The Electoral Commission has released campaign expenditure details for the Euro-election earlier this year. How effective was party spending? Who got the biggest bang for their bucks? Here’s a table of spending and votes won.
Spending (£s)
Votes
Votes per £ spent
Labour
1,027,339
4,020,646
3.91
Greens
534,249
1,255,573
2.35
Ukip
2,956,737
4,376,635
1.48
SNP
267,372
389,503
1.46
Conservatives
2,980,815
3,792,559
1.27
Liberal Democrats
1,580,575
1,087,633
0.69
In terms of spending efficiency Labour were the clear winners and will be hoping that they get three times as many votes for every £1 spent when next May comes around. The Greens were the second most efficient spenders.
For comparison, in 2009 MK spent £13,886 on the euro election of that year and got 14,922 votes in return. That’s 1.04 votes per £1 spent, a lower return than all the bigger parties in 2014 apart from the Lib Dems. Although it’s £1.56 a vote if we allow for the loss of the £5,000 deposit, unfairly taken from MK because it didn’t reach the quota for the whole constituency.
Nice to wallow in nostalgia once in a while. So earlier today I duly toddled off to my local polling station to indulge in one of those meaningless exercises whereby unaccountable power and institutionalised corruption is given a thin veneer of legitimacy, in order to cast my ballot. Ah, I remember the good old days when we had elections at least every other year. And my great grandparents might have remembered annual elections.
Not that my grandparents were actually allowed to vote in them good old days. But they could watch the carriages from the Big House trundle along to take the (male) voters along. And they could always hope the odd farthing or stale saffron bun would be thrown out of the carriage window so that they could scrabble for them in the mud while their betters laughed at them.
Anyway, less of those fond memories. The Labour Party in London and the Liberal Democrats in Truro put an end to a lot of this voting nonsense back in 2009. And the hedge fund investors and retired bankers on Bar Road or passing by in their yachts don’t tend to throw money at us any more these days. Sad but true.
Anyway, this time we had the privilege of voting for members of the European Parliament, which according to most of the papers is a scheme to take all our money and give it to Johnny Foreigner.
I’d only seen one party political broadcast. That was by Labour. And it was all about the NHS, with that Mr Milibland shaking hands with dying patients and telling us how we’d get to be misdiagnosed by a GP a damn sight quicker under Labour than the current shower can manage.
I did wonder what all that had to do with the Euro-election. Seems it’s bugger all. Though I expect Ukip can tell us how Europe is plotting to do something nasty with our NHS. Or is that the Tories and Lib Dems up in London town? It’s all a bit confusing.
Especially when the Labour broadcast turned out to be for the local elections. Which of course we’re not allowed to have any more in Cornwall (see above). And on top of that local councillors don’t have much to do with the NHS either come to that. Perhaps no-one told that nice Mr Milibland. Dear of ‘im.
So who to vote for? I waited in the queue (of two) as a party agent dumped a box-load of signed postal votes on the desk. Apparently some old folk had asked him to fill them all in for them, as they found putting a cross on the paper a bit exhausting. Which he had kindly done. What a good Samaritan.
Having been asked to confirm my address – which was a bit strange as it was written on my polling card, I licked my blunt pencil and pondered my important democratic decision. Engrossed in decision-making, I made the mistake of leaning on the tacky cardboard voting box, which promptly collapsed. Is this really all we can afford these days? Won’t be long before elections are just too damned expensive and go the way of public toilets and Camborne Library I ‘spect.
Got excited first of all by a party with the name ‘An Independence from England’. You got my vote, me’ ‘ansum. But turns out it said ‘independence from Europe’. Should have brought my reading glasses with me. Half of the parties on offer were offering the same thing. Large doses of English nationalism, get out of Europe immediately if not sooner, and end all immigration (but not to Cornwall).
Then there were the Tories. Half of them say we should get out of Europe as soon as decently possible and stop all immigration (but not to Cornwall). The other half urge us to enjoy globalisation. Sit back and watch the rich get richer as they profit from all the cheap labour that can come from Europe. And it’ll keep the bleddy unions in line too.
Then there’s Labour. Not certain what they want as I never got a leaflet from them. But I’m told they’re in all in favour of ‘hard-working people’. Which looks a bit radical. And they want a referendum before we pull out of Europe. Oh, and we should cut back on immigration (but not to Cornwall).
There was another party whose name for the moment escapes me. But this lot are like the walking dead these days. Or more like ghostly spirits. They used to take on material form but now you can see right through them. Doomed, doomed. Better we should put these political lepers out of their misery as soon as humanely possible by never, ever again voting for them, I reckon.
Which just left the Greens. Or spoiling my paper by writing ‘an MEP for Kernow – equal rights with Luxembourg, Estonia and Malta and compulsory Kernowek Kemmynnn’ across the ballot paper.
