The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Communities want to choose people who get things done
Today’s elections are not place for cynical party politics but local understanding
It’s time to go to the polls again. Until very recently, I voted tactically at local elections. I’m not a member of any party – increasingly I’ve felt repelled by the tribal pettiness party politics can descend into – but, generally, my vote has been divided between the two parties I felt most closely aligned to my political views on the constitution, equalities, the environment and human rights.
I used my local council votes to send messages out into the wider world without thinking too much about the impact on my local area.
However, for the past couple of years, I’ve been working in grassroots community activism in my village. It’s a slippery slope – you start out just trying to raise funds for new play park equipment and then, one morning, you wake up and you’re the chair of the board.
The flipside of all this unpaid community stress is that I feel pretty well informed about all four of the councillors who, until this week, served my ward. I know all of their parties or independent status but I also know how much they’re prepared to help, who will take up a cause, who is in it just for their ego, and who only serves particular vested interests.
I know who to contact when we need help applying for funding, who to contact when we need assistance working with particular departments of the council, who has the community’s back against corporate interests. Unfortunately, two of them are not standing in today’s elections.
A leaflet comes through the door. It’s from one of the two parties I’ve tended to make my first preference in the past. It tells me they are fielding two candidates in my ward.
One of them is a man I’ve never heard of before. There is no information given about him, just his name and the party he represents. The other is one of our current councillors, a woman who has been really supportive and helpful with a recent issue my community group is trying to resolve involving a big housing corporation who are building in our village.
I know this because I’ve had to contact her regularly, but there’s no information about her on the leaflet either beyond, again, her name and party.
The leaflet instructs me to mark him as my number one preference, and her as number two. It doesn’t tell me why.
She is my first choice this year and, despite these instructions, I’ll mark her as such on the ballot; without more information I don’t know whether this man will be as responsive, as eager to help out, will share the same views on community rights versus big business interests.
During a chat at the till with a nice lady in the local shop, I learnt the other party I habitually vote for at Scottish election level is actually fielding a candidate here this year. That’s quite a rare thing – they are smaller and, lacking funds to run in every ward, they tend to concentrate on cities.
However, beyond a local newspaper article listing the candidate’s name (actually how I found out her name), I can find not a sausage of information about this person.
I have not received a leaflet. She does not have a social media profile, there is no information about her on the party website, nor the regional branch of the party’s social media.
I know what our community needs in a local councillor right now and I don’t know how she squares up to that.
It’s a different thing from electing an MP or MSP. I no longer feel I can trust my vote exclusively to her party of choice without knowing how she herself will work in the role.
That said, I’m all too guiltily aware this cuts both ways with me. There is only one party fielding candidates in my ward that I never have and never will vote for. (Regular readers of this column probably won’t struggle to work out who.)
Last year, while I was struggling to raise funds to bring facilities for disenfranchised teenagers into our local park, a fellow campaigner tipped me off that the older gentleman representing this party was the best person to go to for help. The project was not one that would work with his party’s current policy and yet he was unfailingly helpful and enthusiastic about it.
He isn’t standing again today; I wouldn’t have been able to bring myself to vote for him even if he was, as I fundamentally don’t feel – yes, despite my experience – that anyone who aligns themselves with that party would ever have a community’s best interests at heart.
Party politics really does get its claws in deep, and early on, in this country.
I no longer feel I can trust my vote exclusively to her party of choice