“Conservatives are bold,  Blair and Brown run away when they see me, but not these fools, they know how to relate to others.”

How long before mydavidcameron.com has an image of an airbrushed Mugabe and the slogan “Vote for these fools”? It would be up there already if I had the Photoshop skills.

Like I said, I do like Jamelia, but I couldn’t believe she thought Margaret Thatcher was on the side of the working class. Mind you, she was not even nine years old when Thatcher left office so maybe she can be excused that one, but she should stick to Buzzcocks in the future.

I did like David Lammy’s point about the Westminster village though.  I think he is right that parliament often seems to be speaking to itself rather to the general public.  With all the arcane and archaic rituals and protocols there it really is exclusive, in the sense that it excludes everybody else.  It really could do with being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.  Even getting it into the 20th Century would be a start: ditching things like robes, wigs, men in tights, and impenetrable forms of address would help.

My favourite comment had to be Rory Bremner’s one about the Tories and Lib Dems insisting that the leaders’ debates are not broadcast in 3D because their leaders are only two-dimensional.

What about Rory though?   He did touch on the difficulty of his job doing impressions when politicans have less personality, but there are other problems for him.  The increasing number of black, asian and female MPs really doesn’t help him and then there is the age thing…   the show featured three MPs he would have a real problem impersonating.

After the next election I think Bremner is going to have to rely a lot more on his cricket commentator impersonations.

Normally I am at work of course, so I didn’t know how many people to expect for a weekday daytime session, but I thought that we had a decent crowd – nine people in Broadfield.  Maybe it is always that good, or maybe the weather encouraged everyone to come out.  Or maybe the recent encouraging opinion polls have whipped up the enthusiasm of members.

On the minus side, I think the weather also encouraged all the residents to go out as well because hardly anybody was in, but it was a nice 90-minute walk if nothing else.

The move, backed without a vote, comes amid fears voters could wake up the day after an election not knowing who won…

Well, since the last two general elections have seen turnouts of about 60%, would it be reasonable to assume that at least approximately 40% of the electorate can’t care that much about the result?

Concern has been expressed on all sides of the house about a growing trend by electoral returning officers, for their own convenience and nobody else’s, to defer the counting of most of the constituencies, which have always been counted in the past on the night of the election, until the following day,

That is a bit snarky. I don’t automatically sympathise with returning officers, but I would have thought it was not their own convenience that was uppermost in their minds but the logistical challenge of finding enough suitable people to carry out the count properly – given that most of the best-qualified people are probably spending 12 hours manning polling stations and so  are likely to be starting the count after being awake for about 18 hours – which might account for the number of counting mistakes and consequent recounts.

By the time they gave up the count in Crawley last time round the tellers were so shagged out they could barely count their own fingers.

Aren’t all these people so desperate to ’save election night’ just saying they don’t like change?   When you see the amount of resistance to a fairly trivial change like delaying the start of the count by eight to ten hours in some places you wonder how we are ever going to get any sort of agreement on any substantial changes.

Here is an alternative – delay all the counts until the next day, then you would still get the ‘event’ of all constituencies counting at the same time.  It might even be more of an event because those huge highlands constituencies might get a chance to start at the same time as compact urban areas.

Some of the speakers at the meeting argued that AV would favour other parties and was therefore a bad thing, while others argued that it would favour Labour and was therefore a good thing, although the debate did drift into proportional representation, which is a different matter altogether.

I am always amazed at the vehemence with which many members of Labour attack the whole principle of PR.  I can’t think of any way to attack PR without having to admit that you think disproportionate representation is a good thing.  Having joined Labour because I favoured the ideals of fairness and equality I can’t see how to then argue for unfairness in a voting system.  But that was all a red herring anyway because as far as I understand it AV is not proportional anyway: if anything it is more FPTP than the current FPTP system.

With AV you would still have the same constituencies and the formation of government would be determined by whichever party was first past the post of having 50% of the MPs.   The difference is that in each constituency the MP would have a post to be first past – 50% of the votes in their constituency even if some of them are second preferences.   At the moment 30% could be enough to win in one constituency or come third in another.

I suspect that if we already had AV and someone suggested the current system there would be similar outrage and resistance.  I guess it is human nature to simultaneously demand improvement but resist change.

I don’t know what effect AV would have, I don’t think anybody does although there are plenty of guesses out there, but what would be interesting is to see how we, as a general public, would vote in a referendum on it.

On the subject of electoral reform, I have been looking at the website for Power2010.  This is a site set up by a campaign looking for changes to the electoral system.  Not a bad aspiration, but a deeply flawed execution of it.   Many of the individual suggestions for change may be good ideas but there are all sorts of incompatibilities.  In some cases the merits of a particular reform only apply if you assume that everything else about the system remains the same and so some of the reforms are not compatible with each other.

