The First Coalition Test Emerges

It's time to get the betting slips out again as another election's in the offing. Where? In Norwich of course!

Today's Sunday Telegraph revelations introduce the tantalising prospect that there'll be elections in Norwich and Exeter City Council areas as a result of the unwinding of the Unitary Council legislation.

So, who's gonna win? Because it's Norwich, it's a lottery but could a Yellow/Blue coalition come up the middle in the first test of The Coalition Government? Read on...


There's a clue in today's Sunday Telegraph scoop on the Queen's Speech, where my eye was caught by the very second piece of legislation planned by the incoming Coalition Government.

Local Government (Revocation of Structural Change) Bill. (Dept for Communities and Local Govt).
This will stop the planned creation of single-tier councils serving Exeter and Norwich. Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, brands the restructuring plans "wasteful and unnecessary" and claims scrapping them will save £40 million.

Now there's a thing! With the country in dire straits and a million problems to sort-out, new SoS 'hungry' Eric Pickles will be slipping-in a quick bit of primary legislation as a first manifesto pledge enacted as a hors d'oeuvre to stop the creation of Unitary Councils in Norwich & Exeter. At least this will stop him from feeling the need to reach for his famed pearl handled revolver.

But why does this piece of legislation mean that there might be an early electoral test of The Coalition?

The answer's hidden away in a Bunnco post from 10th February

As exclusively revealed [on PB] this morning, Labour has cancelled the elections in Norwich this May. Everyone expected the Greens to depose Labour, who were only 2 seats ahead. When the electorate realise that they’ve been cheated of their chance to give a verdict for the shambolic way Labour has run their city, there’ll be hell to pay.

No chance of Charles Clarke holding on. It's the greatest gerrymander since rotten boroughs were abolished in 1832.

Ministerial statement
"In particular the draft orders are providing for the 2010 elections to Exeter and Norwich city councils to be cancelled and for subsequent whole council elections to the new unitary councils to take place in 2011."

by bunnco February 10th, 2010 at 2:54 pm

That 'gerrymander' line caught on and was subsequently picked-up by Iain Dale, who scooped the news that the PermSec required written Direction from the Minister to proceed.

Subsequently The House of Lords Statutory Instruments Committee savaged the Unitary plans yet to the chagrin of local Tories, Conservative Lords did not vote down the orders when they came before the House on 'conventional' grounds unlike the LibDem Peers, who were Not Content. The legislation passed.

So you'd have thought it was Game Over. But what's not widely appreciated is that in the days running up to the General Election the Norfolk & Devon County Councils, in a last throw of the dice, had a 2 day hearing on 29/30th April at The Royal Courts of Justice with the aim of finding the entire process unlawful on the grounds that the Ministers changed the rules at the last moment to suit themselves and to 'fix' the result. No wonder Sir Humphrey objected.

The judge presiding over the judicial review of the government's decision to grant unitary status to Exeter and Norwich councils reserved judgment in the case until after the general election. That judgement is now due.

Now that Pickles has said the whole enterprise is to be scrapped, to a certain extent it's a bit academic but if the Judge rules that the Labour's decision to proceed was unlawful, then one option could be to run the cancelled elections for the City Council after all.

Now, what a delicious prospect that would be. The first 'proper' set of elections since The Coalition was formed.

And with the spotlight having been on Norwich for the last 12 months with firstly the Norwich North by-election and then the brutal 4-way fight in Norwich South with the LibDems ultimately successful on 29% of the vote, Norwich politics are likely to play centre stage. And it's by no means certain how a city-wide District election would pan-out.

Let's have a look at the vote shares from May 5th in Norwich South

VOTE SHARE %
Liberal Democrat 29.4
Labour 28.7
Conservative 22.9
Green 14.9

Note: We do have to remember that the Norwich South constituency did contain Costessey in the South Norfolk district, which is overwhelmingly LibDem and this Yellow boost would not apply in the Norwich City Council election.


Chloe Smith on Norwich Market

Similarly Chloe Smith's Norwich North result is too contaminated by the presence of Broadland district council to be a useful predictor of a City Council poll apart from showing the LibDems have a limited infrastructure in north of Norwich. Cons 40.6%; Lab 31.4%; LD 18.3%

On the basis that Pickles will not be able to resist poking Labour in the eye and allowing his coalition partners the chance to rebuild their shattered base in Norwich, I'm going to predict that the cancelled elections will be fought again, either by the order of The Judge or by a clause in the Bill.

So if this happens, let's have a look at the runners and riders in more detail.

