties. But as I mentioned previously, what really worries me is the lack of anxiety over such a group increasing in power.
My claim about the disproportionate result above is founded on the UK election system being biased towards the two "main" parties, and naturally as the ones in power they don't want to update the system that favours them. Here's a simple example:
On the basis of results in 700 key wards, the BBC is projecting the national share of vote at a general election would be as follows:
CON 40%, LIB DEM 27%, LAB 26%, OTH 7%. (link)
And yet the percentage of seats won looks like this:
CON 43%, LIB DEM 22%, LAB 30%, OTH 5%
i.e. the two main parties have 7% more seats than they have % of votes. Notably, despite having fewer votes, Labour have (significantly) more seats than the Lib Dems. In general elections, this tends to be even more biased - in a similar way to the number of councils controlled...
CON 39%, LAB 15%, LIB DEM 7%, OTH 2% (no overall control in 37%)
In a general election, the NOC councils would HAVE to go one way or another (even a 1-vote majority would win) and consequently the CON/LAB percentages rise even higher still. This is generally because most areas tend to be either pro-CON or pro-LAB, with LD and OTH supporters spread all across the country.
So despite having more voters than labour, the Lib Dems control just HALF the number of councils, whilst the tories (with just a third more voters) controls over 5 times as many. Democratic? Representative of the people's will? I think not.
I might comment about the firing of Clarke despite Brown supporting him. This topic and its hypocrisy and U-turns needs a post of all its own.