Two weeks off - next time for sure

Well the dust has settled, the counting machines have been locked up, the pundits have crunched their numbers (and much has been said about that elsewhere so I’ll not repeat it) and all over the land politicians’ cars are returning to a state of normality. Talking of cars I was most impressed how Alison Thewliss managed to get two of us in the back of hers at one stage, as I feared we’d need to hail a passing rickshaw, of which there are more in John Street than Bridgeton I have to say, to get us to our leafleting area.

Having bravely dipped my toe back into the political water at last year’s Scottish Parliament elections by stuffing some letters into envelopes, I felt inspired, for a variety of reasons, to do a little more this time round. Having once, long ago it now seems, lived my life fully engrossed in politics, it felt more than a little strange standing at Bridgeton Cross one Saturday afternoon, having dragged along my friend Allan for moral support, waiting to see who would turn up. After what seemed an eternity the two candidates and a couple of others arrived and off we went, into parts of Glasgow I never knew existed, although as it turned out we were probably never more than half a mile from our starting point at any stage.

 One of the problems explaining  my lack of political involvement these days is that I have never identified myself with Glasgow in the same way I did with Hamilton all those years ago and even yet I have no real grasp of the area covered by the Calton ward where I now stay. It’s a very diverse area and some of the flats we delivered leaflets to were seemed worlds apart from the affluent pocket of housing I stay in on one edge of the ward. Having been challenged to use two words in this blog (and I’ve used one already) I think I could safely say that some of the gardens we trudged through to deliver our leaflets through worn out letter boxes, in even more worn out front doors, could safely be summed up by that excellent Scots word “midden”. It was distressing in the second decade of the 21^st century to see filthy children’s toys languishing in unkempt gardens in what had clearly once been if not quite “des-res” then an improvement on the tenement slums of the area in the 1950s.

Council elections, perhaps strangely for a Nationalist, are always what have interested me the most, partly I think as back in the late 80s and early 90s, the era of my previous political involvement, they were the one area where with a big of hard and concentrated work it was possible for the SNP to do well.

My first ever election campaign was helping out in Bellshill where a dedicated team of workers saw Duncan McShannon win the seat in a council by-election. I stood as a candidate myself in 5 council elections, twice for the now thankfully dismembered Strathclyde Regional Council, twice for Hamilton District Council, and lastly and the time I finally got elected, for the new South Lanarkshire Council. And I have to say I really enjoyed the campaigns and all the organisation that went into them.

There’s a lot of work involved in an election campaign, much of it unseen by the voters, whether of the planning variety of which splitting a ward up into manageable leaflet runs is but one, and that’s the main difference I think between Hamilton and the area we were in. There were no manageable leaflet runs – a hotchpotch mixture of lanes and alleyways, tenements with and without controlled entries (I’m sure the Labour candidate at the polling station swore that 2/1 was the lucky buzzer to get in), and all in all nothing like the leafy suburb of Silvertonhill with its mass of Wimpey houses.

Then there’s the STV voting system itself with all its nuances, not least of which is the influence played by the alphabet on your chances of election. Calton was one of the few wards in the city where the SNP candidate with a surname starting with T beat the other one whose surname had the fortune to be nearer the start of the alphabet. I do think that is something that should be looked at, whether by grouping candidates of the same part on the ballot paper, or my totally randomising the order the names appear in.

Well having survived my first venture back onto the streets I managed to help out another couple of times before Polling Day itself. Now back in the day I’d have taken a fortnight off work for the whole thing, but I’m not quite back at that stage just yet. But I still found myself out at 7am delivering, or rather failing to deliver (those dreaded controlled entry doors again – clearly the postmen have long since stopped arriving at that time) a “Good Morning” election leaflet. Then it was off to work, and I have to say that by mid-afternoon I was twitching to get away and both vote (it’s always been a recurring nightmare of mine that with our antiquated voting system I’ll arrive to discover someone else has already done so in my name) and stand at a Polling Station.

And that was an experience and a half. Having divested poor Alison of her rosette I spent the next three hours representing the party to those few electors who actually bothered to turn up. There were the usual smiles, growls, winks and nods as I handed out our reminder leaflet as they went in leaving me I have to say with no concept of how we’d done at all.

