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!