Last week, the ward of Carfax, in Oxford city centre, held an election. Or, it sort of did. To be precise, thirty percent of it held an election. Seventy percent of the electorate, the student population of Carfax, was out of town. The winning candidate – a member of the city’s ruling Labour Party – was eventually elected by a majority of those who turned up: 3.6% of the overall electorate.
It’s not clear exactly what happened behind the scenes when the decision was made to hold the by-election, but it’s probably not jumping the gun to say that these headline figures – the thinnest democratic mandate in British history, according to some sources – look very bad.
The situation surrounding the election is still somewhat unclear. The previous Labour councillor in that ward, Anne-Marie Canning – who, it should be mentioned, won her seat in 2012 in an entirely regular election – announced her resignation in July, citing personal circumstances. A by-election date was set for the 4th of September.
It may be that some of the backlash against the council’s decision to go ahead with the exercise is politically fuelled – the local Green Party would clearly like a second crack at the seat when the student demographic returns. It’s also true that Oxford students are out of town, in any case, for more than half the year. It’s a little hyperbolic to talk of students being “disenfranchised” – students who wanted to vote could have done so by postal ballot. The decision to go ahead with the by-election was not in any way illegal. But, having exhausted these few caveats, there is little else to be said in the council’s defense.
It would be reasonable to expect more from our elected representatives than a minimum standard of legality. The process of triggering the election appears to have been manipulated – known Labour supporters accounted for both of the two letters of petition which triggered the by-election. The local Labour branch would have known which date the ensuing contest would subsequently take place. They would also have known that the full, term-time electorate of the area returned a Green councillor the last time it voted, in May of this year.
It is saddening, at best, to see parties resort to this kind of cynical machine politics, in which this year’s electoral harvest trumps the need for any kind of authentic, long-term dialogue with voters. It’s saddening, too, to see a mainstream party of the centre-Left recoil from the student vote; any progressive party worth its salt should be engaging with the student movement, not trying to sideline it. The local party’s behaviour is all the more depressing to me personally, as I happen to be a Labour member.
As to what should happen next, it is surely clear that Alex Hollingsworth (the winning candidate) must submit himself to a fresh election during term time. Even setting aside the circumstances surrounding the planning of the election, there is a strong case to be made that accepting a seat won on 3.6% of the voting roll would be shabby behaviour.
While only two signatures were needed to trigger the original by-election, over one hundred have now been collected on a petition calling for a re-run. It is always awkward, of course, for an elected representative to stand down before the end of their term, but nothing must come between the voters and their rights. If observing those rights means leaving a seat vacant, or filling it with a temporary, caretaker councillor, then the council should do just that. Student voters – apathetic part-timers though we may be – deserve a chance.
