The Straight Choice

UKIP’s first election leaflet for the Norwich North by-election has rolled in:

Leaving aside the fact that there’s no mention of the area that it covers (UK, South East, Just Norwich North?). Actually, lets not leave it aside just yet. In the process of trying to work out where the figures do come from I’ve got totally confused. They are different from the results for the East of England constituency, in which Norwich North sits, they have UKIP higher at 20%, but a much larger gap to the Conservatives at 31%. And they don’t come from the national results. My only guess is that they are quoting the European results for Norwich North itself? Can anyone confirm?

Anyway, back to the point. What exactly is the scale of that graph? The 9% between the Tories and UKIP is represented as about a quoter of the size of the 11% difference between Labour an UKIP. Maybe its some kind of esoteric imperial measurement system UKIP have got attached to? None of these leaner metric measurement systems for UKIP.

[Please read comments below for full understanding of this issue. Following comments some of the text here has been amended to make it clear that we do not have a view of the dispute]

I haven’t got time right now, but to show how there is a difference between Parliamentary elections (which get in the news) and local level elections (where politics is born), here is an email I received about a recent campaign in Castle Electoral Division of Cambridgeshire from a supporter of John Hipkin (who was a City councillor standing for the county council seat). Hipkin lost against the LibDem candidate Belinda Brooks-Gordon.

It’s not so much about abuse, though that did come into it. It’s more in this case that the LibDem candidate pretty much invented an alarmist threat which, as far as anyone can tell, didn’t get beyond a rejection in March. But she was still mentioning it as her platform in June. [see attached leaflet]

Her website, as you guessed, refers to the projected supermarket and offers a link to a 248-page document about the meeting at which it was discussed by Cambridge District Council. I can’t get the link to deliver more than the agenda to my AppleMac, though you may be able to do better. I attach it as a pdf.

However, it led me to the agenda and minutes of that meeting, held on 10
March 2009

http://scambs.moderngov.co.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=680&MId=4399&Ver=4

These give the firm impression that the whole idea was greeted negatively and went no further. See appendices E and F and Minutes, Site 4. It does not feature in the Recommendations. As Appendix E makes clear, the planned development, which has been under discussion for years and subject to repeated public consultation, has never included a hypermarket. It would be totally inappropriate in a suburban context with very limited (and already
congested) road access.

I first heard of the threatened supermarket from the candidate, Belinda Brooks-Gordon, after that meeting and signed her petition against the proposal. Like others, I believed on the basis of what she said that it was a genuine threat. On 8 May she was still referring to it in her email campaign as a ‘plan’ (attached: Supermarket 1).

She adds there, tellingly:

> None of the other candidates are bothered about, or even seem to understand,
> the supermarket issue despite the fact that it is one of the biggest
> development and environmental threats this community has faced. Indeed, one
> of the candidate’s for the County elections already has a City council post
> and has done nothing about the issue. So I do hope that I can count on your
> support on 4th June. It is one of the best ways to counter the proposed
> supermarket development.

The City Councillor in question was her main rival, John Hipkin, who had ‘done nothing’ because he believed the proposal was just a try-on by the University. He would be at least as opposed to such a development as she was, but her leaflets (which I didn’t keep, I’m afraid) reiterated that he was in favour of large supermarkets in general.

On the eve of the election, 3 June, she was still referring to the supermarket in a way that would lead the unwary to think that it was a real threat (attached: Supermarket 2). A letter she put through all our doors at about that time also said, ‘Local residents have also made it clear that they don’t want a large supermarket in this area.’

I canvassed for John Hipkin. Many people on the doorstep told me they would vote for Belinda to stop the supermarket. In other respects they preferred John Hipkin. She won by 1095 votes to 756.

There. Long story and certainly too detailed for your website. I am quite hardened politically (by Labour Party membership and the AUT) but I’ve never come across anything quite like this, where there’s no platform to counter what is in effect a fiction that *works* electorally.

Brooks-Gordon has a blog, where she explains in her election round-up:

To explore the voting figures, it is interesting that in Castle the Green vote was down from 451 votes in 2005 for the same candidate to 226 votes in this election. The Conservative vote also dropped from 767 in 2005 down to 267 in 2009, The Labour vote dropped dramatically from 733 in 2005 to 196 votes in 2009. It is an excellent result for the Lib Dems especially as 1) this year’s vote was split between 5 candidates – one more candidate than in the last County Council elections in 2005, and 2) the 2009 turnout was approximately 62% compared to the 2005. It was a low turnout compared to last time when the County elections were held on the same day as the General Election.

