![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A very quick UK politics update
May. 9th, 2021 05:13 pmThis is not a post where I wail and grieve about The Current State of the UK Labour Party, join the circular left wing firing squad, or offer one of the various hot takes that will allegedly solve the Labour Party's problems and make them electable again (be more left wing! be more right wing! be more centrist! make an electoral pact with the other opposition parties! change the leadership! rally behind the leadership! build an altar to Saint Corbyn and worship before it! etc). We've got newspaper opinion pieces and perpetually aggrieved Twitter leftists for all that.
This is, instead, a rather amused post about the specific local races where I live, which went surprisingly well.
Our county council (which was previously Conservative-led), went to 'no overall control,' which means that no party has a majority. But far more astonishing was the race for our regional mayor, a position which has only existed since 2017. This position was, again, held by a Conservative, and he appears to have been especially dodgy and corrupt, even by the normal standards of local politics (money disappeared, funds were awarded to stuff in a not-very-transparent manner, the usual). The local Lib Dems had taken to deluging everyone with campaign leaflets filled with copious references to 'notorious Mayor Palmer.' Unfortunately, because our region doesn't just cover Cambridge, Ely, and a handful of other satellite villages, but rather takes in much more conservative areas, we assumed that the 'notorious' mayor would get reelected, due to the usual problem of city-dwelling progressives getting out-voted by more conservative voters elsewhere.
However, this was not what happened, thanks to the transferable vote system we have at local level. It's not quite as good as the system in Australia (where you rank every single candidate): you get a maximum of two votes, meaning you put your first choice first, and then the person you can live with second. If no one gets fifty per cent when the first choices are counted, the two candidates with the highest number of first round votes move onto the second round, where voters' second choices are added to each of those two candidates, and whoever emerges with a majority at that point is the winner.
'Notorious Mayor Palmer' had the most votes in the first round, but not a majority, so he and the Labour Party candidate fought it out in the second round. The only other candidate was a Lib Dem, and the majority of people who had put Lib Dems first had put Labour second, but the count was agonisingly slow, so we watched all this unfold over several hours, via Twitter, where an intrepid local journalist was livetweeting things from, of all places, Soham. Because the smaller counting centres were able to tally things up faster, we were waiting (and counting) on the votes from the city of Cambridge, which of course took longer. The whole thing was extremely dramatic!
And so it's goodbye to 'Notorious Mayor Palmer,' and our new mayor is a) an NHS paediatrician b) the Labour candidate and c) took his mum to the count. I'm delighted. As I said on Twitter, I'd like to raise a glass to every single one of those ridiculous Lib Dem campaign leaflets.
Obviously things are dire nationally, but there are glimmers of light, and I feel that what happened here actually offers some lessons as to a way to move forward.
This is, instead, a rather amused post about the specific local races where I live, which went surprisingly well.
Our county council (which was previously Conservative-led), went to 'no overall control,' which means that no party has a majority. But far more astonishing was the race for our regional mayor, a position which has only existed since 2017. This position was, again, held by a Conservative, and he appears to have been especially dodgy and corrupt, even by the normal standards of local politics (money disappeared, funds were awarded to stuff in a not-very-transparent manner, the usual). The local Lib Dems had taken to deluging everyone with campaign leaflets filled with copious references to 'notorious Mayor Palmer.' Unfortunately, because our region doesn't just cover Cambridge, Ely, and a handful of other satellite villages, but rather takes in much more conservative areas, we assumed that the 'notorious' mayor would get reelected, due to the usual problem of city-dwelling progressives getting out-voted by more conservative voters elsewhere.
However, this was not what happened, thanks to the transferable vote system we have at local level. It's not quite as good as the system in Australia (where you rank every single candidate): you get a maximum of two votes, meaning you put your first choice first, and then the person you can live with second. If no one gets fifty per cent when the first choices are counted, the two candidates with the highest number of first round votes move onto the second round, where voters' second choices are added to each of those two candidates, and whoever emerges with a majority at that point is the winner.
'Notorious Mayor Palmer' had the most votes in the first round, but not a majority, so he and the Labour Party candidate fought it out in the second round. The only other candidate was a Lib Dem, and the majority of people who had put Lib Dems first had put Labour second, but the count was agonisingly slow, so we watched all this unfold over several hours, via Twitter, where an intrepid local journalist was livetweeting things from, of all places, Soham. Because the smaller counting centres were able to tally things up faster, we were waiting (and counting) on the votes from the city of Cambridge, which of course took longer. The whole thing was extremely dramatic!
And so it's goodbye to 'Notorious Mayor Palmer,' and our new mayor is a) an NHS paediatrician b) the Labour candidate and c) took his mum to the count. I'm delighted. As I said on Twitter, I'd like to raise a glass to every single one of those ridiculous Lib Dem campaign leaflets.
Obviously things are dire nationally, but there are glimmers of light, and I feel that what happened here actually offers some lessons as to a way to move forward.