Playing for a draw
This article’s about the council elections, but allow us to first digress for a moment. One of the odder little quirks of the online independence movement is that, of those who express a preference when it comes to the subject of Scotland’s national sport, a disproportionately high percentage seem to be Aberdeen supporters. (Possibly partly explained by the North-East, as the First Minister’s political stomping ground and centre of the oil industry, having always been fertile ground for nationalism.)
This blog is among that number, and so for those of us currently living in England and seeking to maintain an interest in the people’s game Manchester United is the logical choice of club to follow, at least for as long as Sir Alex Ferguson is at the helm. (Even if the daft old fool himself has been out of Scotland for so long he still thinks Labour are socialists, and dutifully trots out every time they need a celebrity backer.)
So when we saw the team United put out for the crucial Premiership derby against Manchester City last week, we were concerned. A midfield of Carrick (the English Barry Ferguson, we’ve always thought), the recently un-retired Scholes and the rusty Park (making his first start since January) clearly wasn’t designed to provide a pacy attacking threat, and before the game started we tweeted “That’s an old, slow Man U side lining up tonight. Looks like a chokehold.”
And sure enough, as the match progressed Ferguson’s team showed beyond any reasonable doubt that it had been sent out with the intention of smothering City’s menacing attack and securing the 0-0 draw that would have all but sealed the league for the Old Trafford club. Sluggish and toothless, with Wayne Rooney a lonely and frustrated figure up front, United failed – for the first time in three years, said the statisticians afterwards – to register a single shot on the opposition’s goal, and when a wobbly defence that’s been badly missing Nemanja Vidic all season offered Vincent Kompany a free header from eight yards out, there never looked like being any way back for a side that just a month ago had a commanding eight-point lead at the top of the table and appeared to be a shoo-in for a record-breaking 20th title.
We mention all this because the recent see-sawing of the English championship race is likely to be far more dramatic than anything that happens in the Scottish council elections taking place today. Let’s be clear – there will be no earth quaking and no land sliding this week, no epoch-making shocks such as those we saw a year and two days ago. Everyone will shuffle around a bit, everyone will claim victory for one reason or another, and very little will actually change.
To be more precise, we think the SNP will probably increase their total by a good few seats – maybe two or three dozen – Labour will see a much smaller net gain, the Lib Dems will get drubbed and the Tories will barely move. Labour will remain the largest party in Glasgow but short of an overall majority even with the de facto Labour votes of any “Glasgow First” seats, and there’s a definite chance of an SNP-led coalition or minority administration, which is likely to be the only real story of the evening unless Labour can oust the SNP from the controlling group in Edinburgh.
(There’s never been, in our view, the slightest chance of the SNP winning overall control in Glasgow and only the tiniest prospect of them being the biggest party – remember, the 2007 result was a massive 45-22 in favour of Labour, and you just don’t turn those sorts of numbers round in one term under STV no matter how much of a crooked, discredited, strife-torn shambles the incumbents are. We’ll be thrilled, but very surprised indeed, if we’re wrong.)
We feel fairly confident about this prediction as a result of studying this excellent site, which is just about the only even remotely solid, detailed and fact-based analysis of the elections to be found anywhere. (Bizarrely, absolutely nobody has thought it worth conducting any sort of opinion poll at any time during the campaign.) We invite you to give it a browse for yourself rather than have us attempt to summarise its findings, but the one thing we found truly startling is that there are great chunks of the country where no party is even trying to actually win.
What we mean by that is that in many areas, no party is standing enough candidates to take overall control of a council even if every single one of their people were to get elected. Partly this is a result of the STV system, which makes putting up extra candidates a risk because if you run two candidates they might get (purely illustrative figures) 500 votes each, while a rival party standing only a single candidate might get 600 and take the seat, even though your party got 400 more votes altogether.
The SNP suffered badly in several areas from taking too conservative an approach in this regard in 2007, and has at least partly learned the lesson, putting forward almost 180 more candidates this year while the other major parties all have fewer than they did last time. But despite that, the nationalists don’t have even a theoretical chance of overall control in many councils, and nor does anyone else.
