7May
Scotland
One from the Bad Losers department. The defeated Labour candidate in Cunninghame North is considering a challenge to the result. Allan Wilson lost the seat to Kenneth Gibson (SNP) by 48 votes, ensuring that the SNP took a 47-46 victory in the overall election. Why is this important? Cunninghame N is in the West of Scotland region, where Labour already enjoys an Overhang of one seat. If Labour succeeds in reversing the result, it will become another Overhangseat, and the SNP will not be compensated by an additional list seat.
More precisely, that is why the situation of uncompensated Overhangseats is so dangerous - it makes it far easier for parties to produce perverse and undemocratic results. Forty-seven more votes in one constituency would have turned the entire Scottish Parliament on its head.
Mr. Wilson would do well to remember Gerry Malone, whose defeat in Election '97 came too late for the re-run on BBC Parliament. Mr. Malone lost by precisely 2 (two) votes, and successfully petitioned to have the result overturned. His reward? Being on the wrong end of a Lib Dem majority of about 20,000.
Still on the subject of undemocracy, The Scotsman investigates why so many votes were discounted. Two Xs in the regional section, no markings at all, numbering rather than Xing - that's pretty fatal. Some of the reasons it suggests are open for challenge. Any mark in one box - whether an X, a tick, or a digit 5 - should be accepted, so long as it is clear, and does not identify the voter. The paper also suggests that a blank vote in the constituency section would invalidate the vote. If this is correct - and we have no evidence to confirm this actually happened - then it does expose the folly of physically linking the two ballots.
France
So, M. Sarkozy has won la Presidentialle. He will be formally inaugrated on 16 May. We stand by our initial reaction, that this will be bad news for France. His core policies - of putting the interests of capital ahead of those of people - have been tried elsewhere in the world. Almost without exception, these treatments have found to be the wrong prescription for whatever problems they were intended to solve. If M. Sarkozy attempts to impose these flawed and failed ideas on a hostile French populace, he will surely face the true face of French democracy - large, hostile crowds on the streets of every town and city, baying for the blood of those who would presume to rule them. Yet if M. Popup resiles from his commitments, he will rightly be slaughtered as an ineffectual politician, prepared to say anything to get into office, yet not actually doing anything once he arrives. It's no wonder that, in a show of Socialist support, the British Labour party welcomes M. Sarkozy with open arms, for they are similarly lustful for power, yet incapable of executing any action.
There are things to cheer about, and Johann Hari puts his finger on them. When every vote in every part of the country matters, those who would presume to rule us must be everywhere at once. They can't follow the Labour policy of targetting hard-working families and letting the singletons, infertile, and elderly go hang. Nor can they concentrate their effort into a couple of hundred patches of ground. Another cheer arose from the clear choice, the cleavage between the two parties. On the one hand, racist extremism; on the other, a settled if cautious life. It's not like the UK, where there are various packagings of the same fundamental idea.
And not trivialising politics, not reducing it to Westminster gossip, that's got to help. Take, for instance, the amazing result in Boston borough: C 5 (-7) Lab 0 (-11) LD 0 (-4) Ind 2 (nc) BBI 25 (+22) BBI GAIN The Boston By-pass Independents swept the board in almost the entire borough, with their main manifesto commitment being to lobby hard for a by-pass for the town. A single-issue group, yes. A group of intense local interest, yes. But this is the democratic engagement that far too much of Britain is lacking.