Moving on from the numbers to the candidates, Belinda had to campaign against candidates who included a student without family ties, and a retired person without a full-time job who also had the benefit of the incumbency factor because as a sitting City Councillor there was name recognition. Belinda has a big family, a job, and no name recognition before the campaign. Despite slender resources (the Lib Dems are a grassroots party) and despite the Lib Dems contesting 11 seats in this election, by stint of sheer hard work, energy, enthusiasm, volunteer help from all walks of life, and insight into the needs of ALL groups in the community, it was possible to get another councillor for Castle.

Now I can’t form an informed view on the allegation, not having the time to wade through these very long local authority documents in a town where I don’t live and in my view is so ringed by supermarket developments and traffic congestion that it couldn’t physically get any worse.

However, I do support the view that the regimes according to which information about planning applications and their considerations are made public are so arcane and obtuse that it would be possible for people to lie about them for political gain and get away with it because it would be unnecessarily and unreasonably difficult to expose such lies.

Here is a good time to plug Richard’s other democracy-in-action project: PlanningAlerts.com which, by the way, has also experienced no funding or replacement project from any of the our great and good public or private institutions, and wouldn’t need to exist if council webmasters did their jobs properly in the first place.

Support planningalerts.com, sign up to it, write scrapers, and press for it to be extended to handle planning consultations and decisions about planning applications.

The place to find latest news about the Norwich North by-election is by_elections.blogspot.com and norfolkblogger.blogspot.com.

The TheStraightChoice.org isn’t the best place for your news on this particular by-election, because we’d like to cover all election materials live and uncut.

And that includes election materials from the Nonsuch ward by-election, where the polling day is on 2 July.

Nothing has come through from it, sadly.

This message will be repeated until I stop feeling guilty for not blogging enough.

The messages on the Green Party mailing lists indicate they are mobilizing for an expected by-election date of 23 July. I didn’t believe this until our Norwich-based leaflet mole uploaded leaflets from the three main parties yesterday:

The Labour party, which distributed the colour leaflet, should have the advantage because their campaign gets to set the date. But I’m guessing that that’s where their advantage ends, because their campaign’s local presence has this unexpected gaping hole in it, which would have been filled by their serving MP, Ian Gibson, now resigned and quit from the fray in disgust. Maybe some of his close friends who supported his campaigns over the years have abandoned the scene as well.

I don’t personally have any inside information. I can only speculate wildly based on the observations of traveling to the Crewe and Nantwich and Glenrothes by-elections last year.

I am sorely disappointed not to be able to make it to the by-election in Norwich on account of being on holiday, so Richard is going to have to fill in for me and find out what’s hitting the streets. On recent form, you simply can’t trust the press to report the story competently.

As usual, because it is so easy to mismanage, the on-line presence is where you can always see disarray and disorganization. Take the website of the former MP, www.iangibsonmp.co.uk. This looks normal, but for the one press release about his resignation on the 5 June, and no links to electioneering websites outside of it.

According to the Norwich North by-election, 2009 Wikipedia article, the Labour Party don’t even have a candidate selected yet.

The party tacticians are trying to work out if they can win it. Then they’ll know who to choose.

You can tell when a party knows it’s going to win a by-election — they send all their front bench cabinet ministers or shadow ministers over there to get their pictures taken with the candidate in order fill up the campaign leaflets the next day with their celebrity endorsements.

You don’t get anywhere by being associated with losers.

No message could be clearer, except to our current press corps who don’t really appear to have a clue about election dynamics. That, or they don’t want to educate us about it properly, like so many things.

My evidence of this is contained in my blog posts of:

• 4 November 2008 – Glenrothes: What the papers said
• 7 November 2008 – Glenrothes: The verdict
• 8 November 2008 – Glenrothes: What the papers say <—- the important one

Here’s me outside the Labour party office in Crewe last year:

That was the experience which started it all. I can easily see what drew Screaming Lord Sutch to these places. I can’t understand why there aren’t more nutters who descend on these events.

It’s a darn-side more entertaining than chasing solar eclipses around the world.

A “Pretty standard thank you leaflet following up local elections” from Taversham has showed up on the database. It’s in the Norwich North constituency. And it’s the Lib Dems playing fast and loose with the polling numbers again.

We don’t have any other thank you leaflets following up elections anywhere else on TheStraightChoice.org. If there were enough of them, we’d create a special category.

