FOR nearly three weeks now, The National has led the media in Scotland with our exclusive look at the runners and riders, the prospects and opportunities, for every one of Scotland’s local authorities, concluding today with Glasgow and Orkney, the biggest and smallest councils in terms of population.
It has been a comprehensive and exhaustive process, and at the end we can say just one thing – nobody, but nobody, foresaw the dramatic events of April 18, when Prime Minister Theresa May called her snap General Election for June 8.
Let’s face it, the lady herself never saw that one coming until she went for her famous walk and changed her mind, and without a doubt her decision has had a massive effect on the local government elections taking place in Scotland and parts of England and Wales today.
Across Scotland, local government candidates have been bamboozled by what to do. Local constituency parties are the same, with several candidates complaining to The National in the course of our research that after April 18, their activists were faced with the prospect of two campaigns in two months – most parties hadn’t really got going on Snap Day, and as usual were planning a last-minute campaign as is often the case with council elections.
Two sitting councillors from two different parties complained yesterday that their MPs had started campaigning before Parliament was even dissolved – Tory Secretary of State David Mundell’s first leaflet dropped through the postboxes in his constituency yesterday.
The main fear of many candidates was that the General Election would cause voters and activists alike to take their eye off May 4 and concentrate on June 8, with the already low turnout at local elections – only three areas had 50 percent turnouts or more in 2012 – set to decrease further.
The National can reveal astonishing evidence that voting “on the day” may be even lower than feared. For in Edinburgh, where a record 74,481 voters out of an electorate of 370,692 – some 20.1 per cent of those eligible to vote – obtained a postal vote, the number returned by yesterday was 50,925 or 68.4 per cent. Those are unprecedented figures for the capital.
In Glasgow, where 65,000 postal votes were issued, the return rate as of yesterday was 60 per cent.
In our two largest cities, that indicates two things – that more people than ever before have a postal vote, and the number who have bothered to fill them in is low as postal vote turnout is consistently higher than on-the-day voting – it was just under 70 per cent in 2012.
It may be that one party or another has cottoned on to the postal voting system as a way of guaranteeing your vote, and it will be interesting to see the reaction to the Edinburgh figures in particular.
As our survey showed, local issues are still the bread and butter of local government elections, but there is no doubt that the decision of the Scottish Conservatives to campaign heavily on an anti-referendum ticket has had an effect on voting intentions in many areas – whether that will be for the good or ill of the Tories remains to be seen.
The SNP set out its stall early by putting forward a record number of candidates with 627 party members standing – just less than a quarter of all the 2527 candidates standing in 351 contested wards across the country, with Labour’s number down to 453 candidates.
There are only three uncontested wards in the whole country, so in every council area there has been debate and discussion which continued until last night, even if it was swamped by Theresa May’s snapping.
The best guess must be that the SNP will have the most first preference votes across Scotland and should win control of several councils, but nothing in politics is certain these days.
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