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 BRINGING COMMONSENSE TO BRUSSELS

News from David Sumberg MEP

Summer 2004

Conservative Member of the European Parliament for the North West of England

 

LETTER FROM EUROPE

 

ELECTION REFLECTIONS

The former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan used to describe elections as ‘beastly things’.  If they are honest, every incumbent candidate for political office would agree with him.  For the incumbent politician – not the challenger of course – elections represent the very real possibility of losing a job which is simultaneously fascinating, privileged and enjoyable.  So I do not think I was unique in approaching the recent European elections with Harold Macmillan’s words very much in mind.

The campaign in June was frankly a very strange one.  I worked out the other day that I have been a candidate at eleven elections – local, Westminster and Europe.  However, I have no doubt that the European elections are the most difficult.  To begin with, you are not the sole candidate but part of a slate where the voter chooses a party rather than a candidate against whom to put their cross.  And you do not represent a constituency as you do in Westminster but instead a large and disparate region, in my own case the North West Region.  How can voters possibly identify with nine MEPs for such an enormous area of nearly six million people with widely differing perspectives.

So campaigning isn’t easy. Even if party choice is usually the deciding factor voters like to know who they are voting for and I have to admit that Europe – and European issues – are hardly the meat and drink of political argument in the local pub and that very often the European Parliament seems remote and unconnected with most people’s daily lives. 

It was not surprising therefore that as I trudged the streets up and down the region that there were hardly any signs of election activity.  No posters at windows, and blank stares when talking to many electors who were often unaware that a political contest was taking place.  And if they were concerned about political issues, in many cases it was how to keep their streets clean or the amount of council tax they were paying because in many areas local elections were taking place on the same day.

This time in the North West we had the unique experiment of the all-postal vote – meaning no walk to the polling station to cast the ballot in secret.  This time, so the government promised, it would be far easier than that.  Your local postman would simply deliver your ballot paper direct to your doorstep, all of course in good time for you to fill it in and return it to the Town Hall.  And because it was so easy, more people would vote.  That in any event was the theory.

As readers will know, practice and theory are not the same and it didn’t quite work out as intended.  Ballot papers were incorrectly printed, and in many cases were sent to the wrong addresses if they were sent at all.  They arrived very late in the campaign and as a result many voters missed their chance to cast their vote.  Equally worryingly, there were allegations, in some cases very serious ones, of fraud and intimidation.  And although it is true that more people voted in our region than in the last European Elections in 1999, there was actually not a great deal of difference in the turnout between regions like the North West who had all-postal voting and other regions in Britain which did not.

So I hope we will not repeat this experiment and certainly not at a General Election.

There has been however one unexpected bonus from the all-postal vote exercise.  Because of the concerns expressed about the way the postal vote experiment worked, the government has seized this as a reason to drop their ridiculous proposal of a North West Regional Assembly which was to have been the subject of a postal vote referendum in the autumn.  The idea of another wasteful tier of local government has been put on the back burner and I hope eventually in the political dustbin.  In fact, I think the government dropped the whole idea because they knew they would lose the referendum and the postal vote issue served the useful purpose for them of being the excuse to cancel the whole exercise.

As always the elections were a mixed bag for the politicians.  I am very sorry indeed that my Conservative colleague Jacqueline Foster, who was a most effective MEP for the North West, lost her seat.  She will be greatly missed.  Having lost a few elections myself, I know how it hurts but I am sure Jacqueline will be back in the political arena before too long. 

I am looking forward very much not only to working with my two Conservative colleagues, Sir Robert Atkins and Den Dover but also with the Labour, UKIP and Lib Dem members who will represent the region as well.   I am sure that we will work together for the good of the region in the years to come although I cannot promise not to have the occasional political battle with my non-Conservative colleagues.  The fact that I can do so during the next five years and have been returned to office makes me think that Harold Macmillan was not totally right and sometimes elections are not that beastly after all.