Pay £1000 for right not to vote?

In the latest issue of Hackney Today Jules Pipe says: "A wide-ranging campaign this year to increase the number of people on the electoral role, has resulted in 10,000 more residents being able to vote in Hackney."

I'll be one of those new ones on the electoral role. Nothing like the threat of a £1000 fine! I don't know if that threat was about voting or if it had more to do with the 2011 census. Either way it worked.

The turnout for the 2005 General Election in Hackney South and Shoreditch was 49.7% and in Hackney North and Stoke Newington it was 49.6%. I assume that the 50% who didn't vote were on the electoral role. An increase in 10,000 disinterested voters on the electoral role could make the turnout even worse.

But nothing much seems to work. In 2005, in neighbouring Bethnal Green and Bow, the massively hyped contest between George Galloway and Oona King - which saw Galloway win by 823 votes - pulled a 52% turnout. That was up 4 percentage points on the 48% in 2001. So even a dramatic battle doesn't make much difference to inner city voters with an average turnout at 10% below the national average.

The figures come from the Guardian and can be found most easily on Theyworkforyou.com

For something vaguely related: Navel-gazing intro, Candi-dating in Hackney

Candidate 8: Labour promotes ghettoisation

Candidate 8: Jonathan Fryer, Lib Dem

Jonathan Fryer lives in Tower Hamlets but he said that Hackney appears to be a happier place. The reason is because different communities in the borough interact with each other. But he doesn’t believe this happiness has much to do with Labour Party policies, which he thinks encourage ghettoisation.

Candidate 8 described his home borough as “an odd place” where the poor and the rich, the large communities of white British and Bangladeshi exist side-by-side, but their paths rarely cross.

He said: “Hackney seems to be a happier place. There’s much more interaction in Hackney. In Tower Hamlets there’s a bit of a problem with the community not having much interaction, they don’t have the level of contact they do here.”

He was critical of the Labour approach to race relations: “The way that the Labour Party sees people in class terms and in groups and doesn’t understand that while there are group identities and community identities, if you deal with people entirely as groups and de-personalise them it can be quite negative."

Fryer said that the focus on groups resulted in "ghettoisation" but he said he believed that Britain was a leader in Europe when it came to community cohesion. He said that while Labour figures like former Bethnal Green and Bow MP, Oona King, had been working on this issue, the Labour approach was flawed.

I asked him how bad he thinks the financial crisis will it get?

“I have a lot to do with Vince Cable. He believes that, in the short-term, it is going to get very bad. He saw this crisis years ago and got barracked in the house of commons as a doom and gloom merchant.

Fryer said that there was not a great deal of faith in the government talking about “green shoots” of recovery.

But he said: “Part of it is rebuilding confidence. When people are worried about the possibility of unemployment or generally not confident they’re not spending the markets are getting less and then they start closing down. We don’t have to run far from where we are now to see shops closing down and it’s not always because people haven’t got money, they just aren’t spending it.

I asked how people in Hackney could not be spending if this is one of the poorest boroughs in the country – and they can’t afford not to spend it. So any change in spending won’t be as great as it is in richer areas?

He said: “To a certain extent people in Hackney are poor but they will have been stashing some money away. If they’re west Indian, then it’ll be for a trip back to Jamaica, or for their kids and they’re not spending it, they’re saving it. It would be interesting to know to what extent this is happening. It’s depressing when you see accounts of burglaries and people saying they had £3000 or so in cash stolen from them.”

He said one of the key issues for Hackney was transport: “Clearly there are big transport problems and I think that some of the things we were promised won’t happen and as long as Hackney isn’t plugged into the underground system it is going to miss out.”

I asked him what sort of relationship he would have with MPs?

“Here in Hackney it is Labour. MPs have to have a good working relationship with their MEP to know where EU funding would be possible.” He said that ten years ago MEPs couldn’t go into the House of Commons except by the same route as normal members of the public which he said was “grotesque” but while this had improved, there needs to be far more contact between MPs and MEPS.

Do you eventually want to be a normal MP?

I don’t want to be an MP. An MEP is the height of my ambition.

One of his main hobby horses is that Britain is not educating its children to be European: “The government scrapped learning a second language from the age of 14 a few years ago. And British kids are competing against kids in Germany where they speak 2-3 languages.

I asked if this meant that boroughs like Hackney, which have hundreds of languages, might be seen as a resource?

“One relevant thing is that with Turkish, it is a marginal language in the EU (Cyprus is a member but not north Cyprus). Turkey is very likely to become a member in 10-15 years. I think it would be useful to say to Turkish families here to make sure they keep their language skills because it is going to be very useful and British born ethnic Turks will have a really strong position in the Europe of the future.”

