Last Thursday I went and voted. Not in the council elections, because there weren't any in Tendring this time round, but the European elections. I believe in voting. When my grandmother was born, women did not have the right to vote, and through history and around the world people have died in their efforts to obtain and exercise the franchise, and continue to do so. Voting is important. And no, there should not be a 'none of the above' box on the ballot paper, because in the real world you have to make decisions among the available choices. If you don't like any of them you should start trying to create a better one.
As Friday's radio election coverage focused exclusively on the local elections, I began to wonder what had happened to the European ones, until a journalist made a passing comment that the European count would be held on Sunday night. I'm glad that the massed forces of the UK media made that so clear to the electorate. Come Monday, come the sounds of the media frenzy over UKIP's victory, and orgies of Clegg bashing and Miliband deriding, but very little about the nuts and bolts of the results. I looked hopefully in the East Anglian Daily Times, and on the BBC website, hoping to find out who my new MEP was, but couldn't find an actual list of results. I said plaintively to the Systems Administrator at lunchtime that despite being interested in politics, and having bothered to go and vote, I still didn't know who my new MEP was. The SA pointed out that neither of us had known who the old one was either.
Come early Tuesday evening I was none the wiser, so did a little more digging. The Tendring District Council website proved unexpectedly helpful about the local turnout, and I discovered that my vote was one among 39,004 cast in the Tendring counting area of the Eastern Region, with 73 ballot papers rejected. So far, so good, though I began to wonder about the Eastern Region. How big is it, and what other areas does it include? The Tendring website said that I could find details of the full Eastern Region results on the Chelmsford City Council website, but when I clicked on the link I still got information for voters in the May 2014 European elections, so I could find out what a Returning Officer was, but not who won. I did discover that the Eastern Region spans six counties, from St Albans to Cambridge, Norfolk and Southend-on-Sea.
A Google search for the results was slow to yield anything as mundane as a list of victorious candidates for each region, or a map of the regions. Most of the media seemed more interested in the noise and thunder and variants on the Farage, Clegg and Miliband stories than reporting the bald facts. After some digging I found a one page summary of what I wanted to know on the snappily named European Parliament/Information office in the United Kingdom website. Turns out that the Eastern Region elects 7 out of 73 MEPs, of which 3 are now Conservatives, 3 UKIP and one Labour. That's a loss of one each for the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, and a gain of two for UKIP, and to work that out I had to juggle between two pages.
No wonder turnout for European elections is low. No surprise that there is a popular groundswell of anit-European feeling. Leaving aside concerns about immigration, or who gets to legislate on the curvature of British bananas, there seems to be a fundamental disconnect between the electoral process and anything that happens next. I am quite interested in politics, and not really interested in celebrities, and I reckon I could have found out who was going to Kim Kardashian's wedding with less trouble than it took to find out the actual result of an election that I bothered to go and vote in.
Addendum This post was updated to correct the total number of votes cast in Tendring. I had originally picked up the UKIP vote as the total number, which was incorrect: it is simply that UKIP comes at the bottom of the list of parties standing. I would not wish to imply that I voted for them.
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