Norwich City Council is a 39 member council with 13 three-member wards elected on 'Thirds'. It's currently run by a Labour Minority administration and when you look at the Maths, you can see how precarious the Red position is. The seats are split Lab 15; Grn 13; LibDem 6; Cons 5;

And, if the election is to be run in 13 wards, Labour has 6 seats on-risk, the Greens 4, the LibDems 2 and Tories 1. Here are the celebrities

Ward Party Name Group Leader
Bowthorpe Conservative Anthony Little Group Leader
Crome Labour Jenny Lay
Lakenham Labour Mary Cannell
Mile Cross Labour Linda Blakeaway
Sewell Labour Susan Sands
Toen Close Green Janet Bearman
Wensum Green Tom Llewellyn
Catton Grove Labour Brian Morrey
Eaton LibDem Brian Watkins Group Leader
Mancroft Green Howard Jago
Nelson Green Claire Stephenson Group Leader
Thorpe Hamlet LibDem Joyce Divers
University Labour Bert' Bremner

Interestingly three of the Group Leaders are up for grabs but bunnco understands that Labour's deputy leader [Catton Grove] is now ineligible to stand having moved into neighbouring South Norfolk district so some changes are inevitable.

Labour's record in the City is mixed, to put it politely. They inherited a bit of a mess from the LibDems but haven't made the progress they should have done having been completely distracted by the Unitary vanity project. They allowed a £8m budget black hole to develop and scandalised the area by evicting old-dears from sheltered accomodation before moving-in the Head of Housing at a cheaper rent. They hoped the Unitary Council would save their bacon. It's actually destroyed them.

And with the ultimate failure of the Unitary dream upon which millions of pounds have been wasted, the recriminations amongst local Labour activists are now breaking out into the open. A verdict of misadventure should surely be recorded with the City Labour party blaming the parliamentary party for the serial foul-ups in the unitary process. And vice-versa. With defeat at a national level and the local party split, they're bound to lose ground.

But to whom?

The Tories have never featured in City Council politics outside the leafy streets of Catton Grove and Bowthorpe so I'll skip over these. Conservative Anthony Little [Bowthorpe] was the defeated Parliamentary candidate in Norwich South but benefits from good name-recognition and he'll hang-on.

The Greens power-base is in Norwich South rather than the northern part of the City. They shrewdly built-up good canvassing records in last year's Norwich North by-election but a lot of water has flown under the bridge since then. The University area is where they are strong on pavement politics. They are only behind The Reds by two seats in total so they only need to take a single seat of Labour to tie. Bert Bremner [a double-hatter] in the University [of East Anglia] ward and Mary Cannell should be favourites to yield to The Greens in which case the Greens could take control in a minority administration.

So, everything is set fair for the Greens to take control by nicking a seat from Labour. Isn't it?

But what's this? Could a resurgent LibDem vote eat the Greens in turn and see Labour hang-on?

The leafy streets in the South which are now held by the Greens used to be LibDem Central until the Greens out-LibDem'd the LibDems with their own brand of pavement politics. But things change.

With Simon Wright installed in Westminster for the LibDems and their Libertarian-Idealist policies being implemented in Government, we might expect the LibDems to push the Greens back in their heartland. The LibDems do well in one-off by-elections and can bus-in supporters from elsewhere. This is an infrastructure the Greens lack. And the 29.4 to 14.8 percent bar-charts from May 5th will see an unflattering 'Greens Can't Win Here' message on Focus leaflets.

Hmmmmm. There's quite a lot of interplay here.

They start at Lab 15; Grn 13; LibDem 6; Cons 5. But with a third of the seats up for grabs if Reds lose to the Greens, who in turn leak to the Yellows, whilst the Blues mark time, then there could be an L11 - G12 - LD11 - C5 split, in which case a Coalition of the Yellows and Blue would trump the lot! Stranger things have happened.

The attitude of The Electorate to the Coalition will be the deciding factor and one which will have repercussions far outside the City boundaries, not least the tactics to be employed in the District Council elections in 2011, where the Tories have 5000 councillors up for election.

Come on Eric! Make it exciting for us. I could do with another election! But as for the betting? It's a lottery. Norwich does it again.

Bunnco - Your Man on the Spot.

PS - The same issues apply in Exeter but I don't have enough local knowledge of that scene.

Spoilt Ballots? The Friday Count Debate

Norwich North broke the mould in being the first English parliamentary election for some time to count the ballots on the following day. Why was this and is it a good idea? Bunnco – your Norwich North Man-On-The-Spot asks around in Norfolk.



