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Labour crisis in selecting council candidatesCan't wait. Even if the SNP don't get in at Holyrood, these council elections are going to see the biggest shake up in scottish politics since devolution.
| Quote: | Shortlist chaos for Labour councillors as PR votes loom
DOUGLAS FRASER, Scottish Political Editor
Scottish Labour faces a crisis in selecting its council candidates ahead of next year's election.
The dominant force in local authorities has been struggling for months with the implications of the radically changed, proportional voting system, and faces numerous local battles – first over the number of candidates it is going to stand, then which sitting councillors will be pushed out, and also how to ensure female, ethnic minority and younger people have an equal chance of winning seats.
Headquarters has required local parties to stand candidates from such under-represented groups, but that is a direct threat to white, older men, who have long dominated Labour at local level. Many of them fear the new voting system will lose them hundreds of seats, even without rules on gender and race balance.
Jim McCabe, the leader of North Lanarkshire Council and of Labour's councillors nationally, has criticised the party's gender and race policy for threatening to lose seats and experience. He said many constituency parties have responded to the demands by encouraging a more diverse range of people to consider becoming councillors.
But this falls far short of the rules set down by Lesley Quinn, the general secretary in the Glasgow headquarters, designed for under-represented groups to have an equal chance of success.
Party headquarters is blocking councils from selecting candidates until they promise gender and race balance, but the extent of this is disputed.
The Herald understands around one third of constituency parties have had their plans rejected. The party spokesman yesterday described that figure as "wide of the mark", but he refused to give an alternative figure.
Women's campaigners within Labour accept the rules brought in last February are not going to be implemented, but that some progress should be made.
One of several problems being faced is that the local government boundaries commission – the independent body that has been drawing up the new wards, each with three or four members – has produced draft boundaries, but has still not published its final version of the new council ward map of Scotland.
An attempt to encourage older councillors to retire next year, with the executive offering a payment of up to £25,000 for stepping down, is understood to have failed to relieve the bottle-necked pressure for a reduced number of Labour seats. There too, there is uncertainty, as the final offer has not been made. Tom McCabe, the Finance Minister, is expected to do so in the next fortnight.
The root of Labour's council problem is that it was forced by its LibDem coalition partners to reform local authority elections. Next May, first-past-the-post will be replaced with the single transferable vote system, with voters being asked to number candidates by order of preference.
The new system means Labour can expect to lose many of the 509 seats it won at the 2003 election, out of a total 1222 councillors in Scotland. It will also lose overall control of at least 12 of Scotland's 32 councils.
Yesterday at Westminster, David Mundell, the Shadow Scotland Secretary, made a plea to Labour at Westminster and Holyrood to move the council election from next May, because the new voting system may confuse voters, when set alongside a different type of proportional voting system for the Scottish Parliament. This has been rejected by the executive, while moving the Holyrood vote would require MPs to amend the Scotland Act. |
http://www.theherald.co.uk/politics/66341.html
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