As I blogged earlier this is going to be about a possible forthcoming Norwich North by-election.

Excerpted text from the leaflet includes:

Following their success at the recent elections, the Lib Dems are now the official opposition at Conservative run Norfolk County Council. Labour now have just 3 Councillors in all of Norfolk (down from 22).

At the local elections the Lib Dems won 28% of the vote finishing 2nd behind the Conservatives.

Labour bosses force out local MP Ian Gibson
With the Green Party in a poor 4th place at the last election, local people will likely choose between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives for their new MP.

Libdems are the green choice
With 4th place Green Party out of the race here (just 3% at the last General Election), more and more people are looking at the Lib Dems as the “green choice” locally.

The results from the 2005 Parliamentary General election were: Labour (Ian Gibson) 44.9%, Conservative 33.2%, Libdems 16.2%, Green 2.7%, UKIP 2.4%.

Now, I happen to know that Norwich (the city, not Norfolk County) has been one of the Green Party hot-spots over the last several years.

The Norfolk County Election 2009 across the region results give: Conservative 45.9%, Lib Dems 22.7%, Labour 13.8%, Green 10.9%, UKIP 4.6%, BNP 0.8%.

This produced: 60 Conservative seats, 13 Lib Dem seats, 7 Green seats (all in Norwich City district), 3 Labour seats and 1 UKIP seat (in Great Yarmouth), for Norfolk County Council.

(It’s possible I’ve read 28% from the leaflet above, when it should be 23%, as the image is quite blurry.)

Here is the complete table of votes in the wards that make up the Norwich North constituency (with thanks to Phil Rodgers) extracted and totalled up from this official table of county-wide results here.

(Boundary changes that happen on the next General Election cause the loss of Taverham and Drayton, so this leaflet is still targeted correctly, as long as the by-election happens before the General Election.)

This is one of those standard cases of misreporting of poll numbers. The reporting is done for a district that doesn’t match the district of the forthcoming election, and it’s done using out of date numbers.

Now, you could argue that going back to the previous (out of date) Parliamentary election for your polling numbers for the next Parliamentary election is reasonable, but while the Greens polled 3% in 2005, the LibDems polled only 16%. This leaflet, however, invited readers to contrast it with their 23% poll in the 2009 local elections across the entire county, where the Greens got 11%.

In our first-past-the-post electoral system, most of the votes don’t count. Voters who know that their votes don’t count can sometimes be persuaded to vote for another party, so there is a lot of campaigning to be done on these polling numbers. Which is why they are worth lying about.

Update: 22 June 2009 – added Phil Rodgers’s transcribed data into the incomplete table.

You can debate all you want about how much democracy a country has, but it’s much easier to decide: How much democracy does a country want?

As that old saying goes: “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.”.

The whole point of elections is they’re one of the few ceremonies where the public and the elite — whose interests are often polar opposites — are able to agree on the meaning.

And then the public invariably trusts the elite to count the votes without any outside electoral observers. Big mistake. Using Twitter rather than printed leaflets (as used to be done in the old days) to organize it, everyone who believes the election was stolen comes out onto the street in the same place and sees how many there are.

Gosh, that’s quite a lot. Something has to give. I guess it’s up to the elite to decide how unpleasant this is going to get.

In the UK the candidates and their colleagues are allowed to go to the count where it is all done visibly. It’s difficult to kick up a stink about something going wrong when you’ve actually witnessed the slips of paper pour from the ballot box and seen with your own eyes how few of them have a cross next to your own name.

Don’t get me started about the United States situation where the Presidential election was stolen in 2000 and then again in 2004.

Officially, it was a computer error. And the software was proprietary and secret because of its commercially sensitive nature — commercially sensitive in the way that a toxic waste leak into the town’s water supply is commercially sensitive.

As I said, don’t get me started. Americans didn’t get out on the street and halt the process of ratifying the election, the declared result stood. They didn’t want democracy as much as Iranians evidently do.

Meanwhile, there’s the Open Rights Group 2007 report into UK electronic voting systems, which is well worth a read.

Today there is an important election in Iran.

It’s a polarized run-off between Mousavi (the youth vote) and Ahmadinejad (the trad vote), and there’s evidence that it’s a far more on-line event than our elections over here in the good old US of K.

