What would Scotland’s political landscape look like under STV?

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Last night, my dear friend James MacKenzie suggested that the next Scottish Parliament elections will be fought using Single Transferable Vote (STV), because the SNP, Greens, and Lib Dems all (apparently) support it and the Scottish Parliament now has the power to change it. While I think that is absolute rubbish (why would a politician as risk-averse as Nicola Sturgeon pursue electoral reform that wasn’t in anyone’s manifesto?)  I began to speculate as to what that would look like. So I set about putting together multi-member STV constituencies for the Scottish Parliament.

My first assumption is that, as local government in Scotland uses wards of either three or four seats that these would also be the predominant model used for Parliament seats too. However, any reform effort would doubtless come under significant pressure to include the possibility of five seat constituencies too, in order to prevent a systematic bias in favour of large parties. I’m also assuming that there will be 129 seats, on the basis that electoral reform would be an almost impossible sell if it simultaneously includes creating more politicians. It seems obvious to exclude three seats for the islands, though I’m avoiding the question of how you’d represent these three disparate areas under STV. That leaves 126 seats to be made up on the mainland. I have sought to follow the rules set out in the Scotland Act 1998, which are summarised as follows:

  1. So far as is practicable, regard must be had to the boundaries of the local government areas.
  2. The electorate of a constituency must be as near the electoral quota as is practicable, having regard to Rule 1.
  3. Rules 1 and 2 may be departed from where special geographical considerations (including in particular the size, shape and accessibility of a constituency) render it desirable to do so.
  4. Regard must be had for the inconveniences attendant on alterations of constituencies and of any local ties which would be broken by such alterations.

I also commenced the way the Boundary Commission for Scotland usually does, which is to start at the top and work my way down. The electorate data is from the last review of UK Parliament constituencies (which was not completed), so it’s a little dated. Nonetheless, it provides a relatively good indication of how it can be done.

The total electorate for the mainland is 3,873,387, making the quota for three, four, and five seat constituencies 92,224, 122,965, and 153,706, respectively. The proposed constituencies are as follows.

As the electorate data is broken down into wards, some of the divisions are a little clunky. This is particularly the case where the cities are concerned and wards have electorates in excess of 20,000 voters.

A handful of constituencies were particularly difficult to make up. One such example is Argyll and Bute – a seat that is not in the Highlands, but neither is it suburban Glasgow. It was difficult to put together a seat for Argyll that wasn’t vastly under the quota or vastly over the quota, and there appears to be very little that can be done at the fringes to avoid this (i.e. you either include Dumbarton, or you don’t). East and Mid Lothian is also considerably over quota, which could be more easily resolved by transferring some electors from Millerhill, Craighall, or Musselburgh into Edinburgh.

Geographically, the seats would look as follows:

How would #sp16 have panned out under this system?

It’s obviously impossible to accurately translate results from one electoral system into another. What this simply amounts to is educated guesswork – the factors involved are the constituency votes in the relevant existing constituencies, the strength of the parties’ list vote in the broader region, and guesstimates as to how transfers might pan out. In a good chunk of the seats this is a relatively easy task (for example, in Dumfries and Galloway, the vote share across the two equivalent constituencies amounted to two quotas for the Tories, one for the SNP, and one for Labour, while the Greens performed poorly in the south list relative to the rest of Scotland). However, in many others, I’m simply going on instinct. In those instances, the results are a good deal less than scientific. Finally, I’m assuming that, whatever way they were elected, the three island seats would have produced the same three MSPs.

Therefore, if the Scottish Parliament election had been held using STV on the above boundaries, my guess is…

SNP: 64, Conservatives: 28, Labour: 27, Lib Dems: 6, Greens: 4.

If you want to give it a go yourself, the full breakdown of my guesswork is available here.

