Local election results reviewed

My blog on Friday 4th May gives the results - or see them here on Glos Green party site. Last night the local Green party met to have a look at what we could learn and congratulate ourselves on the results.

Photo: this weeks' Citizen reporting Parish and Town results in Forest and Stroud

It was great to return 4 Green District councillors with their share of the vote once again going up - plus 11 Stroud Town councillors - infact all those we stood in the 18-seat Town Council. There was also a discussion re the rest of the County results - West Glos Greens did extraordinary well considering they had really only been around 4 months - they got their first 2 Town seats and came very close to District seats.

I have to say that the disappointing low turnouts are again an indication of the need to renew our local democracies. The Conservatives may have 60% of the seats in Stroud District but they don't have that level of support.

Indeed in many areas across the country we saw winning parties achieve exaggerated and undeserved majorities while both Labour voters in parts of southern England and Tory voters in many northern metropolitan areas don't have the representation they deserve. In some places people voted more in favour of one party and instead saw another in control of the council! See more on this here.

In fact while the Conservatives tend do be punished by the first past the post electoral system in Westminster elections, in last Thursday's polls the same system significantly helped them, giving them around 50% of the seats with just 40% of the vote. Unlock Democracy show that Labour, conversely, got just 18% of the seats despite getting around 27% of the vote. The Liberal Democrats were similarly under-represented, yet they still managed to get more seats than Labour despite getting fewer votes. None of this helped the Conservatives gain a single seat in cities such as Liverpool, Manchester or Newcastle however, suggesting that the electoral system's bias fluctuates across the country.

We should not forget that sharing power and devolving power are two sides of the same coin. Single party hegemonies ruling over powerful local authorities are as undemocratic as multi-party glorified talking shops. Horse-trading is a fact of life in politics whether you have proportional representation or not: just ask George Bush. Nor does first past the post prevent hung parliaments. Canada, with a multi-party Parliamentary system similar to ours, seems to quite like hung parliaments, having acquired a taste. As the newly re-elected independent MSP Margo MacDonald said; "All's fair in proportional politics - provided it's spelt out before polling, and everyone's vote is counted."

So we need more representative Councils and more powers restored to our local Councils - without such moves voter disenchantment can only grow.

And while we're on elections - it is time Blair went - I don't have time to write here and many others have done it better but it is certainly shaming that the wealth gap has grown wider since he has been in power and despite such a mandate in 1997 Blair has failed us miserably on climate change, civil liberties, international law, public services and more. But it is too simple to focus all the blame on one man. This was a collective failure.

Brown who has supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, failed us dismally on green taxes and pushed privatisation of our public services has a huge task on his hands. I can't see things getting much better under him - although one glimmer of hope on Council Housing is the news that he might be prepared to at last consider the 'Fourth Option' - see details of this and my recent call for people to sign petition on this here.

Update 18th June: Gordon Brown told the UNITE (Amicus) conference "I cannot promise to implement the fourth option on council housing today [a demand from the Defend Council Housing group for the last six years] but what I will tell you is that councils will be allowed to build homes again" (Guardian Unlimited, 18 June). If not now then when???????