Wasted opportunity for change

February 25, 2010 — admin

The debate tonight in council over whether to change the voting system in Woking to one all-out election for councillors every four years instead of the contrived thirds system we have at present was a frustrating experience. I had hoped against hope that the sensible cross-party voices of David Bittleston, John Kingsbury, Peter Ankers, Ric Sharp and Richard Sanderson would pursuade some of those with fears about all-out elections to take the plunge.

It was a big ask and needed a two-thirds majority (24 out of 36 councillors) to get through – in the end it was defeated 16-17 by those wishing to stick to the current system. There were some really good points, ranging from the structural ie that all-out elections provides a period of election-free space to encourage longer-term thinking and decision-making by councillors to the equitable ie that resident in three-member wards such as Horsell West get to vote three times as much as those who live in one-member wards like Brookwood.

There are also questions of clarity for voters, of being able to spend less time electioneering and more time engaging with residents and of the £100,000 three-years-in-four cost benefit. But the sticklers, of whom the “radical” Liberal Democrats formed the backbone, won through, obviously worried about their seats and the prospect of four years in the wilderness. Denzil Coulson told the chamber that in 2011 he was sure the Conservatives would be unpopular and thrown out of administration – and then proceeded to defend the thirds system by way of it being more “democratic” because it forced people to work together and gave councillors contact with residents.

Lib Dem leader Ian Johnson too said that the council was best when it worked together on projects and made out that all-out elections would somehow preclude this, allowing one party to bully its agenda through. Other thirds supporters opposed the idea of too radical a change in the council’s makeup after a four-yearly election, with it taking time to retrain new councillors. Yet successful authorities like Guildford, Elmbridge and all the Berkshire unitaries – as well as all London boroughs – are elected this way and seem to overcome these issues.

More to the point, the strong leader model adopted by the council tonight also seems to point to the need for a all-out election, as the leader’s four-year term should co-incide with the council’s. By keeping thirds, members have essentially nullified the strong leader idea and kept the system we have now. Woking is a good council but it is not helped by its marginal and shifting control. It needs a stability and permanance that at present only the officers of the council enjoy.

A number of members felt that those in safe seats were more in favour of all-out elections because they were less likely to find themselves booted out for four years. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again – as someone who is standing for election in a marginal ward, I’d rather lose the seat and not have the opportunity to stand again as a consequence of the best system than win it and have to work within a second-best model that hinders strategic thinking and bold decisions.

It’s a shame that I have to get party political but I think that the Liberal Democrats have let the borough down by not being bold enough to embrance this change. It is only fair for me to mention Cllrs Ian Eastwood, Ric Sharp and Richard Sanderson as the honourable exceptions to this – they voted against the rest of their party in the free vote and also Independent Peter Ankers for coming down on the visionary side too. Interesting to note that Lib Dem PPC Rosie Sharpley, your agent of change if the Lib Dem literature is to believed, didn’t feel able to vote for it on this occasion.

The next opportunity to get rid of our thirds system is 2015. By then I hope the case will be clear.

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Constitutional choices

February 16, 2010 — admin

Away from all the excitement of electoral mud-slinging, there are some very important changes being debated at a meeting of full council on February 25. They surround whether a) the council should be run by a strong leader and cabinet or have an elected mayor and b) whether the council should elect all its councillors every four years or, as it does now, elect a third of councillors three years in every four.

Last week, the executive took the decision not to endorse any one of these options and to allow the full council to have a debate and free vote on the issues. The understanding I have formed from the discussions I have had is that councillors will not vote for change and will keep a strong leader model elected by thirds – but they could of course prove me wrong!

In the first matter, they are entirely correct to eschew an elected mayor, who would have the power to appoint members of the executive committee from any party regardless of the wishes of councillors. This is in fact nothing short of amateurish political engineering by Labour – hoping that they can claw their way back to power in local government by getting a few Labour (or “independent”) mayors elected in what usually amounts to a silly popularity contest and running the council contrary to the wishes of members genuinely elected locally by their communities.