ABERDEEN CITY
Number required for majority: 22
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: SNP (25)
ABERDEENSHIRE
Number required for majority: 35
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: SNP (36)
ANGUS
Number required for majority: 15
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: SNP (17)
ARGYLL AND BUTE
Number required for majority: 19
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: NONE (max 18, SNP)
CLACKMANNANSHIRE
Number required for majority: 10
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: SNP (12)
COMHAIRLE NAN EILEAN SIAR
Number required for majority: 16
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: NONE (max 14, SNP)
DUMFRIES AND GALLOWAY
Number required for majority: 24
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: CON (24)
DUNDEE CITY
Number required for majority: 15
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: SNP (16)
EAST AYRSHIRE
Number required for majority: 17
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: LAB (17), SNP (17)
EAST DUNBARTONSHIRE
Number required for majority: 13
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: NONE (max 10, LAB)
EAST LOTHIAN
Number required for majority: 12
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: LAB (12), SNP (12)
EAST RENFREWSHIRE
Number required for majority: 11
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: NONE (max 10, CON)
EDINBURGH CITY
Number required for majority: 29
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: NONE (max 26, SNP)
FIFE
Number required for majority: 40
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: SNP (43), LAB (41)
GLASGOW CITY
Number required for majority: 40
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: LAB (45), SNP (43)
HIGHLANDS
Number required for majority: 39
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: NONE (max 33, SNP)
INVERCLYDE
Number required for majority: 11
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: LAB (11)
MIDLOTHIAN
Number required for majority: 11
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: SNP (12), LAB (11)
MORAY
Number required for majority: 13
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: SNP (16)
NORTH AYRSHIRE
Number required for majority: 16
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: LAB (16)
NORTH LANARKSHIRE
Number required for majority: 36
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: LAB (43), SNP (41)
ORKNEY ISLANDS
Number required for majority: 11
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: NONE (max 4, SNP)
PERTH AND KINROSS
Number required for majority: 21
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: SNP (24)
RENFREWSHIRE
Number required for majority: 21
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: LAB (22), SNP (22)
SCOTTISH BORDERS
Number required for majority: 18
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: NONE (max 14, CON)
SHETLAND ISLANDS
Number required for majority: 12
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: NONE (max 2, SNP)
SOUTH AYRSHIRE
Number required for majority: 16
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: NONE (max 14, SNP)
SOUTH LANARKSHIRE
Number required for majority: 34
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: LAB (40), SNP (37)
STIRLING
Number required for majority: 12
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: SNP (12)
WEST DUNBARTONSHIRE
Number required for majority: 12
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: LAB (12), SNP (12)
WEST LOTHIAN
Number required for majority: 17
Parties standing enough candidates for overall control: SNP (22)
So out of 31 council areas, almost a third (10) definitely won’t be won outright by anyone. Of the remaining 21, only the SNP are even attempting to win nine of them, with two more being fully contested by Labour alone and one by only the Tories. (And in most cases it’s a token effort, with zero margin of error – if even one of the party concerned’s candidates doesn’t make it, the chance of a majority is gone.)
That leaves just nine of Scotland’s 31 council areas having more than one party trying to actually win them (every one a contest between Labour and the SNP), which strikes us as incredibly odd. It’s impossible to imagine any of the four main parties not even bothering to put up a candidate for a constituency in any Holyrood or Westminster election, yet they’re all abandoning whole swathes of the country at the level where all the grass-roots political spadework gets done.
And it’s not as if anywhere is a hopeless case for any party. With turnout predictions mostly coming in below 30%, there’s a huge number of votes out there waiting to be won for anyone that really puts the work in. Even the most traditional diehard Labour strongholds would be up for grabs if the SNP could just persuade and mobilise a fraction of the 70% who won’t bother to come out. Conversely, Labour could radically change the entire Scottish media narrative about their decline if they threw activists at the cause and gave the nationalists a bloody nose in, say, Dundee.
Obviously it’s a big drain on resources for parties with only a few thousand activists to campaign for hundreds of candidates. But if you’re tramping the streets of a ward anyway shoving leaflets through letterboxes, we don’t really understand why it’s any more trouble to have three candidates’ names on those leaflets rather than two, at least giving voters the chance to vote 1-2-3 for your people if they want to.
Again, we get the dangers of a split vote under STV. But there are ways to mitigate against that, and it’s surely a gamble worth taking. Because as Manchester United’s pitiful capitulation last Monday demonstrated so clearly, if you play for a stalemate from the word go, you’re playing a no-win game.
This is one of the reasons why I don’t like STV. It encourages – perhaps even forces – parties to second-guess the result too much. My ward has just one SNP candidate. He can get elected straight away if he gets 25% of the vote, but what if the whole ward decides to put him as their first preference? If 100% of the ward votes SNP as first preference, then 100% of our councillors should be SNP. But the maximum we’ll get is 33%. How is that proportional, never mind democratic?
Of course, since my ward bizarrely elected a Tory and two Lib Dems last time (all incumbents, one of whom has since been jailed for embezzlement), there is no chance of everyone voting SNP (although the SNP candidate won the subsequent by election). But that’s not the point. It all smacks of parties trying to manage the result, and in some wards, it seems to be harder NOT to get elected than to get elected (I have 6 candidates for a 3 member ward, but I’ve heard of 5 candidates in 3 member wards, and even 4 candidates – giving candidates 50%, 60% and 75% chances of getting elected). In some places, parties stand just their leader even when they could elect several councillors, because this practically guarantees they won’t suffer the embarrassment of losing their leader. To top it all off, I think you’re quite right that there won’t be massive changes, which will just leave people wondering why we bothered having an election.
Then again, it’s only the council elections – does anyone really care?