For example, one idea is to have a fully elected second chamber.  Fine idea, and I am all for that, but another one is to stop ex-MPs being in the House of Lords.  I can see why people might want that, but if it was fully-elected then ex-MPs would surely have as much right as anybody to stand for those elections wouldn’t they?  Also there would be no problem with ex-members of the second chamber standing for election to the fist chamber would there?  Another idea is to ban Lords from becoming government ministers because they are unelected – but if the second chamber becomes an elected one what then?   If more than one of the proposals relating to the second chamber got in the top five I think they would have a hard job reconciling them.

One of the proposals stands out from the crowd, and it is currently one of the most popular – scrap ID cards.  Whether that is a good or a bad idea it is not directly about ‘bringing change to UK democracy’ which is the stated aim of the site.  It is popular, but that doesn’t make it about democratic structures.  If there was an option for scrapping speed cameras it would probably come top of the list, but that wouldn’t mean it was about democracy.

And that is where the biggest flaw in the whole scheme lies – the vote is carried out by a self-selected sample, and a small one at that.  Ironically, the idea with most support so far is to introduce a proportional voting system.  It currently has 7200 votes.  Why I say it is ironic is that you will end up with pressure being put on candidates in the next election to support a pledge to introduce proportionality based on a number of votes that represents a tiny proportion of the electorate – at the moment it has doesn’t have enough votes to win a majority in any individual constituency and yet the organisers think that should be decisive.

Apart from the actual numbers, this type of poll is open to manipulation, even if only for a joke – which is why you sometimes see somebody totally inappropriate getting the votes in Radio 4’s person of the year or whatever.  It would only take one decent Facebook group campaign to make any of the ideas come top – even if it was the one about select committees, which the bast majority of the population really can’t get excited about.

There are other anomalies, like having support for directly elected mayors but not a directly elected prime minister – surely if the concept is considered to be good for one level of government it should at least be considered for another?  Perhaps the whole concept falls down because it is not bold enough in its ambition: all the proposals are for tweaks to the current system with no consideration for starting from first principles on a whole new system like Socrates did in Plato’s Republic?

Maybe that is what the organisers actually would like but they think more limited proposals are easier to sell and would then become the first step (or thin end of the wedge) towards wider change.  Which, coming back to the original topic, and very bloody neatly if I say so myself, echoes the hopes (of some) and fears (of others) with regard to AV.

I actually agree with many of Power2010’s suggestions, but having them try to impose them on candidates with such a small (so far) volume of support seems, dare I say it, undemocratic.  At the election I won’t make any secret of my personal preference for a more proportional system but that will be because it is my personal preference and not because 0.02%¹ of the electorate tell me to.

Finally, a quick word on the other burning electoral issue of the day – the campaign to ’save election night’.   I am entirely agnostic about this and don’t really care one way or another.

1. possibly. I am guessing here

I hate to bring up the subject of money, but the general election is getting ever closer, and every penny helps. Donations through this link (from UK-registered voters only – sorry Lord Ashcroft!) go straight to Horsham Constituency Labour Party’s account and will be used to print election addresses for the free Royal Mail delivery to every house in the constituency.

Some other PPC either volunteered before me or volunteered more enthusiastically than I did.   Not sure I really fancied the prospect of being on the radio between 2:30 and 3:30 in the morning and then getting up at 6:30 for work.  Even an insomniac has to sleep sometimes!

An even more sure sign of an impending election was tonight’s meeting of the my local branch to select candidates for May’s council elections.  It was a good session and we selected strong candidates for both Broadfield North and Broadfield South.  Not only that but they both live in the wards where they will be standing.

Personally I think you can be a perfectly good candidate or councillor even if you do not live in the ward you represent.  Certainly living elsewhere does not make you a bad councillor, especially in a very compact borough like Crawley – within reason: the Horsham district councillor who lives in Hastings is probably less effective than he could be.

Having said that, some of the electorate seem to prefer a local candidate, and the Tories made a bit of an issue of it in the Northgate election calling their bloke “the only local candidate” when none of the candidates lived in Northgate.  I suspect they will not be making an issue of it in May, as two of their three councillors for Broadfield do not live in Broadfield.

Good luck to Ian Irvine in the North and Colin Moffatt in the South in May!  Its great to see Colin now able to stand in a winnable seat.  In the past he has been happy to be a paper candidate, but now he does not do shift work he has the time to be a councillor and hopefully see some return for the many, many hours he has spent pounding the streets of Broadfield on behalf of other candidates in the past including me, Jayne, Ian and of course Laura and I hope the campaign in Horsham leaves me time to help out back here.

The Tory vote went down from 200 to 89

Closer to home, Geraint Thomas won in Northgate, Crawley by 81 votes.  This is a seat that has been held by the Lib Dems on the borough council since long before I moved to Crawley: over 20 years I think.  This time they came in third.

This must be the first seat Labour have gained in Crawley for at least eight years.  The last time was when a seat in Southgate was won by a Tory who then didn’t turn up to meetings and Labour won it back in a by-election.  Since then we have lost plenty of seats and held on to some, but actually gaining a new one is a bit of a novelty.

The turnout was over 30% which is not bad for Crawley.  We have had turnouts dangerously close to single figures in some places here in the past.

