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!

I love (insert name of club) loves you!!

Well after a short interlude Glasgow again has two gay nightclubs. Choice, in my view, is always a good thing, and so the re-opening of the old Bennets was just what this doctor ordered.

Plenty has been written on the subject of the opening night on Facebook, and I see little virtue in re-hashing it here. To condense it all – well the new owners seriously underestimated the curiosity value that the opening night would attract and the bars were stowed 4 deep at least for as long as I was in the place, and at this point I have to confess I left when it became clear that I’d need to wait about 30 to 40 minutes to get served. These things happen: I don’t recall any of the critics having part-time jobs as nightclub owners so to level criticism on this front is a bit puerile to say the least. From what I read the new management admitted their mistake and got on with the job the following nights.

Unlike many I can’t say I’ve ever been totally sold on one or the other of the two places. My first sojourns on the scene, more than a decade ago now, were to Polo – that’s where my friends at the time went so I went there too. When Club Devotion opened, and what a breath of fresh air that was, that’s where we gravitated to, and I was as sorry as the next person to see its demise when its ownership changed. Bennets it was then, and many a happy night I’ve had in there, glow sticks in hand of course, bouncing about on the top stage.

But over the past few months I became a bit more of a floating voter so to speak and took my custom wherever the mood and the company took me. On occasions that meant flipping between the two clubs in the course of the night out and I always enjoyed my perambulations along Glassford Street.

Until recently of course when Polo changed its door policy and opened their smoking area inside. All of a sudden my options were limited. And like most of you I’m sure I don’t like limited options!

I’m not entirely sure what their reasoning behind this move was – fair enough if I lived in one of the flats opposite I’m not entirely sure I’d like the noise that the outside smoking area generated. But the consequence of this decision, especially after their excellent winter card expired, was to mean a choice had to be made: did you go there first and then up the street, or vice versa.

As many of you know I like the occasional weekend away in Manchester. It’s a change of scenery if nothing else and I am fortunate to have friends who share my love of the place, and indeed I now have some friends in Manchester itself. The scene is larger, so as you would expect there’s more choice than we’re used to up here, and that is part of the attraction of the place. No matter who I travel down with there’s somewhere to suit everyone’s taste.

And that’s the biggest difference between the scenes in the two cities – the variety and choice: the talent isn’t really better looking – there are just more of them and you haven’t seen most of them before!

But the choice aspect runs a little deeper. Unlike Glasgow, where mere mention of the name of either club in the gaydar chat room is likely to spark off furious debate at best and frankly pathetic vitriol at worst, no-one really cares where you’ve been or where you’re going.

I’ve yet to hear the words “regulars only” or “where have you been tonight” at the door of any bar or club in the Canal Street vicinity though a bouncer did once actually say, “You do know this is a gay club, sir?” No seriously he did! People aren’t turned away because they arrive in a group, or on the basis of what they’re wearing. The one exception is Vanilla, the lesbian bar, which is fair enough in my view, but should you ever be fortunate enough to find yourself in Manchester with several lesbian friends then tag along with them and pay the place a visit as the music is superb!

There’s also not the same cut-throat competitive mentality that seems to pervade Glasgow’s Gay Triangle from time to time either with offers of £1 drinks and the like. The competition, whilst there, is of an altogether more adult nature.

And what is the competition about? The pink pound is what it’s all about at the end of the day. I don’t doubt for a moment, and I have several friends and acquaintances that either do or have worked in gay clubs and pubs, that the staff on the whole pan their nights out to make things go well. Indeed one side effect of Bennets new management was in my view a distinct improvement in the much but rightly maligned standard of bar service in Polo.

But at the end of the day the owners of such establishments, whether large or small, are running businesses to make money. How much has always been a matter of some speculation and I have no more knowledge of this than the next person to be served, but “a lot” would be my guess!

So given that, and of course I may be wrong and both establishments are permanently teetering on the verge of financial ruin, there is scope for a little relaxation on all fronts.

As customers we need to relax a little in our support for one place or the other, there being a fine line drawn between healthy banter and blind loyalty.

As businesses they need to realise that what the customers do want is healthy competition, and if that means allowing people to flip between the two in the course of a night out, then so be it!