Thursday, May 31, 2007

Labour meltdown?

Now, bias openly admitted here ... I'm a Labour politician who supports PR (bizarre I know) ... but I've just added up the Party affiliation of Council Leaders in the 32 Local Authorities in Scotland following the 3rd May elections and subsequent endless negotiations, which do appear to have nearly all been settled now.

Indeed, all but 1 Local Authority (Stirling ... details here) is now working in blissful harmony ;-)

... and the results are:

Labour - 11*
Independent - 8
SNP - 6
Lib-Dem - 4**
Tory - 2

* - looks like Stirling may make it 12 eventually
** - what can I say, one-quarter Edinburgh's fault ;-((

Just a reminder that Labour only had control of 13 Councils before May 3rd.

Now I know that the SNP have most "Councillors" in Scotland, but the political affiliation of the Council Leader does pretty much correlate to the make-up of the largest political Group on 'each' Council.

Interesting ... and, as far as I know, completely ignored in the media?

Meltdown??

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Meltdown??"

The media also presented the Holyrood elections as some sort of catastrophic meltdown for Labour. However Labour dropped in % wasn't very big (and less than what some polls predicted) and the SNP win was more due to their big surge thanks to drop of small parties support (collapse in SSP case). Even in seats Labour lost just 4 seats overall in the end (polls seemed to predict Labour in high 30/low 40 range)

Andrew said...

Andrea

I don't disagree at all - but for me, the Holyrood result really shows up the flaws in AMS as an electoral system.

Okay - you can't manipulate AMS as much as FPTP, but the SNP did a spectacularly successful job of making it work for them ...

... contrast that with STV were almost all of the power is in the hands of the voter. It's what scares the hell out of "Party Machines" (of all persuasions) but it's also why I strongly believe it is the most preferable system ... not perfect, but then nothing in life is.

Andrew

Anonymous said...

yes, I agree that AMS still keeps some sort of "distortions" (even more evident in Wales with just 4 members region)