Voting fiasco should be chance to put people first

June 9th, 2008

The problem with the row, now into its second year, over the voting fiasco in the last Scottish Parliament and Council elections is that it continues to be conducted inside the political bubble.

This is a strange place, where the inhabitants get over-excited about the strangest things and where little from the outside world penetrates.  A bit like Paisley, in fact.

And, as I said when I chaired the Local Government Committee’s investigations into the matter, it was ignoring the people’s interests which led to the shambles in the first place.

It wasn’t the people who demanded a new voting system for the council elections, or the council and parliament elections on the same day, or a single Holyrood ballot paper, or electronic counting.  These were all the demands and obsessions of politicians.

But it was the people - up to 140,000 of them - who paid the price with a lost vote.

Investigations and reports, such as the one recently issued by Westminster’s Scottish Affairs Committee and the Scottish Parliament’s Committee report on the Local Government elections to be published tomorrow, are of course welcome.  But, by continuing to argue amongst ourselves about who’s to blame, or seeking to change the system to suit our narrow party-political interests, we are repeating the same basic mistake of treating the voters as an afterthought.

Politicians (including me) get angry when the public accuse us of only listening to them at election time.  Well, here we have a rare chance to prove them wrong - if only we would take it.