Labour slammed on Glasgow North East by-election delay and postal vote shambles

The Electoral Commission has criticised the Labour Government for leaving it almost 5 months to hold the by-election to replace former Speaker Michael Martin, who was forced to resign over the MPs' expenses scandal.

Labour's excuse, that the parliamentary Summer recess got in the way is not even half way to being plausible. For a start, they had several weeks' notice that Michael Martin was going to resign. They could have moved the writ on 22 June and had the by-election in mid July.

It's not as if the recess itself is a barrier to holding a by-election - the Livingston by-election was held in recess in 2005. Ok, there are some funny rules about advertising in the London Gazette, but it's not beyond the wit of anyone to do it.

We all know the real reason Labour delyed the by-election - there had just been the Euro election meltdown where James Purnell, Hazel Blears and Caroline Flint had resigned, the Euro and local elections had been a disaster for Labour and they knew fine that the almost certain loss of one of their safest seats in a by-election would mean the end for Gordon Brown.

The reason this was shameful was because, if you hadn't noticed, there's a recession on. People are losing their jobs. Pressure is put on Government departments like JobCentrePlus and the people who work there with a vastly increased workload. Mistakes are bound to be made. The intervention of an MP can literally make the difference between someone being able to eat that day or not. The people of Glasgow North East didn't have an MP to turn to in order to help them with benefits, CSA, immigration issues for more than a third of a year.

When it's suited them politically (ie when they were trying to stop our campaign gaining momentum in Dunfermline in 2006, they can call an election when the previous MP has barely been buried). Obviously that didn't work!

It's high time for those sorts of electoral timing decisions, and that of the General Election for that matter to be taken out of the hands of those with a direct interest in it - it should be done independently and within an agreed time frame, like it is in the Scottish Parliament.

Lib Dem Shadow Scottish Secretary Alistair Carmichael said:

“By-elections should be called for the convenience of the public, and not for the political advantage of the party holding the seat.

“Reform of this is long overdue. Frankly, however, I doubt we will see any commitment from Labour to act on this. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.”

Just as an aside, we shouldn't forget the SNP's incompetence in all of this. Their attempt to move the writ just before the recess might have amounted to a bit more than showboating if they'd tipped off the other opposition parties about what they were going to do, as I wrote at the time.


It's also worth noting that Labour were also criticised for their failure to promptly deliver voters' postal vote applications to the Council in Glasgow. They held on to some of them for a whole MONTH and then handed them in just before the deadline. Political parties are supposed to hand forms in within 2 days. What if a form had been completed incorrectly? People might have been denied a vote if they were, for example, working or away on the day of the election. That's an absolute disgrace.

I'm sure the Liberal Democrats would be only too happy to support the necessary changes to the law to make by-election procedure quicker and more efficient and they could I think be rushed through Parliament before it's dissolved for the General Election. What's the betting that Labour won't bother to do it?

SNP fail in Glasgow North East

I had for some time thought it was likely that Labour would win the Glasgow North East by-election. The biggest sign that they thought they were on to a dead cert was the fact that they were quite happy for Glasgow Labour MP, Tom Harris, to spend polling day evening tweeting from the Will Young concert at the SECC. I did cruelly joke that maybe they wanted him out of the way, but if you think the result is going to be close, you'll get every single pair of legs out there knocking on doors.

You would think, wouldn't you, that if the SNP were as good as their hype suggests, they would have given Labour a closer run for their money. After all, this was just a few miles from the seat where, last year, they snatched a memorable victory from Labour. It would have been a challenge for them to win as safe a Labour seat as you can get, but you would have expected them to come at least within 1000 votes. Instead they languished on barely a third of Labour's vote. Hardly a ringing endorsement of the Holyrood Government.

Since John Mason's victory in Glasgow East, however, things haven't gone well for them. They failed to win Glenrothes just over a year ago, something which again should have been easy for them especially as they hold the Scottish Parliament seat of Central Fife. They threw the kitchen sink at that campaign only to have their hopes dashed.

In a Council by-election in Inverness earlier this year, they got their backsides well and truly whipped by Liberal Democrat Alasdair Christie, barely getting a third of his vote. They made no impact whatever in an Aberdeenshire Council by-election won by Liberal Democrat Rosemary Bruce on the same day.

The Glasgow North East result, declared at just before 2am, was very disappointing for the SNP, signalling that the juggernaut which came to a standstill in Glenrothes is still in dire need of spark plugs. Westminster governments don't come much more unpopular than Labour at the moment, yet the SNP, who had actually contested the seat in 2005 unlike anyone else, so they had a bit of a base there,couldn't even get the same number of people to get out and vote for them. Their percentage did increase but not significantly. I expect they will privately be extremely disappointed with their performance.