One of the long term legacies of Norwich North is likely to be an end to general election counts on-the-night. Back in July the Chloe Smith result wasn’t announced until 1pm on the Friday after 4 hours of frenetic counting activity in a wedding marquee on the Norfolk Showground.

The decision to count on the Friday was initially characterised as something strange – something ‘Normal for Norfolk’ – but since seems to have gained some traction with Returning Officers elsewhere announcing they’ll be counting on the following day too.

There’s been a predictable outrage from Politicos across the spectrum about the prospect of a Friday morning count and last weekend, on Radio 4’s The Westminster Hour, some Blair-Babe was arguing that ‘of course’ we should count overnight. So what’s caused this problem? The simple answer, of course, is that it’s her Government’s new rules. But why?

For an answer you need to ask Colin Bland, the returning officer at Broadland Council who oversaw the Norwich North count. So I have!

“It’s not just a case of 'let's have the count start at 10pm' as we have been able to do before,” he tells me. Two things have happened which change the game.

1 New rules on the verification of postal votes to reduce fraud have been introduced this year
2 There’s been an increase in the number of people opting for absent ballots and crucially with more handing them in on the day.

In the past, attending the opening of the postals in the days before polling day has enabled party-workers to gain valuable voting intelligence. The officials never actually showed the front of ballot papers as they were removed from the envelopes but you could normally see the vote cast showing-through the underside of the folded ballot paper as it was put in the box. This way you could get a rough-and-ready idea of the party proportions and target effort in the marginal wards accordingly.

But new rules introduced this year to prevent fraud mean it's different.

Every ballot paper is now included in a second envelope. The second envelope contains a signed voter declaration. That declaration is fed into a scanning machine where the signature is compared with the one provided on the original voter registration form. The machine is pretty good provided there's a close match with the signature and the date of birth. And because you now never actually see that ballot in the first envelope, there's no decent intelligence for party workers to be gained any more, which is a shame for the campaigners.

The machine scan checks for 25 points of correspondence between the signature on the postal vote application [as held in the computer memory] and the signature on the postal vote declaration which accompanies the return postal ballot paper envelope. If there are 18 or more correspondences, the vote is allowed automatically; if not, there will be a manual check between the original postal vote application with that on the declaration. This is the sort of process that takes time if it is to be carried out accurately.


In most cases, all this validation can all be done ahead of time as the postals dribble-in during the days preceding polling day but in the Euro elections in neighbouring South Norfolk last June, 600 postal ballots were handed in on the day at the polling station. We know that in The General there'll be more postals, more will be handed in on the day and the turnout will be higher. So returning officers are now estimating that 10% of the total number of postals will be handed in at the polling station.

And they all need to be signature-processed before ballot verification can be completed and the count proper started. And that’s the problem because it can take hours to validate them. Returning to South Norfolk’s June Euro poll, with 600 votes to process on a 35% turnout, election officials worked through the night until 3am to validate the postals in readiness for the Friday count. So validation for the General could take much longer… perhaps until 6am. And it’s just not on to have everybody hanging about on double-time until the early hours before you can even start to verify and then count.



Norwich North’s, Colin Bland told me. “If we didn’t allow people to hand postals in on-the-day, we wouldn’t have a problem and we could count overnight. But we do, so we can’t.”

Moving further afield, we know from Mike Smithson that there are about 50,000 postals in Newcastle so assuming that as many as 5,000 are handed-in on-the-day, let’s think how Election Officials might somehow short-cut the process to enable the count to start in the small hours?

Firstly, there’s no reason why returning officers can’t tour the constituency on polling day to collect the postals handed-in at the polling station which are placed in special sealed boxes and then bring them to the Count and then start validation straight away as if they had been delivered by the postman. In Norwich North, Bland did just that, getting a head-start collecting about 300 postals by lunchtime. But hundreds more were handed-in after that and right up to the point at which the polls closed. So it’s only a partial solution.

As one national Party Agent confirms, Bland was doing it correctly: “Some councils check postal votes handed in on the day in the early evening to reduce the pressure earlier. Such checking can be carried out while the rest of the count continues, it does not have to be consecutive as long as there is one other box of ballot papers to mix them with when they have been checked, the verification can carry on. ”

But this is fraught with logistical difficulty in large rural constituencies like South Norfolk or neighbouring Breckland, each with 119 parishes, some with more than one polling station. And this is why half the constituencies in rural Norfolk have already declared a Friday morning count.