In such instances, the mayor would be able to pack the executive with members of minority parties and potentially run councils with as little as 20% of the council membership. Clearly that sounds quite attractive to the PM, but has he thought about areas outside London that might be fruitful ground for the BNP and how this silly mayoral idea could help that party control its first council? I hope that members reject this senseless scheme outright – Woking simply doesn’t need and wouldn’t benefit from an elected mayor.

On the second issue, I believe there are compelling reasons to favour all-out, once-every-four-years, elections. It saves money, saves people voting every single year and gives administrations a proper four-year term to get things done rather than worrying about the electoral consequences all the time. In addition, it aids member independence and makes it more difficult for officers to start running the policy show.

But among political parties, it’s not so popular. It means that they get out of the campaigning habit and have to re-invent the wheel every four years. It also means that if any member gets voted out, they have to wait four years for another go – and the same goes for overall control of the council. Losing your seat in a local election contest is a grisly business – I’m beginning to properly understand the work that needs to be put in and for all that to come to nothing must be dreadful. 

But there are worse things than being in opposition as a councillor – it’s an opportunity to re-group, reassess the area’s needs and your policies and to come up with something worth fighting on. I’ve seen all-out work well in Surrey Heath, Guildford and Waverley and I believe it is right for Woking too.

Losing seats and control is all part of politics and members must make a decision on this for the good of the borough. My feeling is that four-year terms are conducive to better decision-making and member-led authorities. That may not be the decision that will be reached – but I hope that it if is not, it will be for concerns other than members of all sides fearing the effects of losing power. If that were the case, Woking would be missing an opportunity – and not for the best of reasons.

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Fiddling the system

February 3, 2010 — admin

Tony Blair talked about it after his win in 1997 but soon kicked it into the long grass when civil servants pointed out the advantage that it could potentially give him during the next 10 years. I am of course talking about the first-past-the-post voting system, which has served the country well for 150 years by delivering strong governments in a two-party system.

Yes, it tends to flatter the winning party – enabling them to get legislation through that would otherwise be compromised by protracted negotiations with coalition partners. We haven’t had a hung parliament in this country since 1974 and you have to go back to 1929 for the one before that. In that time, the country has undergone radical economic and social change and the fact that we’ve had governments able to push through their legislation – both popular and unpopular – has been one of the factors that still allows us to be competitive nearly a century after the onset of post-Imperial decline.

Now Gordon Brown wants to change all that.  Isn’t it interesting that having thought about it in 1997 as Chancellor only now is he coming to realise that perhaps it might be a good idea after all? Or, more likely, isn’t he just after a chance to gerrymander the electoral system? He knows that if he wins the election in May, he’s very unlikely to deliver a fifth term for Labour in 2015 because governments just don’t stay popular for that long. So, he reasons, let’s change the system to make it tougher for the Tories, if they don’t win in 2010, to get in at a later point.

And it’s interesting that a graphic in the Guardian today shows how the House of Commons would have looked if the AV system had been in place already. We can see that while it appears to bolster the interests of the largest and smallest parties at the expense of the one in between, that isn’t really what happens. What happens is that Conservative voters are far more likely to vote Lib Dem as their second choice, Lib Dem voters far more likely to put Labour as theirs and Labour voters also likely to vote Lib Dem as a second preference. So with Conservative shorn of the majority of second choices, they have to win on the first preference votes alone, whereas the other two parties are more likely to win on second choices.

It, in effect, seals an unofficial electoral pact between the Lib Dems and Labour – even though a good many people who vote Lib Dem do so because they don’t want to vote Labour or Conservative and have little idea what they are voting for – except they “think that Vince Cable is ever such a nice chap”.

There is an issue with the first-past-the-post system in how it works in a three-party, not two-party system. The largest party is inflated, the smallest party negated. But the Lib Dems have always called for proportional voting out of self-interest and not because they believe it enhances democracy. I don’t remember it being quite so far up their list of priorities 100 years ago when they were forming governments on the back of the FPTP system.