They'll try and make themselves feel better by having a go at the Liberal Democrats for coming behind the BNP. That, I admit, was not a great result for us. We had a candidate who had just the right experience in social work and community regeneration that the community needed. She worked tirelessly during the campaign, getting out there and knocking on doors. Looking at our campaign from the outside, it seems to me that it was not as well resourced as other by-elections had been. We'll see when the election expenses are submitted, but I'd be surprised if we'd spent a tenth of the £100,000 limit. Labour and the SNP will have spent much, much more and I expect the Tories will have put in a lot more than we did too. You don't get such marked disparity of expenditure in a normal election where the limit is about an eighth of that. I wonder if they think that their money was well spent. They didn't stand in 2005, but the Scottish Unionist Party did, and got almost 5%. I suspect that people who made that choice 4 years ago would be more likely to vote Tory. The Tories got just over 5% yesterday. It's hardly progress.

We weren't able to establish ourselves quickly as the main challengers and so consequently found ourselves slugging it out in the midfield. It's not great, but it's not a result that causes me a huge amount of concern. It's not as if we were isolated at the bottom of the heap. There were only around 700 votes between the Tories in 3rd and the Greens in 7th. In 2005 just under 1000 were prepared to vote for the fascist BNP. This time it was just over 1000. While I don't like the fact that people choose to support their message of hate, there's no evidence of a great drift towards them. The contest took place in Tommy Sheridan's natural stomping ground yet he and the Scottish Socialist combined couldn't get 1000 votes where they had nearly 5,500 votes 4 years ago.

The SNP is not going to be able to hide behind the performance of others in this by-election for long. Their performance on every level was shocking and they will have to ask themselves some very searching questions. The whole campaign, from their botched selection onwards, was not of the required standard.

And as for Labour, a comfortable result in one of their safest seats is hardly indicative of a ringing endorsement of the Government. You would expect them to hang on convincingly in their stronghold, but at some time in the next 6 months, they'll be tested in the marginals, places like Edinburgh South, where Fred Mackintosh is just over 400 votes behind Labour, like Edinburth North and Leith, where Kevin Lang is mounting a strong challenge to Labour from a strong second place.

You can't extrapolate much from a by-election in a seat like Glasgow North East, especially after a campaign which failed to engage over 2/3 of the electorate. Labour were lucky to come up against a fairly incompetent SNP campaign in one of their strongholds and would be foolish to think that all is well in their world. The General Election with its wider media scrutiny and exposure will bring better fortune for the Liberal Democrats. It's the SNP who will be seriously worried at their failure to persuade people to vote for them.

Eileen Baxendale to fight Glasgow North East By-Election for the Lib Dems

Glasgow North East Liberal Democrats have chosen retired Social Worker Eileen Baxendale as their candidate in the forthcoming Glasgow North East by-election.

Eileen has also served the community as a Director of the Ethnic Minorities Law Centre and the Fair Shares Trust.

Speaking after her selection, Eileen said:

“I’m delighted to be chosen as the Liberal Democrat candidate in this election. If elected I will be a strong voice for the people of Glasgow North East in Westminster.

“At a time when faith in MPs is at an all time low, it’s time for a fresh start in Springburn.

“Gordon Brown’s Labour Government is gasping its last breath. Labour are out of touch and letting local people down. The SNP is no alternative. They will be full of empty promises - their track record at Holyrood speaks volumes.

“If people in Glasgow North East want a committed voice to stand up for them in Westminster, they should vote Liberal Democrat. I will be a strong champion for the people of Glasgow North East.”

Scottish Liberal Democrat Glasgow MSP Robert Brown added:

“Local people deserve a hardworking MP who will speak out on issues that matter to them, like unemployment and crime. Eileen will make a great MP for Glasgow North East.”

With her background, Eileen Baxendale is extremely well placed to fight for Glasgow North East. She understands the problems people are facing, she has experience of empowering people to regenerate their communities and has a long record of public service.

I'm sure she'll inject some light into what has so far been an aggressive, heated war of words between the Labour and SNP candidates.

Desperate Labour attacks David Kerr for filming with guns

Are there no depths to which Labour will not sink in their attempts to drag down SNP candidate in the Glasgow North East SNP candidate David Kerr.

I've only just really caught up with the Sunday papers and found this report in the Sunday Herald where Labour candidate calls for Kerr to apologise to the people of Glasgow for an item he filmed in a Tesco car park in Springburn. Particularly pathetic was their insistence that "the incident could have alarmed others and questioned Kerr's judgment". Now, I've been lucky enough never to come across a random gunman in a Tesco car park, but if I ever did, I doubt he'd be dressed in a suit and surrounded by a film crew. I think it would have been pretty obvious that nobody was in any danger.

The idiocy of this sort of approach is that they miss the reasons to tell people of the many and varied reasons there are not to vote SNP. They've failed on class sizes, teacher numbers, their Scottish Futures Trust is a joke. They've had to back down on stupid ideas like banning under 21s from buying alcohol in off licenses and privatising Scotland's forests. I hope they are forced to climb down on their appalling, centralising plans for the Police Force too. It would be ridiculous for decisions about policing in Orkney or Caithness to be made in Edinburgh.

