Democracy 1, local democracy 0
POLITICAL anoraks throughout the Realm will be cheering this morning’s news that General Election night has been “saved”. The averted peril in question was, you may recall, the decision by a number of Returning Officers to hold their counts the day after polling day, rather than on the night. Everywhere, those of us used to staying up into the wee small hours, calculating swings and pondering the fate of such late declaring seats as Carmarthen West were, it was feared, to be denied our night of drama. The prospect of skulking off to bed at some unreasonably early hour, the overall result possibly still unknown, loomed. It would be like getting to the penalty shoot out at the end of the World Cup Final, only to be told it would be held tomorrow evening instead.
Following the government’s acceptance of a Conservative amendment to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill (and what a usefully timed piece of legislation that is turning out to be), it’s game on again. ROs will now be obliged to commence the count within four hours of the close of polls, unless there are “exceptional circumstances”.
But it’s hardly a blow for localism, is it? Though small, and in its own way insignificant, the insertion of the new amendment represents yet another form of central control, yet another thing local authorities are prevented from exercising discretion over. The fact that it stems from the Conservatives, a party pledged to radically decentralise, but who are issuing centralising orders before even taking power, should also be noted. That’s not an attack on the Tories, it is merely to note that an agenda of real local empowerment will be very hard to do in an environment where people look to central government to sort out the things that they care about. And if we can’t resist dictating terms to the local level on something as trivial as our election night entertainment, what chance is there that the reigns will be loosened on the really important stuff?
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You make a good argument, but what I find interesting is that what we were facing was, in effect, localism against the will of just about everybody else.
Sure, apart from us saddoes, most of the population will not stay up late to see the result, but they want Eamonn Holmes or BBC Breakfast to tell them who’s forming the government first thing the next day.
Localism on this issue (and hundreds of others, it could be argued), was wrong. It is all a very good idea, but there are issues of competance and scrutiny to be addressed, too.
Dunc
The trouble is that the local level in effect balanced the enjoyment we get from having the results on the night against the enjoyment we derive from paying less to have our democratic processes administered (i.e by paying staff normal time to do the count on Friday instead of overtime on Thursday night). In that cost/benefit calculation, budget savings won. They may have got the calculation wrong and, as you suggest, people may place more value against an earlier declaration than they think they do (in economic terms, I suppose this would be classed as some sort of market failure). But that wasn’t the reason they were overridden. They were overridden because MPs (and candidates) couldn’t wait. Do you think local authorities will be compensated for the extra costs they will now incur to satisfy these 5-20 local authority residents? Of course not.