Skewing the Result

Here's how the Scottish Labour Party announced the results of its leadership elections yesterday: 

Today, we announced the results of our leadership election, using a one person one vote system for the first time in our history.

Kezia Dugdale has been elected Leader of the Scottish Labour Party and Alex Rowley has been elected as Deputy Leader of the Scottish Labour Party.

The results were as follows:

Leader

Kezia Dugdale – 72.1% of the total vote

Ken Macintosh – 27.9% of the total vote

Deputy Leader

Round 1

Richard Baker – 30.4% of the total vote

Gordon Matheson – 32.2% of the total vote

Alex Rowley – 37.4% of the total vote

Richard Baker was eliminated having received the least number of votes.

Round 2 after transferrals

Gordon Matheson – 44.5% of the total vote

Alex Rowley – 55.5% of the total vote

Now the 'selectorate' entitled to take part in these two contests were reported previously as 15,000 individual Labour Party members and 6,000 trade union members who had to register their desire to vote.

So the total 'selectorate' was 21,000 with only 6,000 trade union members out of 300,000 or exercising their right to vote as people who pay the political levy - which means that only around 2% of union members in Scotland bothered to vote.

The other strange thing is that Scottish Labour has not explained how many of the 21,000 ballot papers were actually returned and what the votes were for each candidate in the two different sections, i.e. individual party members and registered union voters.

When we get to the UK leadership election these figures will become even more significant because there are in effect still three separate voting categories in the UK contest: 

1. individual party members
2. registered union voters 
3. other registered supporters who are not party members or registered union voters

Maybe the Labour Party doesn't want people to understand the breakdown of voting in different sections, but if you ask me the public is entitled to know whether individual party members are electing their own leaders - or whether trade union activists and registered supporters are skewing the votes and effectively deciding the result.

Up until now the Scottish Labour Party has been roughly one tenth of the size of the UK Labour Party, yet in the 2015 leadership contests in the party members section of the Scottish electorate is only 5% of the UK total (15,000 to 299,755) while in the non-members section the Scottish electorate is less than 2% of the UK total (6,000 to 310,998).

So something very strange has been going on and what passes for democracy inside the Labour Party these days has been made to look completely mad, yet again.