Last Thursday (22/5/14) every seat in all of London's local councils was
up for election. A week before hand I foolishly suggested that voter's
in Croydon might want to use this as an opportunity to register a
protest against local crime by voting for minority parties such as the
UK Independence Party (UKIP) for traditional Conservative Party voters
or the Green Party for traditional Labour Party voters. As a result of
this off-the-cuff comment I've been forced to analyse the results of
Croydon's election in painful detail. This involved drawing up a list of
all the candidates and how many votes they received and comparing them
with each other and the total number of votes cast.
On reflection this seems to have been a massive waste of time because
electorally Croydon is very dull. Despite all the hyperbole about UKIP
breaking the traditional three party status quo elections in Croydon are
very much a two horse race with wards either voting strongly for the
Conservative Party or strongly for the Labour Party. Across the board
the difference between the two parties is 10-15% meaning that swing
needed to shift power is too large to be realistic.
The main difference between whether a ward votes Labour or Conservative
is a demographic one with the northern wards in which voters are mainly
Black or Asian and generally poorer voting Labour while the southern
wards where voters are mainly white and generally richer vote
Conservative. However rather then race alone the main issue appears to
be home ownership. This means that voters of Indian or Pakistani
heritage are sort of the wild card element because while their skin
colour makes them sensitive to racism they have a strong culture of home
and business ownership.
The 7 seats that the Labour Party won to gain overall control of Croydon
Council directly reflect this demographic pattern with 3 of the seats
being won in the Ashburton ward and 3 being won in the Waddon ward.
These both sit on a clearly marked front line between the Labour north
and the Conservative south. However the specific thing that has helped
Labour to win those seats is the effect of people switching from the
Conservative Party to UKIP. If UKIP had not stood in the election the
4-5% of the vote that went to them would have meant that the
Conservatives would have retained the wards by 2-3% rather then losing
them by 2-3%.
Due to demographics being key to election victory in Croydon and crime
seeming to be the main driver of demographic change in Croydon I think
it would be very interesting to monitor crime rates in the Ashburton and
Waddon wards along with the neighbouring wards of Fairfield, Addiscombe
and Shirley in the run-up to the next election.
If I wanted to properly assess the impact of any protest vote I would
need to assemble all the data from the previous (2010) council
elections, weight it for changes in voter turnout, changes of individual
candidates and national trends. I simply don't have the time to do
that. However based on an unweighted average there does appear to have
been a slight (1-2%) increase in the votes for minority parties such as
UKIP and the Green Party at the expense of Labour and the Conservatives.
As such is appears that a noticeable number of Croydon voters have
taken the opportunity to send an anonymous letter of complaint to the
council over the crime problem. Unfortunately that swing to is too small
to effect the outcome so Croydon council is likely to just ignore it.
However they should be warned that it could become more focused at the
2015 Parliamentary election where there are far fewer seats up for grabs
with the Croydon central seat becoming a key battle ground.
The other thing I noticed going through the results was just how badly
the Liberal Democrats (LibDems) actually did. In almost every ward they
were beaten by the Green Party who are still something of a single issue
party who only control one council and have only one MP. This was even
true in wards that are dominated by the Conservative Party who seem to
have an almost anti-environment agenda. Although I have little love for
the LibDems I actually find this worrying because if it is repeated
nationally - and it appears to be - the LibDems will cease to be a factor
in UK politics leaving us with a US-style two party system of either
Labour or the Conservatives. The problem is that here in the UK we also
have a Monarchy which of late has become very involved in politics. As
such we run a risk of having only one set of political policies that are
set by the Monarchy but dressed up in either a blue suit of a red suit
depending on which way the public mood is swinging. As such I think the
LibDems need to hurry up and apologise to UK voters for going into
coalition with the Conservatives by sacking Nick Clegg.
Overall the political direction Croydon seems to be heading in is
towards Tower Hamlets which has to be the most rotten of Britain's
rotten boroughs.
Essentially the problems began in Tower Hamlets when the Labour
government changed the national election rules to increase the use of
postal/absentee ballots. This almost seemed intended to make it easier
to increase election fraud and therefore rig election results. Firstly
by removing the requirement that voters turn up at a polling station it
made it much easier for people to vote multiple times using fake
identities - often of people who had recently died. Secondly with
ballots papers being posted to and filled in at people's homes it has
removed the secrecy of the ballot. This is a particular problem in
Indian and Pakistani households where the male head of the household
will simply fill in the ballots of all the women and adult children in
the household. There have also been reports of people being forced to
bring their ballots papers to their Mosques, Churches and Temples where
they are filled in on their behalf.
The thing that Labour didn't count on when they set about undermining
democracy in this way is that very soon the people who are carrying out
all this electoral fraud decided to start rigging the elections in
favour of themselves rather then the Labour Party. So Labour quickly
lost control of the elected Mayor and now appear to have also lost
control of the council that oversees that Mayor creating something of a
private fiefdom which many people are starting to suggest needs to be
brought under the direct control of central government so it can be
cleaned up.
The problems in Tower Hamlets have been known about for years but at
this election the UK has seemed very keen for them to be pushed to the
fore. Firstly the BBC ran a national "Panorama" program about the
problems and on election day itself police guards were very publicly
deployed to polling stations in Tower Hamlets to prevent opposition
voters being physically attacked. Finally the vote count in Tower
Hamlets was so plagued with problems that it has still not being
completed and the Electoral Commission have promised to carry out an
investigation. This delay in the Tower Hamlets vote also significantly
delayed the declaration of European Parliament results for the entire
London region although the two process could quite easily have been
separated as they eventually were.
The reason for this focus on Tower Hamlets appears to be threefold;
Firstly it draws focus onto immigration policy. Amongst the British
Establishment it has long been alleged that the Labour Party
purposefully relaxed immigration controls to ensure a steady stream of
poor immigrants into the UK who would vote Labour keeping the Labour
Party in power for ever and ever. Of course the hope is that no-one
would notice the difference between European Union (EU) immigration and
visa controlled immigration from UK Commonwealth nations such as India
and Pakistan.
Secondly it draws attention to political corruption particularly amongst
people of Indian heritage such as Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman and
his "Tower Hamlets First" party. India - the world's largest democracy -
has just voted out a Congress Party which has ruled for decades in
favour of Narendra Modi's BJP Party who campaigned on economic
competence over corruption. This is big news globally not least because
the BJP's Hindu nationalist tendencies could lead to an interesting
relationship between India and it's mainly Muslim neighbour Pakistan.
Finally Britain seemed to be laying the groundwork for arguments over
Ukraine's election that took place on Sunday (24/5/14). Having spent
months pumping out anti-Russian rhetoric Britain appears to have made
the mistake of starting to believe its own lies. As a result they seemed
to be expecting a close election in Ukraine with the neo-Nazis doing
well forcing Tymoshenko and Poroshenko into a run-off vote. Russia
would have then been expected to reject the result making all sorts of
accusations of electoral fraud and voter intimidation similar to those
seen in Tower Hamlets. Of course as it turns out Ukrainians ended up
voting heavily in favour of Poroshenko and heavily against Tymoshenko
and the neo-Nazis creating quite a bit of confusion in the process.
(Originally Posted) 16:30 on 28/5/14 (UK date).
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