That is not to say this is necessarily an indication that all the opinion polls are wrong – Crawley has a bit of a record of going against prevailing trends nationally I think – but it is a welcome morale-booster nonetheless.

A lot of this is down to the qualities of the candidate.  He stood in the same place during the county elections in June so had done a lot of work there already and then really took advantage of that head start.  He led by example and so was able to attract a lot of colleagues to help him.  I suspect he will be a very effective councillor.

Both results show that there is still a Labour vote out there if we take the time and energy to chase it.

Crawley Observer front page, Oct 14th 2009

The Crawley Observer was very popular at work today.

One colleague thought that the headline was a classic, deserving of some sort of headline of the year award.

Another colleague scanned the story and asked why the traffic police were rescuing people from a toilet…   a fair amount of hilarity ensued bfore we could explain that it was not that kind of bog.On a more serious note, isn’t it just a little bit strange that a local paper which is on the streets a day before a hard-fought council by-election in the area it covers does not even mention that there is an election?

In recent months the paper has shown a real preference for ‘human interest’ stories or anything with even the slightest celebrity connection over any sort of seriousness, while its competitor, the Crawley News,  has been moving the other way – and since its re-design it even looks like a ‘proper’ paper too.

Ironically, the events which triggered this by-election are a perfect example of the contrast between the way the two papers cover events.  The News stuck to the facts – that a Lib Dem councillor had resigned due to personal reasons – while the Observer went into some details in true tabloid style.  I’m sure they would claim ‘public interest’ but really it was just gossip.

Not only is there a by-election, and a hard-fought one, but there is a small amount of controversy over the campaigning.  I had heard through the grapevine that the Observer was aware of the controversy but they have chosen to not mention it.  I suspect the story of two ladies getting stranded in a field made the front page because of the chance it will appear on TV since the police who turned up had a TV crew with them for one of those cop-chase shows. – a good example of a tenuous celebrity link.

My own theory is that the reporting staff are getting stretched a little too thinly these days, what with having to knock out two papers in Crawley each week.  Also – to hark back to my preceding post – they must be almost fully-employed just writing up all the details of the week’s crop of car crashes!

Out efforts have not gone un-noticed by the voters either.  They have commented to us favourably on how active we have been lately.

In the past the party has been complacent, back when we held even more seats than the Tories do now.  Over the last few years they have been bussing in helpers from Horsham to ‘flood the area with activists’ which apparently is a good thing if they do it, but somehow a bad thing if we do.

Not that we have been bringing in loads of outside help.  Tonight there were eight or nine of us in a group, all from Crawley and several from Northgate itself.  Some were in their eighties, others unfit or just unsuited to excercise, and the reason they were there when they would have been far more comfortable back at home was not desperation, but motivation.

During this election the Tories have produced another work of fiction, so misleading it could even be the work of Alan Quirk, where they are promoting their candidate who, like all the candidates, lives outside Northgate as “the only local candidate”.   When they did this there were failing to take account of two things:

Fist they must have forgotten that ballot papers contain the candidates’ addresses.  Any voters who do make their decision purely on grounds of location, regardless of policy, might have been swayed by these “only local candidate” claims, but once they see the ballot paper they will realise they have been duped.

More importantly, the Tories do not realise that such misleading claims have a far greater effect on Labour  members than on the voters – many of whom routinely discard all election material unread anyway, and most of whom don’t vote for anybody at all.  The effect it has is to make more of our members more active, deciding to go out and do something about it.

The old saying goes (probably) that every time you tell a lie an angel dies.  Well every time you lie in an election leaflet an armchair supporter from the other side decides to get out of their armchair and start knocking on doors!  And when they are dismissed as ‘activists’ they are not ashamed of that but proud of it.

So keep up the good work Crawley Tories!   A few more such newsletters and we will have enough of our members stirred up to have this level of activity all the time.

And another thing…  it was very nostalgic this evening.  I can remember when all elections had the levels of activity that Labour have been showing in Northgate this month from all the parties.  It was not seen as flooding an area: it was just how things were.   For weeks before an election the streets were full of canvassers, windows were full of posters and on polling day the booths were full of voters – not like the miserable levels of turnout that we see now.

All political parties have seen membership drop and age to the extent that it is not possible to see that sort of thing now outside by-elections,  but surely that has a lot to do with the increasing apathy at election time?

The other reason I felt nostalgic was that it suddenly occurred to me that our candidate was carrying out a very old-fashioned campaign and acting the way candidates really should do – showing leadership to the team with him, fully engaging with every member of the public he met whether it was at their doorstep or as they were getting out of their car, proudly stating that he is the candidate, and just being totally committed.

I don’t know how things will go on Thursday, but if Geraint should win and he turns out to be half as good a councillor as he is a candidate then Northgate will be very lucky indeed.  I could embarrass Geraint by saying this (or I would embarrass him if I thought he ever visited this site)  but he has really inspired me to be a better candidate myself in Horsham.