A little campaigning Flash animation

Went out delivering campaign newspapers in Headingley today. Really good exercise – must have burned off a good thousand calories. I did end up with newsprint all over my fingers though.

The Leeds ward boundaries are changing this year so the entire Council is up for election. The LibDems have all three seats in Headingley, and our hard-working councillors deserve to get re-elected this year. With the Labour Council currently only a few seats from No Overall Control, all-up elections and the postal vote pilot, it’s anyone’s guess what the political landscape of Leeds will be on June 11th.

Very disappointing news from the Electoral Commission, who have rejected the idea of lowering the UK voting age to 16. One of the more ridiculous reasons for this was that 16- and 17-year-olds might (or even would) use their votes less than the average and this would lower turnout. What they would actually be doing would be lowering percentage turnout – the number of people turning out to vote would go up!

If you follow this logic, the Electoral Commission shouldn’t run voter registration campaigns in case the people they register don’t use their votes. We should, in fact, kick off the electoral register anyone who hasn’t used their vote in, say, the last four years. That would dramatically increase turnout in future elections. What a success.

While percentage turnout is a useful measure for comparing individual elections, of course it depends on the current level of enfranchisement. (That’s why turnout in 2001 was only compared in the media to elections back to 1918.) Turnout might drop (or it could go up) the year the change is made, but from then on you have a new baseline.

And, as many people have written many times, it is neither fancy gimmicks nor fixing the way it’s counted that will resolve the issue of falling turnouts, it is engendering in the population the feeling that their vote actually matters. That means a voting system that doesn’t treat you as an irrelevance if you live in a safe seat and a Government that doesn’t introduce policies that directly contradict explicit manifesto commitments.

It was somewhat unexpectedly that I found myself on BBC Radio Five Live last Wednesday. They couldn’t get a LibDem MP on to take part in their top-up fees debate and so, prompted by a friend, I phoned in. Within minutes, I was standing in a quiet street in Westminster debating higher education funding live with Tory MP Charles Hendry and Labour MP Kevin Brennan.

It was more unexpectedly that I found myself at BBC Television Centre, home of said radio station, on Thursday. The NUS, this time, failed to offer a speaker to discuss political protest so the production team decided to call on “that good LibDem we had yesterday”. The debate was good fun, in the studio with Simon Mayo, although less adversarial than Wednesday’s.

Anyway, just to prove it, here’s a picture of me in the studio (in the corner) courtesy of the Five Live webcam.