People are blogging. People are on the streets. There is a demographics of youth tilting the whole vote in a new direction. The Guardian reporter says:

For young people I think what you see is a sense of liberation. Normally in Iran there is the morality police who are out and about patrolling, making sure that women have their head covered, young men aren’t wearing tight jeans, that couples are canoodling in public. There is an islamic morality that is part of the way this country works. And for the period of the election this has been relaxed, so you have this tremendous sense of people letting off steam, letting their hair down while they can, and it’s become galvanized into what really seems to be a significant social political movement…

Are election leaflets too old fashioned? Well, the Ahmadinejad side probably needs to use them, because their supporters are not going to be young and on-line.

I don’t know what Iranian election leaflets look like. Maybe someone could upload one.

We’d like to see the software behind TheStraightChoice.org go global. This would be interesting because we’d have to solve the post-code-location problem for different countries, and that’s a useful resource to have.

I have this intuition that the live record of physical events (leaflet drops through letter boxes) is going to feel more compelling than the timeline of tweets and blog posts. I don’t know why.

If Ahmadinejad loses, then a lot of campaigning material in America and Israel that says, “vote for me because Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust” is going to have to be dumped.

That argument never made any sense. But you don’t have to make sense to get votes. That’s the beauty of it.

What just happened?

The electoral commission doesn’t publish it’s own breakdown of the data by sub-constituency, but just links to the BBC webpage of election results.

Well, that’s great. Now we have Nick Griffin going out and representing my region for the next five years. As you should know, I was rooting for the Green Party. (Unless I am in a party, how would I know anything about election leafleting? They don’t teach it in school, you know.)

Here’s the breakdown:

Tits! Missed by 0.3% of the vote, a marginal value that was garnered by the small parties known as English Democrats, Arthur Scargill Labour Party, No2EU, Jury Team, and Libertas.

I’ve already commented on Libertas and Jury Team (in my personal no-holds-barred blog).

Today we have a look at The Christian Party (UK) and the Christian People’s Alliance who told people to put their cross by the cross.

Ain’t Wikipedia great! Under the Christian Party, the Welsh flag will be banned because it’s the sign of the devil.

That’s a single issue for you people of Wales.

Hey, dude, it’s only a flag. What’s the fuss? It’s hardly the most serious matter.

Here’s their party political broadcast by the leaders of the two parties. Get your heads out of the sand and watch it. They’ve got an elephant in the room.

The Christian Party is a bible-believing faith-based Conservative Party, that believes in small government, greater labourly(sp?) responsibility, low taxes based on an economy driven by thrift and enterprise rather than debt and consumerism.

The Christian Peoples Alliance is a christian democratic party linked to christians in politics right across Europe. We exist to challenge the secular agenda of the big parties, and we’ve carried the support of church leaders right the way from Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and evangelicals.

What unites us is our Christian faith and the values that flow from it. Judeo-Christian values that have carved out a heritage and our history and provide the foundations for our hope in the future.

Together [we] have set out a manifesto of practical measures based on biblical principles that, if adopted, will make a better Britain for us all.

We call our manifesto A Time of Jubilee.

Sounds a bit like the Republican party under George W. Bush — who, along with Tony Blair, I understand, was a Christian. They also explain (on their aptly named www.wastedvote.info page) that a vote for the Christian Party will keep the BNP out.

Well, it didn’t, did it? That’s another thing the Electoral Commission could do for us: conduct opinions poll a week before the election and publish them in the public interest so we can all see where we stand, tactical-voting-wise. People need to know.

As I am collecting videos explaining the d’Holt method of voting, here’s their public information effort (which is still better than the Electoral Commission’s)

I’m a single issue man myself. It’s not so much that Iraq War is the most important issue to me — it’s that it’s a very measurable benchmark in relation to the claim that biblical belief prevents undesirable consequences in politics in the modern age.

Google search on site:www.christianparty.org.uk/ iraq yields nothing.

But the Christian Peoples Alliance gets articles like this:

Speaking tomorrow at an anti-Iraq war rally in Newham, organised by the Stop the War Coalition, the Leader of the Christian Peoples Alliance party, Councillor Alan Craig, will say that grassroots Christian activists in Britain must demonstrate their passion for peace and justice and show that politically active Christians are not only on the Religious Right. Having addressed 500 people outside BBC Television Centre in protest against blasphemy, Alan Craig will now call on the 50,000 people who complained to the BBC over ‘Jerry Springer – the Opera’ to campaign with equal enthusiasm on wider ethical issues such as peace-making, the ‘Make Poverty History campaign’, tackling economic and environmental exploitation and pressure for international trade justice.