Oh, and I prefer to take the “support anyone but Man U because Ferguson left Aberdeen in the lurch” approach. Although English football pretty much bores me – I stopped following it when the money started getting really ridiculous at the turn of the century. It’s just a more expensive version of the SPL, with the same teams guaranteed to win, with Man City pretty much just doing what Romanov did at Hearts.
I’m rather looking forward to when the money falls out of the arse of football. It’ll be quite a spectacle.
I can’t blame Fergie for leaving the Dons. What did he have left to achieve in Scotland? He’d crushed the Old Firm, won every domestic trophy multiple times and taken an all-Scottish team to European glory. The only way was down, whereas Man U was a massive challenge. He left Aberdeen in great shape.
I was reading something in LPW that suggested standing extra candidates isn’t such a risk as some people seem to think. Is there any known example of a party failing to get anyone elected because it fielded two candidates, when a single candidate would have succeeded?
Does anyone know what the sequence of events would have to be, in order for a split vote to cause a party to fall between two stools like that, and is it something that’s actually likely to happen in practice?
As I (barely and quite possibly entirely wrongly) understand it, there’s a “quota” of first-preference votes which automatically gets you a seat before any second-prefs and beyond are counted. So let’s say the quota is 1000, and Labour stand two candidates to the SNP’s three. The two Labour candidates get 1050 each, whereas each SNP candidate gets 950 first-prefs, plus the second- and third-preference votes of the others.
The result in that case would be two Labour seats and zero SNP, even though Labour got 2100 votes in total to the SNP’s 2850. (And would still be the case even if every Labour vote put SNP as a second preference.)
It’s a ludicrously extreme example for illustrative purposes, of course, not least because it assumes the first-preference SNP votes are equally split between the three candidates (whereas in reality personal prominence or alphabetical order are huge advantages) but as far as I know that’s the basic principle. Again, though – I could be entirely wrong. It’s very very complicated.
I mistakenly believed that the aim of a political party was to win, and be able to put its policies in place.
I didn’t realise that some councils were guaranteed to have no one in control even before any votes were cast!
Very strange system.
Here’s something that council members and candidates really ought to work on – their websites.
I’m in the Hillhead ward, and apparently not worth canvassing (or was at work when they attempted) and barely worth even leafletting. I’ve only had flyers, even these with the absolute bare minimum on information, from SNP, the Greens and, charmingly, the Tories (bless ’em!) and these don’t say much more than so-and-so is an avatar of their respective party. No real insight on the characters and views of those due to be representing us on the most local level, where surely that’s even more pertinent than at the national level.
Trying to find any information on any of the candidates has proved difficult. No wonder turnouts are so low in local elections -if the candidates themselves aren’t that bothered, I struggle to see why I should. Am I being too idealistic to want to know a small amount of information about the candidates, or should I just assume that they will toe their own party lines – whatever they might be, seeing as none of them seem keen on elaborating what those are other than vague promises with some variation of Moving Glasgow (as a whole, I note – nothing on the Ward level) Forwards. Inspiring! Obvious!
I know there’s two sides involved in an informed electorate, but trying to hold up my end of the bargain shouldn’t be so difficult.
I agree with Doug’s analysis above. Defenders of STV say that this second-guessing thing is actually good, because it reduces the power of political party managers. However, STV then hands these managers a major boost, by making the elected representatives more remote from their voters. Who is “my councillor” in an STV ward? Since there’s not an easy answer to that, the councillors are less accountable to their electorate.
The other way the parties are made more powerful in STV, is by keeping the size of the wards as small as possible. All Scotland’s wards are 3 or 4 member, and that actually makes it quite tough for independent candidates in urban areas.
That is a different analysis from the norm.
Is it, perhaps down to the numbers of activists available in each area? Or even the number of people who come forward as credible candidates?
As far as I know, the SNP decides how many candidates it will present on a ward-by-ward basis, and it’s independent of the number of people willing to stand for election. It’s also independent of the likely number of activists available. If they feel there is no hope of getting two members elected, they will not present two candidates.
I see Serverin Carrell is still god bless him still spinning frantically the SNP has been ‘dented’….quite how increasing their share of the vote, increasing their number of seats is a dent is best left to Severin’s imagination.
On Aberdeen fans being more pro independence*….probably something in that….Fergie took on the Established status quo….beat it, routed it and humiliated it and then went to Europe and did the same thing…..
Throw in a City and local economy that rubbishes the ‘too wee, too small, too stupid’ argument on a daily basis (most Aberdonians work for either small local companies and multi nationals who both work on a global stage)…..so the Unionist scare tactics remind Aberdonians of the bile and hatred directed at their club from the West Coast Media a generation before.
Stand Free and keep up the good work min
Whoops……
Should be pointed out that not all Aberdeen fans support the SNP/Independence…..you’ll find every political hue represented…..it’s an unspoken agreement however that the club and support should remain politically neutral and be open to everybody.
Having said that I do recall the entire Aberdeen support at Ibrox waving SNP ‘YES-YES’ flyers in the build up to the Devolution referendum……but this was probably just to noise up the Rangers fans rather than any deeply held political beliefs.