And I haven't even got round to mentioning their lauding it round the international stage pushing the cause of independence at our expense. Oh, wait...

On many important issues, the SNP just gets it wrong.

David Kerr got it wrong on G-Cal and deserves everything he gets for that, but the attempts of the Labour portray to wrongly portray him as some sort of gun toting religious maniac are at best tasteless. It just shows how little they have to say for themselves.

I guess we're going to get more heat than light from Labour and the SNP for the next 4 months until the by-election. Oh joy!

Labour Deny Glasgow NE voters choice

There's one thing not to move the writ for a by-election, quite another to actively block someone else trying to do it.

The SNP tried to move the writ for the Glasgow North East by-election a wee while ago in the House of Commons. As far as I could tell, all the opposition parties, even the Tories, supported them, but Labour lodged a counter motion moving next business.

In the end, Labour managed to defeat the opposition by 111 votes, but Paul Waugh, the Evening Standard reporter, tweeted that if the SNP had tipped off the Tories and Lib Dems, the result might have been different.

"The SNP ambush fails by 111 votes. If they had got their act together and tipped off Tories and LDems, they might have forced Aug byelectn.
2 minutes ago from web"

Maybe the SNP MPs should watch this episode of the West Wing before they try anything like that again.

It was a good idea, though, credit where it's due, and ultimately win win because we can all now say that Labour, not just through inertia, but actively went out of their way to keep the people of Glasgow North East without an MP for at least another 3.5 months.

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SNP's David Kerr slams Glasgow universities

One of the things about being a by-election candidate is that everything you have ever said in public comes under scrutiny and, in some cases, reappears to bite you on the bum.

We know that the SNP's selection process for Glasgow North East has been a bit of a living hell for them to go through and a complete farce for the rest of us to watch. We now discover that new, bright and shiny candidate David Kerr's cupboard is not devoid of skeletons with their feet in their mouths.

Apparently, a couple of years ago, he told a seminar in St Andrews that universities such as Glasgow Caledonian "did not have a reputation to tarnish."

This is just the worst sort of unfounded academic snobbery and to be honest I'm more angry about these comments than I ever was about the former SNP candidate's problems. To have slated quality institutions, which provide excellent research and learning facilities, is unforgivable. I know students and academics alike at G-Cal who rightly feel insulted at having their institution trashed like this.

It's really important that local politicians do what they can to support the local universities their constituents might attend or work at. How can places like G-Cal and Paisley feel that they will ever have anything other than lip service from David Kerr?

Kerr himself has tried to defend his comments by saying that they were meant to be light hearted. Why would you make such a joke if you didn't mean the sentiments behind it, though?

Lib Dem MP Willie Rennie, who is himself a proud graduate of Paisley University, had this to say on the subject.

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Tories call the Kerr-tle black

There seems to be a bit of a fuss about SNP candidate for Glasgow North East David Kerr's membership of Opus Dei.

Now, I'd find it very difficult to vote for anyone who was pro life and anti gay rights, whatever religion (or none) they followed. Let's not turn the by-election into a Dan Brown movie.

Opus Dei with its secrecy and flagellation is just the sort of thing to give the tabloids a feeding frenzy as they did when Ruth Kelly another Opus Dei associate, was appointed to the Cabinet. However, followers of all sorts of religions and denominations within Christianity hold the same views on abortion and homosexuality. Should these people be ruled out from being MPs? Of course not - as long as the voters arw aware how they will vote on these issues up front.

And, oh, the irony, that Murdo Fraser is having a go at Kerr for membership of a "secretive and hardline" organisation. This from the party which gave us Section 28, for goodness sake and which now wants to enforce a cooling off period on couples who want to divorce. For a party that believes in small government, their insistence on intervening in areas which should be up to people themselves to determine is hypocritical to say the least.

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SNP lose another Glasgow North East hopeful

The protracted SNP game of musical candidates continues in Glasgow North East. First the expected and obvious candidate Grant Thoms doesn't even stand. Then Newsnight producer David Kerr resigns from his job to stand and gets beaten by the SNP Opposition Leader on Glasgow City Council, James Dornan by 5 votes. Given the Council's unpopular school closures across the city, also opposed by the Liberal Democrats, this might have been a smart move.

Now Cllr Dornan has stood down after Sunday Herald revelations that he may have broken the law by being a partner director of a charitable trust, Culture and Sport Glasgow while under a protected trust deed which is an alternative to bankruptcy.

I think it's a shame he's been put in this position by the SNP. They should have checked all this out thoroughly before they allowed him to go for selection by the members. They shouldn't have been checking if there was a potential problem when a newspaper points it out to them.

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