Aha! I remember something about that Jerry Springer: The Opera campaign.

Turns out they got very annoyed with people taking the mickey out of their mythological world-view, and got out and did something.

One thing led to another, and now several years later it’s morphed into a political party with 1.7% of the vote.

Politics will continue to be strange until normal people start getting more involved.

Here’s one of their leaflets:

Ian Gibson MP has resigned to spend more time with his family money so there may be a byelection in Norwich North. The atmosphere in Parliament these days is probably not much fun.

I believe that, because he was Labour Party, Gordon Brown gets to choose when to hold the by-election.

Oh goody. I hope he sends Tom Watson over to manage it, now he has the time on his hands, because I really love going over those anti-blogger leaflets he made when he ran the Hartlepool byelection campaign in 2004 before overstepping the mark.

There’s an informative set of comments about the Norwich North constituency spanning several years here.

Norwich is a nice place to visit. Good beer. I wish it was a rural constituency, because the distribution pattern of leaflets would be more interesting. A densely populated area is too easy to cover with each round.

We need to advertise TheStraightChoice there by delivering leaflets. But it’s not like a normal leaflet drop — maybe five leaflets per street. Getting uploads is not like getting votes. You don’t need too many.

I mean, like a 1% vote for a candidate would make him a real loser, but 1% of people uploading leaflets would be phenomenal.

Maybe if there was another leaflet uploading website, we’d have to fight over who got most of the people’s uploads first. But then again, it’s the internet, and we’d simply steal from each other’s databases. The data doesn’t belong to us anyway.

Today is June 4 and my partner tried to get me out of the house without my morning tea at 6:30am to deliver Green Party leaflets. I headed out at 6:50am.

The delivery on the day is potentially important because folks might pocket your leaflet on their way out the door as a method of reminding themselves to go out and vote (if that’s what they are inclined to do).

This one batch of streets near my house gets hit hard, because they are in reach and dense with letter boxes. People there don’t know that half a mile up the road they never get any Green Party leaflets.

These were just ordinary leaflets used in another part of town, not special ones that say “Vote Today” I saw going out last May from other parties in the target ward during the council elections. It’s important that every leaflet to the same house looks different.

There’s a shortage of public buildings in some parts of the city, so they have set up portacabins at certain junctions. Probably cost quite a bit.

We voted in the basement of this place.

Later in the morning, while I was shopping, I asked someone I knew whether he had voted today. He turned out to be a “bring back hanging — it’s the only thing these violent thugs understand” and “I’d agree with the BNP if I could be bothered to vote” sort of bloke.

Maybe it’s my age, but I talk politics with people to find out what their rationale is, not to convince them. I know I don’t have the talent to persuade people. That’s what politicians are for. I converse for my own good, to learn, not to teach.

The conversation about politics drifted onto the TV program on the BBC last night, “Kate Adie returns to Tiananmen Square”, which had really impressed him.

Those Chinese get killed for trying to get democracy in their country, which we know is cherished here about as much as an old shoe. Funny how those who don’t have democracy are much more keen on it than those who do. Funny how killing them off doesn’t really deter them from wanting to get it.

Do you think the death penalty only stops people murdering kids in other street gangs, but it can’t stop people fighting for justice and democracy?

I don’t think the question was understood. The two concepts were in separate thought compartments.

If you don’t know who to vote for today, Nosemonkey has some online resources for deciding how to vote.

I was interested to note that he linked to that Green Party video about the voting system I did earlier, as he is not a Green supporter. I felt concerned about that, given my affiliation, but apparently there just is no other resource for describing the EU voting system.

I mean, goddamnit, what do you think the electoral commission is for? There’s this embarrassing animation about how to walk to the polling station, and then they give only this page to explain the mechanism of the system! Not good enough! This is something that needs an on-line animation with pie charts and real numbers.

The facts are, later tonight, when the polls close, there will be a count of the ballot sheets with their faces turned down. Some of my colleagues are going to be there at the local station to see if they can glean some estimation of the votes in Liverpool by looking at the imprint of the “X”s through the paper.

The number of ballots have to match those who registered at the poll to prevent ballot stuffing.

The real count happens on Sunday when rest of Europe votes, and the results start to come through later that evening.

I expect there to be a pause in election leafletting after today to give everyone a break, and then it probably picks up much sooner than you would think in certain parts of the country where a candidate is really serious about getting elected.

The only way to find out is to either be there, or keep the profile of TheStraightChoice high enough such that it appears on our radar.