17 May - Your vote doesn’t really matter
With nothing much happening in Bexley right now I wondered if there was any scope to return to and further analyse the election statistics but fortunately a reader came to the rescue with his own thoughts. The points he makes are probably not unique to 2022 but illustrate clearly why it is near impossible to arrest the decline in Bexley under its one woman dictatorship.
More than 7 out of 10 of the potential votes were not cast for either
Conservative or Labour candidates. How this then manages to produce a
Council packed with 33 seats for the Conservatives and 12 seats for Labour
genuinely baffles me? If anybody really believes that we have any sort of
truly representative elected officials at Bexley Council then I am afraid
that they are remarkably deluded.
You make the point that Teresa O’Neil, our glorious Conservative Leader, can
no longer truthfully claim that the majority of residents support her Tories.
In fact any claim of this type is even more bogus when you can see that the
Conservatives gained a mere 15.43 % of the potential votes available across the Borough.
Perhaps much more noteworthy is to see how the Conservative share compared
to the 13.36% of the potential votes that Labour managed to acquire on the
night. This then would inevitably lead you to conclude that any sort of a
genuine contest should produce a result indicating not that much separating
them both – of course this assumes that you want to actually reflect voters
intentions and be truly representative throughout the Borough. So please
remind me again how we ended up with a landslide majority of 33
Conservatives compared to 12 Labour Councillors?
Funny how Bexley Council is not keen to give any real indication of turnout on the night. Go look at
https://democracy.bexley.gov.uk/mgElectionResults.aspx?ID=16&RPID=16303716
and you will see n/a. Why are they so coy? I agree that residents in
different wards have different numbers of votes that can be cast so it is
not a simple calculation to make – but equally it is not that difficult to
do either. My analysis shows that less than 31% of the potential votes that
could have been cast actually were.Please can somebody let me know what sort
of a mandate to govern this actually is in our so called democracy?
Wouldn’t you know that at the ward level it gets even worse. In every single
ward across the Borough more than 80% of the potential votes from electors
did not go to the winning Party. What is the point of claiming to represent
residents, in any way shape or form, when all you have actually demonstrated
is that you failed to acquire 4 out of 5 of their votes for your political party?
Perhaps I digress but I do wonder if anybody else is struck by the
incredible chutzpah on show via an image banner received from a Bexley Council e-mail:
“Your Vote Matters”, don’t make me laugh! Could anything really be further from the truth?
To me there is no reasonable explanation for how Bexley council has been
electorally constituted. I can only conclude that our current electoral
system is morally bankrupt and frankly just not fit for purpose in the
modern age. On the other hand, don’t go holding your breath for
change. After all, why would either of the main political parties want to
alter the corrupt system that they have so brilliantly engineered for us? It
has been said that “every nation gets the government it deserves.” I ask
myself daily where have we gone so wrong in Bexley?
In case anyone else is interested, Nicholas Dowling’s spreadsheet analysis of the results is
available here.