A New mayor for London

We are fast approaching the time when all Londoners — like myself — will have to vote for a new mayor. So far we have had Ken and Boris in the post.

You'll note I did not include their family names, indeed very rarely to the media find it necessary to to do so either, their personal names being totally sufficient for everyone in London (and many further afield) to know who is being referred to.

The LibDem candidate, generally, has not had this level of name recognition in the past. Vote for Susan! required the seven million or so Londoners to know Ms Kramer better than they probably did. Support Simon! had some level of name recognition for Mr Hughes because of his activities as a fairly well-known London MP, but still he didn't win against the 'popular' Ken and Boris show.

Arguably, the voters in this contest haven't really taken the position of London-wide Mayor as seriously as they ought to; it appears to many to be more of an opportunity for PR stunts than a serious position responsible for setting the policies which enable London to grow and to run the transport and other public services. So maybe, just maybe, it is time for the LibDems to offer up a candidate who has as much of a 'knock-about' reputation as Ken and Boris do?

Lembit!

In his favour he has national name recognition in the same way — and possibly stronger than — Ken and Boris. He has been seen to not take himself too seriously, appearing on television quiz shows and the like, but also has a great record as an MP. His perceived negative, of course, is that unlike Ken and Boris he isn't seen as 'a Londoner'. But then Boris wasn't when he got elected; he'd been pretty much seen as the Henley-on-Thames candidate.

Mike Tuffrey has also thrown his hat into the LibDem selection 'ring', on the grounds of his sterling service to the GLA and right back to GLC days, but whilst he is known in London political circles he has zero name recognition at large and will suffer in the same as Susan Kramer did for that.

It will be interesting to see whether the LibDems will select the candidate more likely to win, or one who is more in keeping with the Party line but certain to lose.

The False Post

I am currently watching recorded coverage of the debate yesterday in the House of Lords regarding the Parliamentary voting system and constituencies bill. Apart from their contributions having changed my mind entirely on the matter of the date for the referendum being concurrent with regional and local elections — I now firmly believe they should not be — there is one matter which continually annoys me; a matter of false advertising.

That is the description of the present electoral system as "First Past the Post".

There is no "post" involved in the current counting of the ballot. The winner is the candidate who has the highest number of ballots in their favour. It isn't that they have a "majority" of the votes; a moment's inspection of the results from any year show clearly that it is a rare candidate who receives over 50% of the ballots in the constituency.

But there is a "Post" in this discussion; the alternative vote — indeed many other methods of determining the result of a ballot — has one. The count commences with a calculation of the number of ballots in their favour which a candidate requires in order to win, in effect what the "winning post" is.

If only one could take such matters to the Advertising Complaints commission …

Where you live

I'm listening to Radio 4's The Westminster Hour at the moment and, unsurprisingly, the discussion is about the recent General Election and where do things go from here. One of those discussions is about PR (Proportional Representation) and the perceived need for the relationship between the citizen and the MP in the form of the Constituency relationship. Some MPs and commentators suggest it is sacrosanct and must never be broken, which some forms of PR (such as AV+ and list) partially or completely do.

But I'm wondering whether that relationship is all it is suggested it is.

At this election the boundary between seats in my area was shifted, and where I had been an voter in the Hampstead & Highgate constituency for the last 24 years I was now voting for an MP in the Holborn & St. Pancras seat. I didn't get any choice in that 'move' — my home hasn't changed. And, as I commented in a recent post on the results, the lines dividing the nation into constituencies are pretty much random; though sometimes they may associate similar areas together they are just as likely to separate one area into individual, illogical parts.

So is the 'Constituency' all it is said it is? If you know which Member of Parliament is representing you (or, indeed, which Members plural) then does there need to be a direct relationship between them and where you live? Does where you work actually matter more, for example?

In London there are 'constituency' members of the London Assembly, and 'top-up' or 'London-wide' members, and residents of London can go to either 'type' of Assembly Member as they choose. Similar arrangements apply to other elected bodies in some areas.

So would Parliament fall apart if the method of allocating new MPs based upon the number — and proportion — of votes received changed from the present (and clearly outmoded) method?

Somehow I don't think most of us would even notice the change.