They Took Our Jobs! The free market bias of the European Court of Justice and the dismemberment of workers’ rights

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giphy“We have surrendered our sovereignty to the European Court of Justice” is the one of the most common arguments in favour of leaving the European Union of the Tory right. This, I have argued before, is somewhat surprising given that the consequence of that loss of sovereignty is the removal of Member States’ liberty to depart from a free-market, pro-private enterprise, capitalist ideology. The cardinal offender, in the minds of Jacob Rees-Mogg, et al. is the European Court of Justice (ECJ), with their fondness for distasteful European ideas such as rights, etc. It is true that the ECJ is imbued with a broad power to bind the courts of the Member States, and that that power might not be so objectionable if it were exercised in a manner that is ideologically neutral. However, while it is certainly the case that the ECJ is not ideologically neutral, what the Rees-Moggs and the Borises of this world seem to ignore is that the ideology the Court has consistently chosen to impose is the pro-enterprise ideology that Rees-Mogg and Boris so favour.

Article 3 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) provides that one of the aims of the EU is to pursue a “highly competitive social market economy”. The ideological ambiguity in this objective is no accident – the consensus in favour of European unity at the Communities’ outset was so broad that the objective of unity was paramount to all other ideological concerns. As the ECJ is a fan of the purposive approach to legal interpretation, it therefore, inevitably, falls to the court to resolve the conflict between the “social” and “free market” objectives of the Union. It is clear from the decisions of the Court that the ECJ favours the free market over social objectives.

Though the Court’s ideological leanings have been evident since the days of Cassis de Dijon, in keeping with the other EU institutions, the ECJ became more overt in expressing its ideological preferences in the mid-1980s. In Zaera, the Court stated that the objective contained within Article 3 of “raising the standard of living” within the Union was not a directly effective right or an objective per se, but rather that it was an expected consequence of the operation of the single market. In other words, the only increases in living standards that the EU Treaties mandate are those that occur by accident through the operation of the market, and that any artificial attempts at raising living standards are (presumably) illegal where they interfere with the operation of the market. The decision to favour one objective of Article 3 while surgically neutering another is an ideological preference.

While we frequently hear claims from the left about how much the EU has done for workers’ rights (ignoring the fact that many of the rights that they provide already existed in the UK, and in the case of holidays the UK provides more the minimum mandated by the EU) there appears to be a collective ignorance amongst many on the left as to the ECJ’s total dismemberment of collective labour rights. Two seminal cases in the past decade exemplify this: International Transport Workers’ Federation and Finnish Seamen’s Union v Viking Line ABP (Viking) and Laval un Partneri Ltd v Svenska Byggnadsarbetareförbundet (Laval).

In Viking, Viking Line ABP operated a ship between Finland and the Estonia, and planned to change the registration of the ship from the former to the latter in order to avail of a lower minimum wage in for Estonian workers. The International Transport Workers’ Federation opposes all “reflagging” for convenience, and instructed all of its international partners not to deal with Viking. Viking sought an injunction in the High Court of England and Wales on the grounds that the industrial action infringed upon their right of freedom of establishment under Art. 56 TFEU.

Similarly, in Laval, the the Swedish government awarded a contract to build schools to a Latvian company, Laval, who posted workers from Latvia to work on sites alongside Swedish workers. The Swedish Building Workers’ Union demanded that Laval sign their collective labour agreement, which would provide Latvian workers with far better protection than they would have been entitled to under the Posted Workers’ Directive. Laval refused, and so the builders’ union, along with the electricians’ union, called a strike in order to picket Laval’s sites. Laval sought an injunction under Art.56 as the pickets prevented them from doing business in Sweden, thereby infringing upon their right of freedom of establishment. The Court held, inter alia, that the Posted Workers’ Directive only entitles workers to the rate of pay the higher of the rate of pay they receive in their home country or the minimum wage in the host country, irrespective of whether or not that wage is significantly lower than the wage received by domestic workers. In effect, you can undercut domestic workers by importing labour even when it’s prima facie discriminatory.

In both Viking and Laval the Court held that there exists in EU law a fundamental right to industrial action. Naturally in cases such as these, that right to industrial action comes into conflict with the employers’ right of freedom of establishment. Normally in cases such as this, where two rights are in conflict and the scales are evenly balanced, the Court will grant the Member State a wide margin of appreciation. Resolving the conflict between two rights is, ultimately, an ideological, and therefore, a political task, and not a role that a court such as the ECJ should be performing. This is the approach that the Court had previously taken in cases such as Schmidberger and Omega.