I wonder whether we might see a dividing line at The General with compact urban constituencies [more likely to vote Labour] going overnight on the basis they can have multiple collections of postals during polling day with the sparse rural ones [Tory-leaning?] opting for the Friday. Might this distort the betting between the close of poll at 10pm and the final declarations?

Of course, the verification could be speeded-up by buying more machines to scan and verify postal votes. But each costs in excess of £20,000 and needs a specially trained operator. In times of financial restraint, is it worth investing those sort of sums to double a capacity used only every other year? It’s difficult to justify in the present climate.

Counting the following day does also provided a cost saving – about £1,000-£1500 was saved on overtime in Norwich North, which could amount to £1m nationally, although this can be partly offset by removing civil servants from the day-job the following day.

Make no mistake. I would really like to have the vote on the night. Getting rid of Gordon Brown 6 hours earlier than otherwise might be the case seems like a good idea to me. And as a person used to attending the count as a counting agent, I love the nocturnal excitement. But we have to safeguard the whole process against fraud... which is why it’s important to check the absents so carefully… and that inevitably takes time. We can’t have it both ways.

But can it be done on-the-night? An increasing number of Electoral Officials don't think so. And they're the ones who run the election. In a touchingly old-fashioned sort of way, I'm not sure it’s proper for Politicians to direct an overnight count. This is one area above all others where Politicos must let the officials get on with it. There really shouldn't be Political Interference in the running of elections.

But, as one venerable former headmaster told me the other day, back in the 1950’s the General Election count was something done on the Friday and that the whole school got involved with it. If we’re trying to engage a whole new generation in an understanding of politics might a Friday count demonstrate to the pupils that polling day isn’t just a day’s holiday whilst the school hall is used for voting, but actually part of a more valuable democratic process?

On balance I’m persuaded that we should leave it until the Friday so we can all share the excitement after a good night’s sleep. Perhaps Colin Bland was more of a trail blazer than a bogeyman after all.

Reflections on Norwich North by Your Man On The Spot

So now the dust has settled I thought I’d reflect on the local factors that shaped Norwich North from the start. As Bunnco – Your man on the spot, it was clear to me from the outset that this was a poll in two parts.

In the red corner we had the northern half of the Labour-run Norwich City Council area.

Local people were scandalised when it was revealed that last year that old-dears were evicted from their sheltered housing complex where they paid about £70 per week and Council employees, including the head of Housing, moved in at £50. As the ‘Greyhound Opening’ scandal was reported in excruciating detail, tenants passed a motion of no confidence in their Council landlord as a string of other damaging stories followed including the need for £8m cuts to balance the books – a real achievement for a council with a net budget of £16m. Labour were beaten locally before they started.

In the blue corner there was Tory-controlled Broadland Council looking after the leafy northern suburbs.

District council tax is about half what the City pays. Last year they won The Times ‘Best Council’ award and are consistenyly in the top-3 nationally for recycling. In the ipsosMORI ‘place survey’ in Norfolk published 2 weeks ago, satisfaction with the district was a staggering 94% and yet the Government had plans to abolish Broadland and absorb it into the City. There isn’t a single Labour councillor in Broadland.

So, the Tories simply had to turn-out their vote in the Broadland part whilst they knew Labour voters would stay at home or lend their votes elsewhere. It was always going to be a Con-gain…. But by how much?

Let’s turn to the candidates….

Chloe Smith had been chosen for 18 months and Conservatives had delivered three leaflets before the others even selected candidates. And when they did, both Labour and LibDems botched it badly.

Labour chose a former leading light in the local university Young Conservatives, who Labour activists knew was the weakest candidate on their shortlist. Insodoing, they punished the national party for the shoddy way in which Dr Ian Gibson was treated. Revenge was the motivator there.

The LibDems thrashed around and eventually chose April Pond as 3rd choice after the retiring editor of the EDP told them to get stuffed. Then it became clear she didn’t live locally like her leaflets said. She lived in some style in a mansion on the Suffolk border. With a moat. Oh dear.

UKIP’s man blotted his copybook with the local media on Day One with a clumsy press release that tried to capitalise on an armed siege with the predictable ‘send all the foreigners home’ line. The BNP had a “vicar” standing and Craig Murray lost credibility by nailing posters to lamp-posts and telegraph poles [frowned-on round here] then refused to take them down when told to do so by the Returning Officer. You can’t get elected on the platform of ‘put a honest man in Parliament’ when you’re caught breaking the rules.

