Out for the Count

At the tip of democracy's spear, kind of

On election night on 4 July, I attended the vote count for the constituency I ran in, Islington South. In a way, this is the tip of the spear of democracy, where the rubber hits the road etc.. It was an interesting and in fact, to my surprise, rather fun experience as I had been dreading it, not least because it often lasts until 4am in the morning and I don’t like missing my sleep.

The count took place in a large tennis centre by a park in Islington. Huge rubber mats had been laid over the indoor courts, enormous curtains of ball-catching nets divided the space, slightly incongruous for such a political and formal event. The count itself took place on a large square of perhaps fifty tables at which sat the counters, all Islington Council employees in black Islington Council T-shirts. At the centre of the square was the computer-laden table where all the votes were ultimately counted up.

Our little group of Green Party activists got to work shortly after we arrived at 10pm when polling stations closed. The first task is the tally. This is when the ballot boxes are first emptied into a messy pile of ballot papers. These are then sorted by the counters into stacks of ten. Our job was to watch the counters stack up the papers, and try to see where the crosses were next to the names. This is the first indication of the vote; it’s also a way of seeing where our votes were concentrated. Several ballot boxes are received from each ward of the constituency (each of which contains about 11,000 voters). So by counting up the Green votes in each ward, we can see where our vote is strongest and where our canvassing has been most successful.

It was strangely exciting to see the ballot papers spill out onto the tables. It felt very raw. That very day thousands of voters had made a cross in the box beside the name of their preferred candidate. This was a profoundly political act. And after all the boring campaign talk and debate, we could suddenly see who was getting the most votes. I was tallying in Islington North, the neighbouring constituency which was also being counted in the tennis centre. Here, a particular drama was playing out for this was the constituency of Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party. He had been expelled from the party for refusing to accept a report into anti-semitism and was now standing as an independent. Meanwhile, the Labour Party was running its own ‘official’ candidate against him. Both Corbyn’s supporters and the Labour Party had flooded the constituency with leaflets and canvassers. The Labour Party was desperate for Corbyn to lose. Who would prevail on the night? Slowly, as the ballot papers were stacked and bundled together with rubber bands, I could begin to tell.

There was a Labour Party activist tallying alongside me. A young woman, she was perfectly affable though there seemed to be no tradition of actually greeting members of the other parties. It was oddly tense as a result. Every few minutes, a man in a sharp suit and tie would appear and snap at her: make sure you count the votes, as if that wasn’t precisely what she was doing. There were several men, mostly young, in sharp suits and ties, patrolling the counting area. These were clearly more dominant or senior members of the Labour Party, local or not (the teller beside me was from West London, as the local party had imported activists from all over). They for sure didn’t greet me but instead gave my Green Party rosette, pinned to my lapel, a suspicious glance (I too was in a suit, though a rather scruffier one and my shoes were trainers rather than the smart leather business shoes worn by the Labour people). They were very grim faced and stern. They weren’t nice to my fellow teller and they ignored me. Indeed, they contributed to the rather strained atmosphere one could sense in the room. For them, it was all about defeating Corbyn.

But as the ballot papers spread out onto the tables, and I tallied up the votes I could see, it was clear that Corbyn was in fact edging out the Labour candidate. I was pleased because I know Jeremy Corbyn from days fighting the cause of the Western Sahara, where he was a devoted and rare parliamentary supporter for this forgotten fight for liberation. And I don’t like the current Labour Party, for reasons I have explained. There was also the Schadenfreude of knowing that the men in sharp suits would be disappointed, no doubt to the detriment of their future party careers.

As for the Greens, we didn’t campaign in Islington North, for fear of becoming a bogeyman of the Left if our votes stopped Corbyn from winning. So there weren’t a lot of crosses for the marvellous Green candidate, Sheridan Kates (although she was in fact to come third, a remarkable result given the absence of any canvassing or leafletting). It was largely a two horse race.

But what of my candidacy in Islington South? After about an hour of tallying, one of our members came over to me and whispered that it looked like I was coming second. I was elated and put my arm around him in an awkward hug. Second was a huge jump from the previous election when we had come fourth behind the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives. We had no hope of winning the seat, Labour’s 24th safest in the country and where their candidate, Emily Thornberry, had won in 2019 with a massive majority. On a night of a Labour landslide, coming second was a huge result for us; we were now Labour’s main challenger!