Random lines

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a fairly well-defined entity. A really big island, lots of smaller ones, bits of another big one, and spots in between. The UK Parliament — located at Westminster — serves as the representative body of this entity. 650 Members of Parliament form that body, drawn from all points of 'GB&NI'.

But how are they drawn from that area? As we saw on May 6th it is a matter of random lines drawn across the countryside, dividing populations into zones of allegedly similar sizes with each of those zones returning an MP based on which candidate receives the highest number of votes, no matter whether more people voted against them rather than for them.

These lines, in some areas, sometimes delineate cities or towns in a meaningful way, but even then they can have the effect of disenfranchising the majority of a population. One of those things once called gerrymandering. Take Oxford, for example. In Oxford East the Conservative candidate — Nicola Blackwood — received 23,906 votes, and won the seat from LibDem Evan Harris who gained 23,730 votes — 176 fewer. Richard Stevens for Labour only took 10.6% at 5,999 votes. Next door in Oxford West the results were in the reverse order: Labour's Andrew Smith won with 42.5% of the vote — 21,938 — to Steve Goddard's 17,357 LibDem votes and the Tory Edward Argar brought up the rear with 9,727 votes.

So that random line splitting Oxford in two resulted in one Conservative MP and one Labour MP being elected to the 2010 Parliament. But who drew that line? You take the total vote across both constituencies and whilst Labour support reaches 27,937 and Conservative 33,633 the Liberal Democrat total leads the way with 41,087 — substantially higher than either of the other two main parties, yet they didn't achieve any representation in Parliament.

In York, there are also two seats, York Inner and York Outer, and Outer elected a Tory MP and Inner went to Labour, yet the totals for the city were Conservative: 35,034 LibDems: 30,918 and Labour lowest on 27,681. Logic, therefore, would suggest that the City of York should have elected one Conservative and one Liberal Democrat, yet it didn't.

How can these results ever be right?

There are hundreds of similar examples across the nation; very few MPs received over 50% of the vote in their constituency giving them a real personal mandate. And this is before we account for the thousands of people in Birmingham, Sheffield, Maidstone, Manchester, Hackney, Islington and elsewhere who were unable to even vote despite queueing for hours, often in the rain, to exercise their democratic right to be counted. Whilst one would hope there was no intent to disenfranchise the electorate like this, it seems that whilst the law says a polling station must close at 10pm there is nothing that says how many booths must be in that station, or how fast the staff must work through the queue.

I've had a permanent postal vote now for some fifteen years and, whilst it was noted yesterday that votes had 'gone astray' in York and one doesn't know that the ballot paper I sent via the Royal Mail definitively arrived at the count, I trust that it did. And all elections — even where you stick the paper with the 'X' on in the box yourself — is about trust. People place their trust in the system that their vote will be counted. They place their trust that the result will be meaningful. They place their trust in the representative nature of our electoral system; that we don't operate a delegated authority where an MP only represents those who voted for them, but expect that the constituency MP will represent everyone in that area.

Are we right to do so?

When I first moved to Highgate I joined the local Labour Party, indeed I became branch secretary and later Womens' Officer for the Constituency. Before that I'd had jobs where to be seen as politically active was very much frowned upon. When the leadership election took place which returned Tony Blair I left. Then, about ten years ago I joined the Liberal Democrats and was very active with them, supporting friends in elections, trying to get selected for a seat myself, and serving as the Chair of the Party's GBLT group. At the moment though I'm not a member of any political party. But I am still a member of Make Votes Count and a very firm believer in the principle of proportional representation; that the MPs we elect should be from political parties in a broadly similar ratio to the number of people who voted for those parties.

Yesterday, this country elected representatives from a range of political persuasions to the House of Commons. The numbers of each party were, very clearly, not fair or a reasonable response to the voters' intentions, and there is no clear path to Government. I joked on Twitter that — given the earlier statement by the Governor of the Bank of England that whichever party formed the next government the nation's response to the massive cuts they would have to introduce would keep them out of power for a generation — they'd all succeeded in not getting elected.

Thing is, any coalition Tory-LibDem, Labour-LibDem, even Labour-Tory, would not reflect the intention of the electorate. They voted and, for better or for worse, we have a 'hung' Parliament. It isn't for those elected to decide amongst themselves who should take power, it is for us — the Nation's people — to expect them to all work together, to get this country back on its feet in the face of financial adversity. The newly arrived Parliament needs to set aside their differences and work — informally — together.

