What to look out for turnout-wise come the Notts County Council election on 6th May 2021

In an ideal world, the Nottinghamshire County Council election would be on hold until the end of the summer but the pressure is on and the Conservatives sense that they may be able to pull off some great  local election and mayoral victories, as they persuade voters to believe that they have got Covid-19 beaten, so the Government get on with it and don't let Labour's hesitancy spoil things.

I admit that I was hoping that it would all drag on and voters would stay at home. Be it Broxtowe, Nottinghamshire or across England, Labour depends on low turnouts to win seats and elections. As the tables below shows there are exceptions but all these do is prove what I say. I admit that I will following the County Council results and turnouts closely, since I happen to live in one of the County divisions (wards), Bramcote and Beeston North, with the highest turnouts in the County Council 2017 election.

Labour's historic problem with needing low turnouts to win is something it doesn't talk about, or even admit in my experience — hence my being someone with a long record of fighting elections slow and long. I call it 'campaigning under the radar' and it works.

I'll come back with an update after Thursday 6th May 2021, assuming the County Council election goes ahead.

CLICK ON THE TABLE TO SEE IT SEPARATELY.

Another look at low Labour election turnouts

 In a couple of recent posts I have touched  on the topic of election turnouts and what they mean for Labour in terms of planning campaigns. I am a lifetime 'under the radar' campaigner; someone who likes to fight elections slowly and over a long period of time and in the process identifying Labour's core vote. Low turnouts are to Labour's advantage and always have been. The House of Commons Library has lots of reports on the topic, including one on the 2019 General Election turnouts(follow this link to find it).

Here is a table from the report which should be of interest (click on tables to enlarge):

The table below is from the Library's 2017 report:

Finally, two tables tracing turnout in the last six general elections in Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire. I have collated the data for Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Birmingham. Seats with high turnouts (Broxtowe and Sherwood) were the first to go and the only three seats Labour continues to hold are low turnout Nottingham seats and this pattern is replicated across the other counties as well. Staffordshire is included because I have friends in the county. These facts should influence how Labour organises and campaigns, but I see no evidence that it does. Here are the tables (again' click on images to enlarge):

I will leave it, as there is plenty to think about. In all the talk about Labour and Keir Starmer developing policies and a strategy the importance of election turnouts is the elephant sitting in the corner unnoticed.

 

National Audit Office's local government financial data including Broxtowe invites as many questions as it answers, so let's have a council budget 'Teach-in Day'

The National Audit Office has published a report, Financial sustainability of local authorities: (a) 2018 visualisation, relating to local government finances covering the period 2010/11 – 2016/17. Unfortunately it is all percentages and not actual amounts of money. On the plus side you can compare Broxtowe with Nottingham City and Nottinghamshire County Council, albeit very different beasts. I have extracted some data which I will turn into tables over the next few days.

In the meantime if you have missed this story in the news media or don't have a weblink, follow this link.

The following quote from the report's introduction delivers the message loud and clear. It is that local government and local communities who have paid the price of the financial crisis, together with those on low incomes, the vulnerable and disadvantaged. To all these people local services matter!

The Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government measures the impact of reducing government funding on local authority income via ‘revenue spending power’. This indicator captures the main streams of government funding to local authorities alongside council tax. We found that nationally revenue spending power fell by 28.6% in real terms from 2010-11 to 2017-18. If council tax is removed, our analysis shows that government funding fell in real terms by 49.1% from 2010-11 to 2017-18.

Here is a comparative table (click on table to enlarge).

If I had the time I would request the financial data which has been used to compile these percentages (which all appear in the report). There has been talk of Broxtowe Borough Council's financial problems. What this comparative suggests is that Broxtowe appears to be in no worse position than Nottingham or the county council.

Notice how percentage reserves have increased and you can see why this data matters in money terms. I will have a look at Broxtowe. What the figures do show is that Nottinghamshire County Council has a far lower level of reserves (in percentage terms) than Broxtowe and Nottingham, which probably helps explain the enthusiasm among some county councillors for the creation of a unitary county council (an idea since dropped, for the time being at least).

That said, the county council spends (in percentage terms) 64.6% of its budget on adult & child social care, whereas the city spends 54.5%. At this rate, as the news media tells us every few days (so it seems), the county and city will soon have little money to spend on anything else!  

