Lock & Load

The problem with stopping the BNP…

… is that, in the current state of our democracy, it’s too easy to get elected.

Let me explain.

Nick Cohen’s incisive piece on the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog, posed the question: Bigots, racists and worthless buffoons - so why do they keep getting elected?

Cohen warns of the dangers of communalist voting following communalist campaigning. This got my mind ticking over, and having just run the election results for my own ward through a spreadsheet, I realised that – with the right motivation and certain conditions – it is pretty damn easy to get elected.

Now, in no way do I wish to denigrate the amount of effort put in by the various candidates because I’m sure they’ll be the first to tell you that it isn’t that easy at all… and 12 of the 15 candidates didn’t get in, so it can’t be that easy! Right?

Wrong. Bear with me while I start at the beginning.

The first thing to note is that in a ward of almost 10 000 eligible voters, fewer than 3000 people bothered to vote. Yes, the poll (i.e. voter turnout) was a dismal 29%. That means almost 3 out of every 4 voters simply did not care enough about the issues presented by the political candidates to trot down the road to cast a vote.

But let’s get specific. Because each person has three votes, there were 8229 votes cast out of 27717 possible votes. But here’s the shocker. Of the votes cast, all a candidate needed to win a seat on the council was just under 1000.

Yes, to win a seat under current conditions, all you have to do is persuade a thousand people to vote for you. You merely have to attract a piddling 3.5% of the total votes cast by persuading 10% of the total population to vote for you.

Now hold that thought, because I’m going to come back to it and explain why this is so dangerous when a group like the BNP wakes up to this.

The other shocker is that ‘democracy’ while it may be seen to be in action, it’s just a mirage – it’s (literally) taking a nap or watching TV while giving every appearance of being hard at work. And that’s not a metaphor. Democracy is not an abstract idea. It is the will of the people, and instead of voting on Thursday, 3 out of 4 people were willing to do something else instead. Democracy went home and watched TV.

For example, the winning candidates in my ward got 1118, 997 and 929 votes respectively. As I said, it means that they each managed to secure 10% of the total number of possible votes or a third of the actual votes. But wait. Candidates who didn’t win got 5320 votes between them, so two thirds of the actual votes cast, or 20% of the total population of the ward did NOT want those councillors.

So this is the state of our democracy. To win a seat, all you need is to corner 10% of possible votes. Roughly double the number of votes for you will go against you (but they will be distributed over the many losing candidates) and 70% of possible votes will never be cast, because people – ‘The People’ – simply don’t care about any of the candidates’ platforms.

So how does this help the BNP fascists get in while we’re having a nap?

Well, typically fringe parties with a particular communalist axe to grind will get a very high proportion of their supporters to the polls, while the average middle ground of (usually) decent, moderate opinion, doesn’t get off its collective arse.

The nightmare scenario in any ward like my own is that they manage to find 1000 people to ‘motivate’. That’s all it takes. And since those 1000 people can vote for three candidates and are likely to vote for the same party, they would be almost assured of getting at least 2 of the 3 elected, while the rest of the vote is split between not only the three big parties, but the several left-wing alternatives as well.

But there are a few things to consider that might avert disaster. Communalist politics tends to burn very bright very quickly, instead of the slow-burn politics – backed up by hard work and solid social policy – that characterises more sane politics. While groups like the BNP might theoretically need a very small threshold (1000 people, remember) to take over a ward, they will be batting above their weight: they will be using the top end of their support base, while people of goodwill are lethargic. Moderate and progressive parties are only mining a small seam (29% of eligible voters) with a large potential for growth if they can find a way to motivate and activate these people.

(Sadly, they appear to be squabbling over the spoils instead. Fighting to capture a larger share of an ever shrinking pool of reliable voters, the main parties are failing to capture the imaginations of the vast majority of the electorate. Sure, the electorate may seem lethargic and indifferent, but whose fault is that?)

The trick then, considering the fascists have a far more finite support-base which they use up more quickly, is to get the middle-ground interested in politics again. The people who are going to stop the BNP, aren’t the voters. They’re the people watching TV or taking a nap. The people who could be voters.

While the school halls drafted in to serve as the polls echo with the occasional scratching of solitary pencils, the army of democracy is snacking oven chips and fiddling with the remote. Who is going to lead them into battle?

posted by Brett Lock @ 10:11 am