It is time for a national Government, not a fix-up.

Expenses and Allowances - the bubble bursts

The major topic of conversation in the UK lately has — very unusually — been politics, or more precisely the behaviour of the people charged with performing the representative democracy at Westminster. The better question, in my opinion, about the alleged abuses by MPs and Peers of the allowances system is what was actually wrong about the system and why it happened. In every job I've had where I was refunded for expenses I incurred whilst doing that job, the essence was that I shouldn't be left out of pocket; I should not be penalised for working outside my usual hours or at other locations to my company office. Where the Inland Revenue was concerned, payments to me had to relate to extra costs incurred "wholly and solely" on behalf and because of the work I did. So where did MPs go wrong, indeed did they? Expenses can be organised as 'expenses' — where the refund is exactly the amount of the extra cost — or 'allowances' — where a set figure is paid from which the individual covers the related cost. Often a job may pay an 'evening meal allowance' or a 'per diem' and if the individual pays more they can't claim the extra but sometimes they may not spend it all and keep the difference. The allowance system is easier for an employer to operate as it is faster and simpler. Members of the House of Commons appear to have had a mixture of these options. The 'Additional Costs Allowance' came in during Thacher's government years, in part because the full salary amount recommended by the independent pay review board was not then authorised. Then, as has happened a number of times since, the PM of the day decided that the population at large would think MPs overpaid, so instead the ACA was introduced as a way to semi-hide the overall increase of payments to MPs. MPs haven't "set" their own salaries, they were only asked to "accept" the recommendation-reduced-by-the-PM figure. Recently one MP commented that MP salaries were said to be comparable to a typical GP, but has now dropped well behind. A few years later and it was supposed to be comparable to that of a Head Teacher at a secondary school, but again that teacher is now paid well above the rate of an MP. "We get the MPs we deserve" is, indeed, a truism. But we should also accept that they have a serious job to do, and that they have that job to do not only in the Chamber of the House, but also in the committee rooms, and Westminster Hall, and Portcullis House, and their constituencies. The MPs — and would-be MPs — I know all work an effective 7-day working week, of far more than the typical 8-hour working day. As such they should receive a sensible rate for the job. To suggest they shouldn't would mean a return to only those with private incomes being able to put themselves forward, and that would be a great loss to us all. The media has now covered this issue for two weeks, and whilst it is clearly important it has detracted from external, and more important, issues. Possibly Labour are even happy about this reduction in questions about their handling of the economy? With the removal of the address and other information from the data that was due to be published it would not have become clear how many people were, clearly, 'on the fiddle' re 'flipping' on homes and taking the proverbial, so The Telegraph is to be thanked for their actions, illegal or not there was clearly a public interest defence. Statements about claims being "by the rules" or "approved by the authorities/fees office" are trying to weasel out of getting found out of, basically, taking the p***. If someone is on benefit they can only get Housing payments based on the average costs in the area, not get whatever they ask for. There is almost an argument for building an 'MPs apartment block' within the sound of the division bell and funding only that. Australia have something similar in Canberra, so it is clearly workable. If someone wants to live elsewhere then the costs are up to them, not the tax-payer. It is difficult to know exactly how widespread the abuse has been as the published data is, not surprisingly, that which makes the best editorial. Clearly though there are some deep questions over the attitudes displayed by what might be a majority of members, across all parties. One could argue that where money is 'repaid' then they've then received tax-free loans at the expense of the taxpayer. The issue is considerably more complex than just the amounts of money involved. For all MPs it is unclear to me that new selection/adoption meetings by the (usually, comparatively) small number of activists involved will make an substantial difference (other than costs). Similar with calls for an immediate General Election; without all the evidence getting published and considered it is too soon.

Is recycling a good thing?

Twenty years ago a political advert appeared on billboards around the UK which went on — allegedly — to win the election a year later for the Conservatives.

Now, the BBC and others are reporting that accountants BDO Story Hayward have done some research for the TUC and reckon that one in every 56 UK businesses will fail this year, a 59% rise on 2008. Further, the British Chambers of Commerce last week suggested that UK unemployment could reach 3.2 million — or just over 10% of the workforce — by the second half of next year.

I can't help wondering whether the Tories would do well to just recycle the old poster and not spend money on new advertising …