I was very disappointed to have lost in this month’s elections.
However, I would like to thank the more than two thousand people who voted for me. It’s been a privilege to represent Seaton and Colyton and to get to know so many of you in the last four years. It’s frustrating to me that so many of the things I was trying to get done, like the Stop Line Way in the Wetlands, are unfinished. I hope my successor will pick up the baton and I wish him luck.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about these elections was that more than half the electorate didn’t vote. We had a turnout of 42.5 per cent; the highest in East Devon was 43.5. Devon County Council spends over a half a billion pounds each year and provides crucial services but for each voter who cares, there’s at least one other who doesn’t seem to mind who’s in charge or who’s speaking for the local community.
Of course this doesn’t only happen in Devon, it isn’t a new situation and there are many reasons why it happens. Britain is a very centralised country and the government controls much of what councils do pretty tightly. For over a decade, it has starved them of funding, yet forced them to put up council tax while cutting services.
Many voters see little for their money and they don’t see how voting will change it. Indeed, if they think it’s difficult to make real changes for local communities through this system, they’re right. Any councillor who says they don’t find the job very frustrating at times isn’t telling you the truth. Yet we also know that it is possible to push things forward a little here and there, and to sort out some of the problems, and that makes it worthwhile.
Another factor is that people believe that, as one seasoned local observer keeps telling me, ‘if you put up a donkey with a blue rosette, they’ll win here’. The Conservatives are certainly the strongest party in East Devon, but they are hardly invincible. In election after election, they get a minority of the votes (this time it was 43.8 per cent in our district) but the vast majority of seats (84 per cent) because of our electoral system.
Yet when the opposition voters unite behind a single candidate, we can win, as I did in 2017 and almost did again this time. Where the opposition is so split that none of them can win – like Exmouth where five candidates fought the Tories for two seats – many voters probably think it’s pointless to vote. Turnout there was a miserable 30.2 per cent.
This low voting – even in General Elections, one in three voters doesn’t turn out – seems to suit the Conservatives so much that they are now trying to discourage people even more. To vote in General Elections in future, people will need to show approved photo ID. But millions don’t have a passport or driving licence. The government will ask councils to issue a special new form of ID to these people, but of course many people will not realise they need this or get round to applying in time.
This is being done in the name of combating voter fraud. But even top Tories admit we don’t have a voter fraud problem. Just one voter, out of 32 million, was charged with fraud after the 2019 election. Everyone agrees that the real reason for the proposal, copied from the Republicans in the United States, is to try and prevent people from voting – the people without photo ID will be mostly the young, poor, women and ethnic minorities, groups which tend to vote Conservative less than others. Welcome to what the Americans call the world of ‘voter suppression’.