Some the data is less complete for comparative purposes so I will just refer to Broxtowe when it comes to loss of Government funding and spending power.

Between 2010/11 and 2017/18 Government funding to Broxtowe fell by 62.9% and, as I understand it, will continue to fall until it reaches 0%. I'm sure when this will happen. In real times this equals 42.6% and council tax lost 3.2% of its spending power in Broxtowe during the same period.

It gives me a headache just trying to comprehend what is actually happening. We all need to understand because it is that important!

Perhaps the Labour Party might like to organise a kind of 'Council Budget Teach-in Day' a few weeks before the Borough Council elections (one day in Beeston/Stapleford and one day in Eastwood/Kimberley) with stalls and data based on services. It could well attract much need media attention!

For council tenants there could be a stall with info on 'Where does you rent go?' looking at the housing budget.  Another for leisure and parks. Then there's Environmental Services. You get the idea. Once in power the Borough Council can take over the days.

Residents can be asked for their views so that changes can be planned for. Holding budget consultations in October/November is far too late and only serves to show how little interest have in their own 'public consultation'! 

Is a 'progressive alliance' a viable option?

'We're a Kodak party in an Instagram era'

Clive Lewis, Labour MP, in Guardian video interview with Owen Jones, 28 July 2016.

Today Paul Mason has a video on The Guardian website calling for a 'progressive alliance' of all left/centre parties to defeat the Conservatives at the next general election.

There is also an article in the same online edition by Clive Lewis MP headed 'I'm backing Jeremy Corbyn for leader: Here's why'.

Put together they hint at an interesting approach to the very real problem of defeating the Conservatives at the next general election. My guess is that Theresa May will hang on until the new parliamentary constituency boundaries come in and she will have an inbuilt advantage because the new boundaries favour the Conservative Party.

I can pinpoint when I became a supporter of proportional representation. It was in 1960, when I attended my first Labour Party selection meeting for the then Wembley South CLP for Wembley Central ward where I lived. In those days local councillors served for three years and a third of the council was elected each year, so we had only one prospective candidate to select. There were four hopefuls and after the first ballot, the bottom name was deleted and on the second ballot, someone got over 50% of the votes cast, so was selected.

Someone in the meeting asked if we could have preferential voting, which was explained as writing 1 2 3 4 against the name of each would-be candidate and the one with the lowest number of no.1 votes would drop out and their no.2 votes would be distributed as allocated. It immediately seemed like a less messy system of selecting a candidate — I only had to vote once, then the votes could be quickly counted as their was only about twenty of us in the hall, but the exhaustive ballot won and it was not until I was in Lenton in the early-1980s that Labour Party members could be persuaded to use preferential voting instead of exhaustive ballots.

It struck me then, at the age of 16, that if the Labour Party would not use first past the post (FPTP) to select its own candidates, how could it support FPTP in elections for councillors and MPs? From then on I became a supporter of proportional representation (PR) and the historian in me quickly learned that until after 1945, the Labour Party supported PR.

Tony Blair set up a commission led by Roy Jenkins which came up with a complicated PR system, then supported the added member PR system for the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly and another PR system for Northern Ireland, but made no effort to introduce the added member PR system for UK parliamentary elections.

When Nick Clegg had his opportunity after the 2010 general election he blew it and we were offered a system even I voted against. Just two votes like we had in the awful county police commissioner election a couple of months ago.

I personally believe in voting for individuals and not political parties and the added member system allows you to do this with a second vote for a party, which means you could vote for a Labour Party candidate and give your party vote to the Green Party.

I believe we need added member PR voting ASAP and the only prospect of this is the one-off 'progressive alliance' Paul Mason talks about and Clive Mason alludes to with his references to agreeing with individual Liberals, Greens and SNP speakers.

You would only need a centre-left alliance for one general election, then the voting system can be changed (without a referendum). None of this is new. Graham Allen has been here before and argued that at local government level, communities should be free to choose their own voting system (see the report on voter engagement which he contributed to to in 2014-15)

If a one-off 'progressive alliance' becomes something Jeremy Corbyn picks up and makes part of his campaign it will be a game-changer for me, because I support the idea. It is, in the present circumstances, both logical and necessary if we really want to beat the Conservatives at the next general election.