Navel-gazing intro: Candi-dating in Hackney

My brother-in-law is the only person who has asked me to explain why I have never voted. I argued that the issues were too complex; that no one understands the issues (even people who have spent their professional lives trying to understand them); that everyone who does vote is using the evidence to justify an emotional decision; that the evidence could be used to justify anything - except a decision based on evidence.

My brother-in-law hasn’t stopped voting and I haven’t started so the argument was probably never relevant - for some reason he votes and for some reason I don’t. I don’t have faith in my argument that it is all too complicated - it could be used to justify not getting out of bed in the morning - but it has become my excuse for not getting involved. At least not as a voter.

I am afraid to step into this arena now. I fear that my opinions are half-formed, adolescent, embarrassing. I am afraid that if I try to express a view on the issues, rather than my lack of confidence in the system, my ignorance will be exposed and ridiculed. Politicians and the people who surround them appear to spend a lot of time exposing and ridiculing each other and I assume that they would happily do the same to me.

Now, having set it up as an act of selfless bravery, I reveal that on Saturday, I went to the first political event I have ever been to in Hackney – apart from a couple of council meetings.

The reason I could stomach it – or even contemplated going at all – was because of this blog. I assumed it would allow me to hide behind the cloak of journalism. There was another reason too: on Thursday I found out that I might be made redundant and I didn’t feel like sitting around thinking about it.

So going to Hackney Unite’s 'candi-dating' event wasn’t really a tentative step in my journey toward democracy but I’m aiming to write up the experience over the next couple of days.

Here’s the Socialist Party of Great Britain's candidate’s take on the day and a quick mention by the Lib Dem candidate.

Pipe smokes democracy

Mayor Jules Pipe sounded so convincing when he rubbished democracy improving attempts by Hackney and other councils it hardly seemed worth revisiting the subject. But a quick look at some of the data available suggests he may have been cherry-picking.

At 29 April's full council meeting Pipe said that past efforts to interest Hackney residents in grass-roots budgeting had failed. He also said that this route for improving local democracy could end up costing taxpayers on several fronts as budgets were left unspent and pavements in disrepair led to increased insurance claims.

The mayor said that there was no evidence that past and ongoing experiments in devolved budgeting had led to improved democracy or interest in how the borough was run.

He said it had been tried in 1990: "Five neighbourhoods were given £100,000 and every year we ended up with the money unspent in a number of neighbourhoods." He said that this and other attempts to devolve budget decision making "didn't strengthen democracy in any way whatever."

One of the examples he used to strengthen his argument was Kirkless Council's devolved budget scheme and many of the negative figures he used - £600,000 was unspent in 2007/2008, some wards have £2m back-logs on pavement budgets and projects are often held back by disagreements between different parties in the same wards - were discussed in this Kirklees Council document: Safer Stronger Communities Scrutiny Panel

The final line of the documents findings is: "In the main, the practice of devolving decision-making to wards has been useful and in most cases the full allocation has been spent." Not at all the view of Mayor Pipe.

His negative view of these projects was based mainly on the belief that they didn't create the desired democratic interest.

However the report in the above link appeared to state the opposite - with cross party bickering causing problems, not disinterest. More to the point Kirklees is a Labour/Liberal led council and more likely to face these political disputes than Labour dominated Hackney. Unless Pipe thinks this process might cause rifts between his councillors.

The growth in democratic understanding also seems to be backed by this report from 2006 : "Many councils have established relatively small-scale (generally under £100,000 per area) local project budgets to be allocated by area committees. These have proved popular with councillors and community representatives alike as they represent direct decision making by frontline councillors with their communities. But they can be problematic in that they can detract frontline councillors into time-consuming allocations of small funds rather than working to influence mainstream decision making."

No doubt Mayor Pipe's response was well researched and probably based on more up-to-date information. But judging by the superficial google-searched documents I could find it looks like he's just plucked a few bad bits out to make a point he wanted to make anyway. If so, why?

If these projects don't work, where's the proof? Or is he saying that Kirklees Council can't accept that their project has failed and its leaders are deluding themselves?

Pipe was responding to a question from Conservative leader, Cllr Coggins: "What is the Mayor's attitude to 'ward budgets'? (see for example the arrangements in Brent, Westminster, Eastbourne and other authorities).

Pipe said he wanted to encourage people to understand the council decision making process and that "we are developing our approach to participatory budgeting" but it would depend on those people who want to get involved having a better understanding.

But he said the main hurdle to getting this process underway was a technical one: "We haven't done participatory budgeting sooner because this council sets it budget extremely late, usually the paper work is available in January and it would need to be available around October to be able to go to the public with ideas and gauge their reaction and involve them in the decision making process."

So no plans for grass-roots democracy in Hackney at the moment.