However, in Viking and Laval, the Court held that the right to industrial action is subject to the right of freedom of establishment, it must pursue a legitimate aim, and it must be proportionate. In other words, you’re allowed to strike provided it’s not too inconvenient for your employer! And there I thought the whole point of a strike was for it to be inconvenient.

These are just some examples of the court’s preference for corporations over workers. There exist plenty of other examples of the Court’s ideological preferences in the field of labour law (such as Rüffert), as well as scores of examples where State Aid, Public Procurement, and Competition law are concerned, which I intend to write about in a subsequent blog. What’s clear from all of this, however, is that if anyone should be enraged by the European Court of Justice, it’s not the Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world, it’s the left.

Did Richard Lochhead cost the SNP their majority?

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417851-richard-lochhead-rural-affairs-secretaryThe SNP have spent decades slowly winning the support of Scotland’s farming communities. Though historically a solidly Tory demographic, the SNP first started making serious inroads in Scotland’s most agrarian areas in the 1980s, in particular in the North East. In the decades that followed their dominance in rural Scotland became increasingly apparent: they won Angus East, Banff and Buchan, and Moray in 1987; the Perth and Kinross by-election in 1995; and padded their numbers still by winning Galloway and Upper Nithsdale, and Tayside North in 1997. That dominance wasn’t just reflected in election results, either. The SNP’s support in rural communities, and their relationship with farmers, was visible in their ever-present stalls at agricultural shows, as well as the increasing number of giant “Vote SNP” hoardings on the roadsides, where once they would have said “Conservative and Unionist.” However, that relationship has severely soured in the past few months.

Since December 2015, farmers across Scotland have faced considerable delays in receiving their Common Agricultural policy payments from the Scottish Government.These payments are usually made in December, when many farmers settle their accounts, though by the end of February, only 1,000 out of almost 8,000 farms had received the payments they were due.. Though these delays are seemingly attributable to the shift to a new computer system and the shift to the new Basic Payments System, it has been alleged that Ministers were alerted to potential problems as early as 2014, while they were out campaigning in the independence referendum.

This led hundreds of farmers to descend upon Holyrood to protest the SNP Government’s handling of the issue. The previously-SNP supporting former head of the NFU in Scotland, Jim Walker, described assurances by Environment and Rural Affairs Secretary Richard Lochhead as “at best worthless and at worst plain lies” in what amounted to “a vain attempt to save his own skin.”

I spent a couple of weeks of the Scottish Parliament election campaign at home in the Highlands, and that the farming community had turned its back on the SNP was palpable. Gone were the scores of yellow Richard Lochhead and Fergus Ewing boards, and in their place were shiny hoardings bearing the names of Douglas Ross and Edward Mountain. That hostility was reflected too in the NFU hustings in Dingwall a couple of weeks ago.

Digesting the results of Thursday night, it is clear that the SNP paid a price at the ballot box for the Scottish Government’s failings over farm payments.

Below are the results of ten of Scotland’s most agrarian constituencies, and just look at those swings to the Tories. In addition to taking Aberdeenshire West, there’s a 15% swing from the SNP to the Tories in Moray, whopping 17% swing in Alex Salmond’s old constituency of Aberdeenshire East, and Roseanna Cunningham’s majority was slashed from 7,166 to 1,422.

The regional list results were just as bad. While in 2011 the SNP managed to win all ten seats in the North East and win a seat on the list, this time around not only did they lose Aberdeenshire West, but they weren’t even close to winning a seat on the list. There was an 11% swing from the SNP to the Tories in the North East. And while the constituencies panned out the same in the Highlands and Islands, the SNP dropped another two seats here, with a 9% swing to the Tories here.

So while the SNP remained static in Central and West of Scotland regions, and gained two more seats in Glasgow, the SNP lost two seats in the North East and Highlands and Islands, and another one each in Mid Scotland and Fife and the South of Scotland. Overall, six out of eight of the SNP’s losses came from Scotland’s rural regions (the Lothians providing the other two). If Scotland’s farming communities sought to punish the SNP for the farm payments fiasco, they’ve well and truly succeeded.

Back home in Moray, those who aren’t fans of the local MSP have been known to refer to him as Blockhead. Having potentially cost the SNP their majority, Richard Lochhead’s head might well be on the ministerial block.

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