The next stage of the count was the actual piling up and counting of the votes for each candidate. For this, little shoe-box size containers were arrayed across each table with the name of each candidate inscribed neatly upon them in marker pen. Our job was to watch our votes piling up in the box marked with my name to make sure that none of ‘ours’ were put in others’ boxes, which did in fact happen one or two times. But for me, this was the best part. In Islington South, Thornberry’s boxes were filling up quickly. But lots of ballot papers were going into my boxes, and more than the remaining candidates! So I was indeed going to be second. Yippee! Of course they weren’t ‘my’ votes but Green Party votes, but by that time my ego was firmly in control. Gleefully, I watched my votes stack up and grinned at the counters, who smiled back. That’s me!, I told them, and as I was the only candidate monitoring the vote, they responded with polite surprise. I started chatting to one but then a more senior official came over and firmly told her to stop talking to me. It wasn’t allowed. I began texting my friends, which one also isn’t supposed to do as the emerging count cannot be publicised until it’s formally declared.

After the votes were bundled into batches of twenty, they were then assembled for the final count. This all took several hours during which the party activists, including me, roamed around rather aimlessly, occasionally popping back to our Green Party table, where we had hoarded snacks and soft drinks. Taut with nerves, I stuffed yogurt-coated almonds into my mouth as fast as I could and guzzled fizzy drinks. We gossiped about the national result which was gradually emerging as the night wore on. Indeed, Labour had won by a massive landslide.

Word spread that the results for Islington were being finalised. I had come second! I was thrilled and we all hugged each other. And in Islington North, Corbyn too had won! Now for the formal declaration. The candidates for South were summoned to the stage. The mayor read out the result, oddly announcing me as “Carne William Ross also known as Carne Ross” as if my middle name was some kind of odd moniker. Then the count for each candidate was read out. Of course, Thornberry had won by a thumping margin. But I had received 17.5% of the vote and had come a convincing second, well ahead of the other parties. This represented a 13% swing to the Greens. Fantastic!

Thornberry gave a short speech which consisted of the usual bromides of gratitude to the wonderful people of Islington South, though she also complained about some of the less ‘democratic’ tactics some parties had used. Shouting people down was not proper democratic debate, she declared. We were unaware of these issues until this point and didn’t know what she meant.

I had approached Thornberry before the declaration to shake her hand and wish her congratulations. She acknowledged me with barely the slightest of nods, perhaps remembering our contretemps at the hustings a couple of weeks earlier (retailed in an earlier post). The Labour Party members present, including the men in suits, cheered and clapped her result, as did the Greens when my result was announced.

A while later, Islington North was declared and indeed Corbyn was the winner. The official Labour candidate stood forlornly on the platform, barely noticeable in the row of the also-ran candidates. Beforehand, he had been spotted reclining in the parties’ area where his wife consolingly stroked his hair. Corbyn could have given a vengeful ‘told you so’ speech for he has been poorly treated by the party he once led, but instead spoke graciously of his loyalty to the people of Islington whom he had served as MP for now forty years. His supporters, also mostly young men (but not in suits), whooped and yelled. And then suddenly it was all over and everyone drifted off home. I was so wired I couldn’t sleep, exhausted though I was (perhaps it was all that sugar…).

After the event, I had two conflicting emotions, one of head and one of heart. I had been stirred by the count and the encounters with voters before the election. I liked the experience. It had been enjoyable and interesting, though perhaps only because it had been novel. I envied Thornberry now entering parliament. Afterwards, I kept thinking about her (it turns out she was not to be given the office of Attorney-General she was expecting, what must have been a bitter rejection). My ego had been boosted by all the attention and drama.

But little-noticed during the count, one of the officials had announced the voter turnout: a mere 58%, and across the country it had not been much more. Over forty percent of those eligible had not voted. We didn’t really pay this much attention in the excitement of the count. Thornberry failed to mention it in her victory speech.

As the vote recedes, I think of the crosses in the boxes on the thousands of ballot papers that were counted that night. One little pencilled cross. That was the beginning and end of the offer to the voter, their chance to ‘have their say’. It’s pretty pathetic. Despite this experience of what is called ‘democracy’, I remain an anarchist. I don’t believe in ‘representative’ democracy where the many elect the few (the very few, in fact one person, the Prime Minister) to take decisions of enormous consequence about the many’s lives. Instead I believe that the many should take decisions about their own circumstances without the impositions of top-down authority. I stood for the Greens because only they talk about devolving democracy and giving true power to the people (and I will have more to say about this in due course). They also care about equality and climate, which I care about too.

That night, Keir Starmer was elected Prime Minister with less than 35% of the vote, but winning a huge majority of the seats in Parliament - around 60%. Such are the vagaries of the deeply unfair ‘first past the post’ electoral system. That means the government, now with overwhelming and all but unstoppable power, was given a mandate by no more than about a third of voters, who themselves constitute less than 60% of the adult population. That’s a total of about one in five people, not really very many, who made a choice given to them once every five years - a little cross in a box. That’s ‘representative democracy’ and it has to change. I will discuss how in later posts.

But it was fun nevertheless…