Medway Council Elections – The View from the Left

The day after the local council elections here in Medway, newly-elected Labour blogger Tristan Osborne commented on the local and national results. I read his post at the time and let it be, thinking it would go no further.

(Incidentally, he couldn't even correctly work out the proportions of votes by party. The linked post claims the Conservative vote remained "static" at 42%, which was indeed their figure in 2007 [actually 42·15%]; but in fact it was just over 46% this time – 80,010 votes out of a total 173,750 votes cast.)

It didn't go any further, at least not until today, some ten days later. The response concerns the rather simplistic, inaccurate and unreasonable paragraph at the end of the "Medway" section...

"Despite the protestations by those on the left; if the Green Party or this TUSC band of lunatics, we would have been able to dent the Tory majority. This point is stressed every single time - if you split the left vote with fringe parties (and lets be frank they are not a realistic prospect of being in government, and even less so with no AV) then you open the field up to the right. Fact."

The local Greens' Steven Keevil understandably felt it appropriate to challenge this idea that, in effect, other Left-wing candidates should have declined to stand in order to give Labour a clear run in opposing the Conservatives.

He is correct, though for the wrong reasons and falls into the same partisan/ideological trap (elections are for the voters and community, not the manipulated benefit of an ideology); but it is right that as many parties/groupings/individuals who feel up to the challenge of campaigning – and perhaps elected office to follow – should feel free to participate in these elections.

They aren't there to give Labour an easier ride; and anyway the Right has its own fringe parties taking hundreds or even thousands (across the piece) of votes, specifically UKIP and the English Democrats who are generally considered to be right-of-centre. Thus we are all in the same boat, and the grown-ups have learned to accept this and live with it without griping.

It wouldn't have made any real difference even if the Green and the Trades Unionists & Socialists candidates hadn't stood. Besides the myth that they take votes only or even primarily from Labour, so that adding their votes to the Labour figures proves something, there is also the fact that these smaller parties never put up a full slate of candidates in any ward, so it isn't a simple arithmetical question anyway.

Candidates' positions on the ballot paper are significant here, as there will be a number of split votes, which are usually done by looking down the ballot for the relevant party names/logos. Those with strong personal votes (something that Election Agents like to deny even exists!) will skew that effect, and I could quote several examples very easily, but by and large the listing order determines how split votes end up being cast.

I'm not going to make this post over-long by writing a ward-by-ward analysis of what might have happened if those candidates hadn't stood; but I have already had a look at the whole question and I cannot see a single seat that would have switched to Labour if it hadn't been for them. I have been checking individual wards' full results, as well as summary spreadsheets of the results' analysis and how many candidates each party fielded in every ward.

As Major John Shepherd in Stargate Atlantis would say: "it's...complicated!"

UPDATE @ 2200: Alan W Collins has in fact done the ward-by-ward calculations, finding (as I did when doing the same first-level exercise myself) that in fact Labour would have done worse without the smaller parties and Independents participating.

At the more complex level at which I hinted immediately above, it doesn't have the same effect; though Alan's post does illustrate very well Labour's fallacy in their original contention. I expected them to look for someone else to blame, and this has been one example of their doing just that.