The Scotsman
June 26, 2004
Summary: An analysis of the impact that the introduction
of choice voting will have in Scotland. The Scotsman
Birth of a Grassroots Transformation
By Joyce McMillan
June 26, 2004
IF THERE���S one thing we can safely say about the gods
of political success and failure, it���s that they like a good laugh. On
Tuesday last, after months of criticism and backbiting capped by a lacklustre
performance in the recent European elections, the mild-mannered John Swinney
resigned from his four-year leadership of the SNP. And on Wednesday - with
remarkably little fuss, thanks to the general roar of speculation about the
Swinney succession - the Scottish Parliament passed a measure that is likely,
over the next few years, to begin a quiet transformation in the SNP���s
position in grassroots Scottish politics; a measure that could, as The
Scotsman���s political editor argued last month, have provided a "major
fillip" for John Swinney, and may still almost double the number of
elected SNP politicians between now and the end of the decade.
The measure in question, of course, is the Local Governance (Scotland) Act,
designed, among other things, to introduce proportional representation in
Scottish local government in time for the elections of 2007. There���s no
missing the bitter irony of the coincidence between John Swinney���s political
fall and a reform that is bound to favour not only his party, but his chosen
style of politics. There���s no point, of course, in idealising proportional
representation as an answer for all our political ills, as some of its
supporters tend to do. This weekend, local officials and researchers from
seven cities across the European Union are gathering in Edinburgh to mark the
end of the three-year Demos Project, designed to investigate ways of
encouraging greater citizen involvement in local decision-making. If there���s
one conclusion on which they can agree - amply supported by the experience of
the roughly proportional Scottish Parliament since 1999 - it���s that
differences in electoral systems have only a marginal impact on the growing
western syndrome of low electoral turnout and public alienation from formal
politics.
As the bitter opponents of PR inside the Labour Party have been quick to point
out, multi-member PR systems of the kind now adopted for Scottish local
government, with a balanced group of three or four councillors for each large
new ward, tend to weaken the personal link between voters and their
representatives in ways that make for less immediate transparency and
accountability. And the introduction of this reform - negotiated by Scottish
Labour���s Executive coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, as a key
element of their current partnership agreement - has come at the price of a
quid pro quo to Scotland���s threatened ranks of Old Labour councillors, in
the form of a raft of financial benefits, including substantial pensions,
salaries and severance payments for councillors. This is hardly likely to
diminish the current sense of distance and mistrust between voters and an
increasingly professionalised political class.
Yet for all that, it seems to me that democrats in Scotland must welcome the
slow-burning reform implied in the new Local Governance Act, if only because -
like the Scotland Act itself - it offers us the rare sight of a dominant
political party actually bringing itself, for its own complex reasons, to
surrender some of that visible dominance.
In some parts of Scotland, the results of the voting reform are likely to be
substantial, if not quite revolutionary. According to electoral expert John
Curtice, of Strathclyde University, Labour stands to lose about 100 of its 509
Scottish council seats, dipping from 42 per cent of the available places to 34
per cent on a roughly similar voting pattern. The SNP, meanwhile, stands to
increase its representation by more than half, from just under 200 seats to
almost 300. There will be no more Glasgows, where Labour has traditionally won
90 per cent of the seats on barely half of the vote; no more Midlothians,
where the SNP won one-quarter of the vote in 2003 without taking a single
seat; and, as Professor Curtice points out, no more Labour control of
Edinburgh "in a month of Sundays", since the party���s current
slender council majority is based on less than one-third of the vote.
In other words, Scotland���s local authorities in future will actually reflect
something close to the real balance of local opinion; and in a nation where
Labour has long had the arrogance of a party whose performance was grotesquely
flattered by the old electoral system, that must count in itself as a major
democratic advance.
But beyond that, proportional representation in local government offers other
opportunities for genuinely progressive change. Proportional systems are
generally more flexible, for example, in allowing under-represented minorities
to enter electoral politics. Just as importantly, given the current
slow-burning talent crisis in Scottish politics, this small but profound shift
in the balance of local politics will also widen the political pool from which
our elected representatives are drawn. Today, 42 per cent of our councillors
come from the tiny talent-pool of a Labour Party whose membership represents
less than one-half of 1 per cent of the population; the more that number
declines, the larger the opportunities for others to move into public life.
And then finally, the coming of proportional systems at least allows
politicians the possibility of cultivating what are, in the British system,
some relatively unfamiliar political virtues - for example, those of
constructive compromise and creative consensus-building. It���s clear, of
course, that these are not the only political assets that count. There are
moments when a strong adversarial debate is desperately needed to clear the
political air. And the fate of John Swinney - a natural consensus-builder,
who, as chair in 1999-2000 of the fledgling parliament���s enterprise and
lifelong learning committee, prided himself on never once having had to put a
proposal to the vote - tells us everything we need to know about the
preference of the media, and of the public as media consumers, for flashy,
quick-witted, sharp-tongued and superficially charismatic political leaders
over quietly charming, non-macho characters like Swinney, or the similarly
hounded and ill-fated John Major.
BUT in the end, politicians interested in the future of their trade are bound
to note the extent to which political times are changing, away from the mass
political parties and big ideological confrontations of the past, towards a
system in which politicians of all parties struggle with similar complex
questions: the size and limits of the state; the balance between public
spending and private provision; the levels of taxation that will be tolerated
by the vast new middle class which dominates our politics; and - above all -
the best systems for ensuring the maximum return for every penny of public
spending.
In such times, there should be a place here and there for coalition
government, and for a pooling of wisdom and views between parties, in the
effort to build a working consensus that can actually deliver results. And
there should be a place, too, for politicians with the qualities of John
Swinney. Not, perhaps, as leader of the SNP, at a moment when the party is
preparing to shoot the white-water rapids of division and self- reinvention -
and of almost inevitable separation between gradualists and fundamentalists -
that it was bound to face in the aftermath of devolution. But seven or eight
years down the line, when the surviving moderate wing of the SNP, with a much
stronger base in Scottish local government, is beginning to rebuild itself as
the nation���s main party of opposition - well, then John Swinney���s time may
come again. And if it does, the quiet passing of this week���s Local
Governance Act will have marked the beginning of his long road back.
|