The Greens flapped-about and eventually dumped their existing candidate in favour of the photogenic but bonkers Dr Rupert Read. I thought the Greens would do rather well but they faded fast, outgunned in the leaflet and money stakes and Read blew it in the TV debate when he made too much of the northern-bypass issue designed to relieve gridlock [and pollution] in the northern suburbs.

Now, to the campaign….

All the Tories needed to do was avoid the banana skins but when it came to Labour, with friends like these who needs enemies?

The National Party did everything they could to make it difficult for Labour to succeed in NN. They actually went out of their way to make things worse. Announcing an EcoTown on the edge of the constituency with one week to go could be described as ‘courageous’ but then to tell locals the next day that the money to pay for the infrastructure would be reduced just smacks of incompetence. Local Govt minister John Denham had a chance to call time on the unpopular Local Government reorganisation issue in Norfolk when Mr Justice Foskett quashed the process in Suffolk with ten days to go. But he blew that chance too. And then the Labour Candidate got “suspected” swine flu in the final days. Not many locals are buying that story.

The Greens and LibDems just attacked each other as they fought for the places and it seemed to me on the ground that UKIP were filling the vacuum. And so it turned out to be to a certain extent with Labour supporters disproportionately backing the party.

The Greens are the largest party in the Norwich South constituency but the Greens were shrewd in targeting their canvassing in the Norwich City part of the NN in preparation for the local elections May 6th next year. They’re only 3 seats behind on the City Council and now have full pledge details for the wards they need to win to take control.

And the leaflets, the bloody leaflets. In fact the low turnout is partly due to the forest of leaflets backfiring on all parties. You’ve never seen so many. It just turned people off. And the LibDems must wonder whether delivering 5 different leaflets to some houses on the polling day alone backfired contributing to the depressing result.

I think the leaflet that did make the most difference though was the one distributed by the Tories in the Broadland area two days before polling day highlighting the threat to their council as a result of Labour’s Council Reorganisation plans. It didn’t change minds but it motivated the Tories in the suburbs to come out. And that’s all that was needed.

The Result….

As the polls closed I posted my prediction “My gut feel is that we’re talking about 40 16 16 16 16 [Con Grn LD Lab UKIP] + others. Or 38 17 15 14 13…. it’s a lottery for the places. And in these scenarios 40-16 is better for Chloe than 38-17.”

I got the percentages almost exactly right on my second suggestion. In truth I expected Labour to be overhauled by the LibDems and UKIP but it’s now emerged that Labour had a quite sophisticated postal vote campaign going on so, whilst intelligence from the polling stations was that the Labour vote had /really/ collapsed, in fact they had already built themselves a 2000-vote cushion which saved them from 4th place embarrassment.

The Lessons….

1. The Tories gambled on putting Cameron at the front. But it was a calculated bet and he’s emerged a stronger leader for it. The Tories ran a sophisticated campaign and experimented and innovated in ways which will only become clear on polling day. The dawn raid delivered by 7am with each leaflet personally addressed to every house was just one example of this.

2. Postal Votes are an important tool for Labour. They are harangued on the doorstep and they’re short of masochist activists. It’s the only weapon they have left. Charles Clarke in Norwich South must now be looking over his shoulder in a genuine 4-way marginal and, for all the talk of winning back the seat from Chloe [a task made easier by boundary changes], local Labour will be better used defending Charles in May than trying to beat Chloe. NN shows that Labour is finished whilst Brown is still in place.

3. The LibDems must be gutted. They’ve truly wasted £100,000, which could have been spent more effectively elsewhere and now Clegg, who mishandled the candidate selection from the start, must be looking vulnerable. This angle hasn’t been picked-up by the media. They’ve lost their way.

4. Labour have more to fear from UKIP than the Tories.

5. Keep an eye on the Greens to take Norwich City Council in May. Back in the 1990’s there was a Legalise Cannabis party, who put up candidates in the County Council elections in Norwich. So there’s been quite a rebellious streak in the City. Expect that to be expressed at the polls in the spring.

6. The BBC will have to learn lessons. They excluded UKIP from the televised debates, a decision made away from Norwich in Birmingham or even London. It’s not the BBC’s job to ‘pick winners’. They should report the news, not make it. And there is some soul-searching to be done here about how much airtime they give the minor parties in the General. UKIP are the media-winners out of this campaign for they will be able to demand more airtime on the back of this result.

7. In the General Election to come local issues like the ones I have described will play a much greater role in determining the final outcome than the simplistic Uniform National Swing. We need to be careful about extrapolating the NN result to the national stage.

Bunnco – Your man on the spot in Norwich North