As I gaze out my window and wonder when and if summer is going to arrive, I hear rumours of another rare event in Cornwall – an election. True, it’s only for the European Parliament, one in which Cornwall is so marginal it’s invisible. In fact, it’s hardly worth summoning up the energy to stagger down to the polling station. Or to take all those postal voting forms I’ve collected along to the postbox.
In these elections, we’re tagged onto an English mega-region. Cornish issues can thus be ignored with impunity as it ranks somewhere with Gibraltar on the priority list. Only two of the nominated 48 candidates live in Cornwall even though on population grounds alone we might have expected five. At number 5 in the preference lists for their respective parties, neither stands any chance of election and neither is actually Cornish,
Moreover, they’re both standing for parties that surely no sane person would ever consider voting for. Although, according to the latest polls, we have to conclude that well over half of those who intend to vote are in danger of a visit from the men in the white coats. Half of those might be excused as they’re looking for a home for a well-deserved protest vote. The other half is completely inexplicable.
No MK this time round. I realise this decision makes perfect sense when, despite gaining 6.8% of the votes in the last Euro-election in Cornwall in 2009, MK lost its deposit. This is because it didn’t get enough people in Bournemouth and Swindon to vote for it. While other parties have to win just 2.5% of their target voters to get their £5,000 back, effectively MK has to convince at least 25-30% of the voters in Cornwall to do so. A fair deal for Cornwall? Might as well publicly burn the cash. Probably get more publicity that way in any case.
Now that we have national minority status I guess all those Lib Dem, Tory and Labour politicians who rushed to express their joy will be equally prominent in their loud support for MK’s right to stand in future European elections on the same basis as Plaid or the SNP. Or perhaps they’ll go back to sleep again for another 15 years.
In a way, the timing of the national minority status concession means it’s a pity there was no MK option to tap the brief flurry of Cornish patriotism induced by it. MK might have missed a trick, by not trying to organise a pro-devolution, pro-localist list across the mega-region, something along the lines of the UDB’s ‘La Bretagne pour une Europe Sociale’ list in the western region of the French hexagon. On the other hand, it may have been difficult to find enough sympathetic folk with similar ideas in Cornwall and the English south-west. Or with some cash to stump up towards it.
But let’s stop bleating about being disfranchised. Who can any self-respecting Cornish nationalist/autonomist/regionalist vote for?
Did Danny Alexander, egged on by Andrew George and Dan Rogerson, really believe that national minority status was enough to make us vote Lib Dem? People may have short memories but not that short, surely. The pasty tax, Lib Dem support for a Devonwall constituency, their collusion with austerity policies that punish the poor to satisfy the lifestyles of the rich, their support for privatisation and, with the exception of Andrew George, the ‘reforms’ of the NHS, are seared into our memories. Or should be. Not to mention the broken and worthless pledge on student fees.
Closer to home, we can be thoroughly depressed by the Lib Dems’ continuation of the mindless housing and population growth policies that are steadily eroding the Cornishness of Cornwall, or their feeble resistance to central government cuts. National minority status can’t begin to wipe all that from the record.
However, at the Euro-election we have one alternative to the left to the Labour/Lib Dem/Tory right wing, neo-liberal consensus. The Greens have a real chance of snaffling a seat in the region, although they seem to be suffering from a news black-out as the media continue their macabre love-hate fascination with Ukip.
Although the media are keeping it quiet, the Greens have been neck and neck with the Lib Dems in some polls and look to be a far better home for a more cerebral protest vote. In addition, they’ve come out in support of MK’s campaign for a Cornish Assembly. Although, unaccountably, their message in this week’s Wet Brit contains not a single word about Cornwall. And I continue to harbour some doubts about their stance on Cornwall Council’s unsustainable population and housing growth strategy.
Still, at least they don’t deny climate change is taking place and even suggest we should do something serious about it. Although such extremist views might not appeal to the average Western Morning News reader, at the moment a Green vote looks a slightly better bet than spoiling my paper. A pity they have no candidate on their list who lives in Cornwall though.
Where is the Green Party standing?
In the unlikely event that anyone living in the English conurbations, or the minority of English districts that have local elections this year, is reading these rambling, directionless musings, they do have another possible alternative on the left. If the Greens are suffering a media boycott, then the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition has been cast by the press into the depths of the deep-freeze, which has been firmly locked for the duration of the elections. (Although Dave Nellist was spotted last week on some BBC politics show that no-one watches.)
Yet they’re standing almost 550 candidates for the local elections and contesting around 13% of the available seats, mounting the largest left of Labour challenge probably ever. Despite this, TUSC receives less publicity on the BBC’s website than the English Democrats, an outfit that has just 36 candidates (60 down on the last round of these elections in 2010). TUSC is standing a curiously high number of candidates in places hitherto not known for their Trotskyite leanings, such as Plymouth, Exeter, Lincoln, Stevenage and Grimsby.
Kernowpolitico: notes from the periphery 