KEEP AN EYE ON THESE CHANGES

When the Scottish Parliament was set up, it was recognised that the old first-past-the-post system of electing representatives was discredited and could not reflect a modern complex democracy.

So the Lib Dems and Labour agreed on a kind of proportional system - the old first-past-the-post system of 73 individual seats, and a top-up list system for 56 Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) to balance to a certain extent the bias in the old system.

This gave more proportionality, but had the disadvantage of creating two types of MP - a single member elected by a single constituency, and list members elected by a group of eight constituencies, with seven list MSPs per group of constituencies.

Because of the historic strength of the Labour party, Labour ended up with a disproportionate number of the single member constituency MSPs.  The other parties were to a great extent represented by list MSPs.

To its discredit, the Labour party, who set the system up, has constantly tried to undermine its own system, principally by denigrating list MSPs as second-class MSPs or failed politicians or back-door MSPs.

Some time ago they began to suggest that they wanted to change the present system, a change that would be of terrific benefit to Labour and undermine all the other parties.  The latest proponent of change is Scotland Office minister David Cairns.

The idea is that candidates should be barred from standing in both the constituency and the party list at the same time.  Well, of course, this great for Labour, as they know where their safe seats are and many Labour candidates will be assured of being elected.

But it is certainly not so good for the other parties.

Let us say you have a first-class SNP candidate in the Glasgow area.  He or she will normally be selected to fight a constituency, but will have little chance of winning, losing probably to a Labour Mike Watson equivalent or worse.  Then that excellent candidate would not be allowed to stand for a list seat, even although they might have come top of the list!

This system, if adopted, would be a great political fix for the Labour party, and deplete the quality choice for all the other parties.

It probably will not happen, but it just shows you how far the Labour party might go to undermine democratic choice in its own interests.

The day will come, of course, when the trends of recent years will lead to the Labour party being far less powerful in Scotland than it is at present. So in the longer term this is not even a good idea for future Labour candidates.

A STUNNING RESULT

Readers may remember that the last time out in October I told you of the Loanhead (Midlothian) campaign for the local by-election.

I said then that I hoped to have better news than in our previous Midlothian by-election last March when we were comprehensively hammered.

Well, folks, the news is indeed good - this time we did the hammering!

You can see the details from Allison in the Flag last week.

This of course was a local government by-election, so the area to work was small and the electorate manageable at just over 3,200.

But I have never before had the feeling of total and ruthless logic applied to a campaign that I had here.

Right from the beginning we knew what turnout to expect, and what number of voters we had to contact to win.

We knew what leaflets we were going to put put, and how we were going to run our canvassing, and how we were going to manage the postal votes.

All the same, while we thought we were going to do well, most of us had no idea that the result was going to so devastating for our opponents.

As one who played a very minor part in this victory, I can tell you that the feeling was great!

Let us hope that those responsible for running the campaign are given a free hand with other elections and are able to build up a team based on their successful principles.
 

WHAT ABOUT THE OTHERS?

So what are the lessons from this result and where does it leave the other parties?

First of all, sheer organisation and a logical approach are a great help in the preparation of the background.  Sheer hard work is also important, and knowing your way around the various ins and outs of political campaigning;  where do you get a marked-up register, how do you transfer that into your own spreadsheet, how do you go about garnering postal votes and how do you maximise your own turnout?

There are many other aspects that have to be taken care of, so let us hope that the SNP will take all of this on board.

As for the other parties, well, they are left licking their wounds.

Clearly, there is still quite a strong residual Labour vote out there, but it is soft and a really good campaign can convince people that Labour victories are not inevitable.

For the Conservatives - still clearly the second party in England - the result was a disaster:  13 votes in all, under one per cent of the  total.

If this sort of thing goes on, then when the Tories win again in England they will face immense problems governing Scotland.

For me personally, the most heartening defeat was that of the Lib Dems.  I was once a Liberal myself, influenced by the great Jo Grimond.

What a moral failure there has been in his old party since the sixties! Only the Liberals in Loanhead ran a truly dishonest campaign.  They must have put out about five pieces of literature, claiming that the result was between themselves and the Labour party, and that no other party had any chance of winning.

The result proved them wrong, of course, but even as they put out their ridiculous forecasts, they knew that they were dishonestly trying to con the voters.

Every graph they put out was a graph, not of a Loanhead result, but of a general election result for the whole of Midlothian.

Because they had come third in Loanhead in 2003, they did not dare to mention that awkward fact, but claimed that only they could defeat Labour here - a deliberately ambiguous term by which they tried both to avoid mentioning the town of Loanhead, but also give the impression that it was really Loanhead that they were talking about.

I first came across this kind of dishonest Lib Dem verbal manipulation in the Borders in 1997, and it is really good to see that it was at last taken apart by a great SNP campaign and the voters of Loanhead.

SIR WALTER SCOTT

In an interesting article in the Herald newspaper Judy Steel points out that it was two hundred hundred years ago in January 1803 that Sir Walter Scott published The Lay of the Last Minstrel.

This was a ground-breaking work - a kind of novel in verse - that set Scott on his way to literary fame, if not fortune.

And yet, the anniversary has gone almost unnoticed in Scotland and it seems elsewhere.

We certainly fail consistently to celebrate our famous Scots and the achievements of our country.  Even featuring on a postage stamp would help to raise awareness of Scotland, among Scots themselves and abroad.

Part of the problem is the conservative nature of British institutions, especially the Post Office, although things have changed over the years.

I well remember when the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns came up in 1959 there was a move to celebrate Burns on a postage stamp.  It cam to nothing, because the PO claimed that you could not possibly have the head of anyone apart from the monarch on British stamps, and in any case British stamps only celebrated institutions.

Five years later however, a way was found to celebrate on stamps the four-hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare.

As I say, things have improved, but there is still room for improvement, both in our own attitude and in that of the Post Office.