Boris 4 London

Voting in the London Mayoral elections is now well under way. Those ever fickle polls (that usually influence rather than convey public opinion) are showing a reasonable lead for Boris Johnson.

Whether or not he wins is another matter entirely of course, though I expect he will. Just. The tide is now noticeably turning against Labour and against Ken.

Whether a Boris win is a good thing for either London or this country is debatable though. As Peregrine Worsthorne said in the First Post today of Boris Johnson, ‘take away the gags and jokes and nothing much is left’. Much the same could be said of the elitist metropolitan classes that now infect the majority of political institutions and parties in this country.

Still, at the end of the day, sum zero Boris is more positive than Ken Livingstone who languishes in complete negativity on almost all fronts; whether he is vocally supporting brutal communist regimes in Cuba or Venezuela or comparing a Jewish journalist to a Nazi concentration camp guard.

Thankfully since I do not live in London and will not be voting in these elections, I will not be affected by its result (directly anyway) and can rest with a clear conscious tonight.

Engineering The Vote

Despite the title this article does not concern the ongoing elections saga throughout Zimbabwe in which President Robert Mugabe may attempt to rig the result in a desperate effort to cling onto power for another consecutive term.

No, unfortunately this post once again concerns the Conservative MEP selections and the continuing discontent being voiced by party members over its rules and procedure.

This dissatisfaction has rumbled on for over a year since the central party hierarchy proclaimed that incumbent MEPs would automatically top any selection list and the top ranking woman in any vote would automatically receive preferential treatment.

Since the selection count on Friday the Conservative party has bowed to pressure and publicly released the figures by which candidates were ranked and selected. The results show that despite a number of women receiving fewer votes than their equivalent male candidates, they were still ranked more highly in the final process. Unfair? Yes. Unexpected? No.

Yet, in a few regions female candidates such as Jacqueline Foster and Anthea McIntyre topped their respective ballots on their own merit without it would seem any required or unwanted intervention. These results therefore prove that women, regardless of their gender, can outperform male candidates in a vote if they are deserving.

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Full South West Result

The result for the South West MEP Selections is as follows: 1) Giles Chichester MEP, 2) Julie Girling, 3) Ashley Fox, 4) Michael Dolley, 5) Don Collier and 6) Zehra Zaidi.

It looks as though my prediction of the final vote was almost completely wrong. Oh well, what do I know? Results from the other EU electoral regions around Britain can be found at ConservativeHome in a running update.

Despite changes in the number of MEPs the South West elects (and I use the term ‘elects’ very loosely) being reduced from seven to six, it is almost guaranteed that Giles Chichester and Julie Girling will be elected in 2009 to serve as MEPs in Brussels. However, Ashley Fox’s expenses paid first class ticket on the Euro-star is not quite so assured.

At the European elections in 2004, UKIP increased their share of the vote by 12% when compared with the result from 1999. With an ever growing mood of discontent directed towards our own self-serving Government, Parliament and the European Union, there is every chance that UKIP will poll even more strongly at the next EU elections in 2009.

Nick Webb has reminded me that depending upon overall turnout and how well other parties such as the Greens and UKIP poll, it may only take as little as an increase of 600 votes per Parliamentary constituency within the South West to win a third Conservative MEP. In the current political climate this is of course more than achievable.

European Selection Results

Well, today is that terribly exciting day when we finally learn which of our MEP candidates will probably be heading off on the gravy train to Brussels at the next EU elections in 2009.

Much like the European Union itself, the party list system which is used to elect MEPs is incredibly undemocratic. In effect political parties rather than the electorate have almost total control over who is selected and elected.

For example, despite Giles Chichester being a sycophantic pro-EU MEP whose views are out of line with the majority of Conservative party members in the South West and indeed the electorate – unless he had chosen to step down or resign then there is no way for party members under the current rules to remove him from office or the list, and the British electorate in the South West certainly has absolutely no say either.

Then there is the scandal of how the party has chosen to enforce the elevation of the highest ranking women in the selections vote to the top of their list behind any incumbent MEP. In the South West this means that if the membership voted for the two female candidates Zehra Zaidi and Julie Girling to come in last, then regardless of the result the higher ranking of the two women would automatically be placed second behind the incumbent Giles Chichester.

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