Thankfully, not everyone is taken in by the PM’s Saulian conversion to the cause of electoral reform. I’m heartened to see that the BBC reports (I’ll quote becuase it’s a long way down):

“Campaigners for democratic reform give a mixed reaction on Mr Brown’s proposals, with some, such as Power 2010 saying it did not go far enough: “Without troubling the public for their views, ministers hand-picked the voting system they favour in a cynical exercise aimed at wrong-footing the Tories ahead of a likely election defeat.

“The future of our democracy is far too important to be decided by empty gestures such as this.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

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Food waste muck-raking

February 2, 2010 — admin

Enough information to fill a blue bin

A couple of days ago I received among the more dubious of Lib Dem leaflets, which was masquerading as a National and Local issues survey. Actually, there was only one short and very general question on national issues and the rest of it was dedicated to stirring up local matters, which the Lib Dems usually achieve with some skill. None of the issues probed about was particularly surprising.

The one thing that did catch my eye though was question six, which asked people “Do you have all the information you need about the new food waste collections (starting January 2010)”? Apart from inviting the answer “no” and provoking a small degree of antipathy among voters, I’m left wondering what all this is about. In case the Lib Dems hadn’t noticed, a whole section of the Woking Borough Council website is dedicated to answering a myriad of questions on the service and it is also linked to on the homepage.

In addition, I had my caddies delivered today and there is included in the package an eight-page booklet that describes in more detail than you could ever need why the scheme is being introduced, how to use it, what can go in the bins and includes a tear-out calendar of collection dates. As a PR officer, I’m fairly certain that this covers most bases.

Anyone who still doesn’t have enough information on the scheme after that either has an unhealthy interest in the mechanics of waste collection or simply isn’t listening. To me, question six demonstrates that the Lib Dems suffer from one of these afflictions. Answers on a postcard.

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All up or by thirds?

November 10, 2009 — admin

Last night, councillors had a briefing on possible options for new council election arrangements and leadership model. The details of this are all in the public domain and were touched on briefly at the executive meeting on September 3.

There are two main questions – should we elect the council as we do now, by thirds three years out of four with a “rest year” in the fourth or should we do as more and more councils do and elect all 36 members once every four years? The first has the advantage of giving voters regular input into council affairs but generally results in less stable council control. The latter reduces the amount of times voters need to visit the polls and favours strong administration – but is that a good thing?

The other question the paper raises is the possibility of elected mayors with power to nominate members to the executive – regardless of party – and who cannot be removed before their term is up. Alternatively, we could adopt a “strong leader” model whereby the leader would be similar to the mayor but have to be a borough councillor elected by the council for a four-year, rather than one-year term.

From reading this, you can see that this is yet another step towards greater centralisation and placing more power and permanence in fewer people. In politics, permanence is the ultimate power - hence its adoption by most of the world’s leading despots throughout history. In the decade from 1999 to 2009, we have moved from the old board system where all councillors had equal say within the chamber and the only trump card was numerical superiority through the executive system that gives six or seven members more powers than the rest to this, which would rest primacy in a single member.

I think both options move the wrong way and I’d like to see a Local Government Act that reduced the power of individual councillors but increased the scope of the decisions on policy and finance that they were allowed to take. This government seems to think it should be the other way around.

On the election arrangements, I’m less sure. My experience of councils elected as a whole is that they tend to be better at making decisions but the strength of opposition within them is diminished. Councils elected by thirds tend to be dominated by short-term political thinking but do have the advantage of strong oppositions who sense that control may be just months away. They are also more open to officer interference – perish the thought.

On balance I favour the elected at once option. I think that it favours stronger members vs stronger officers. Officers are vital to the success of any local authority but it should be the members with whom the agenda rests. I think that is an important principle that overrides concern about opposition strength.

We shall see what our members – who I hope will be allowed to vote freely – think.

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