The independent candidate and his hand-held megaphone were the light entertainment for the evening and I have to say that the Labour candidate and her father were pleasant company and full of friendly banter for what became an increasingly chilly evening, and by the back of nine were winding me up no end when anything remotely looking like Alison’s car came along the street, as by then I was in desperate need of a quick dash home to collect the jacket I should have brought to begin with.

I also had the pleasure of meeting our SNP MSP John Mason for the first time, although I didn’t quite know what to make of him saying, “Ah you’re Nic – I’ve heard all about you”!

But before long Alison did appear, a jacket was obtained in time to avert hypothermia, and the polls closed. And that was that. The counting wasn’t to take place till the next day so off home I went to put my feet up after what I have to say was an enjoyable experience.

Will I do it all again? Roll on the referendum in 2014 – I’ll be taking 2 weeks off work for that one!

Do Council Elections matter?

In just under a fortnight voters go to the polls to elect councillors to Scotland’s 32 Local Authorities. A ridiculously large number of councils for a nation of just over 5 million people in my view but that’s an issue for another blog altogether.

Just how important are these elections? Historically turnout has always been low – on the whole well under half the registered voters making what is hardly an arduous trek to their local Polling Stations to cast their votes. So are they important at all?

I’ve always had a keen interest in local elections. Many moons ago – in 1986 to be precise, I stood for what turned out to be the first of five occasions as an SNP candidate in Ward 64 (Hamilton West) of the now deservedly defunct Strathclyde Regional Council.

As campaigns go it wasn’t one that set the heather on fire, and compared to later elections was a tame affair – the SNP in Hamilton had imploded in the early 1980s and our team of activists was small to say the least. But we were keen and soon were pounding the streets leafleting almost the entire ward, which was quite a task in itself.

Subsequent campaigns proved more substantial, starting with the 1988 Hamilton District council elections, when employing new campaigning techniques, we caught the Labour Party totally on the hop and managed to snatch victory by a margin of 47 votes in the Cadzow ward, held by Labour at the 1984 elections with 83% of the vote!

I was honoured to be election agent for Jim Smith in that campaign, and stood myself in the Low Waters ward, increasing the vote there too. I will forever remember the Returning Officer’s long pause when he told the assembled candidates and agents the result. He was clearly waiting for someone to say “recount please” but there was merely a shrug of the shoulders and the result was announced!

Sadly Jim was to lose the ward at the next elections in 1992 as Labour mounted a campaign of Parliamentary bye-election scale, but two years later he slashed into the Labour majority in the Regional seat, and although only coming second, obtained the 4^th biggest swing to the SNP in Strathclyde Region as a whole.

A year later in 1995 in my 5^th and last campaign I was successful at last and polled almost 50% of the vote, winning the Silvertonhill seat on the new South Lanarkshire council from an astonished Labour party, who made a clean sweep of the other 19 seats in Hamilton that night.

But turning away from my potted electoral history and back to the subject of this blog – do these elections actually matter?

On a global scale perhaps not, but the impact local councils have on peoples’ lives is substantial. They run nurseries and schools, clean away our rubbish, light our streets and resurface the roads. They regulate the licensing affairs of our clubs and pubs, and provide Police and Firemen to keep us safe. They work with local organisations such as residents groups, housing associations, youth and pensioner groups.

They are in essence about your local community and can make your streets a better place to live.

And in common with all but one kind of election in Scotland they are held under a system of proportional representation so that your vote does count! A far cry from 1986 which saw Labour hold all but a handful of seats under a shameful and antiquated first past the post system that distorted most elections in Scotland right up until the first Scottish Parliament elections in 1999.

Councillors do make things happen. They may be small in scale but they are significant to the people concerned. Getting half a dozen pavements resurfaced and getting double yellow lines painted at a street junction may not sound much to you but I can assure you that they mattered to the residents concerned!

So when it comes to Polling Day on May 3^rd your vote is important, no more so than here in Scotland’s largest city, where for the first time in almost three generations voters have the opportunity to sweep away decades of one party rule.

That opportunity has provided the impetus to get this ex-activist back on the streets putting out leaflets for the two SNP candidates in the Calton ward in Glasgow, candidates who if elected WILL make Glasgow a better place to live!