Thurs 5 May: 2022 Council Elections
Council elections are approaching and are critical to cycling and transport policies and budgets for the next 5 years. We’ll tell you here how to make the most of the election opportunity locally. Please use our info to contact and try to influence your own candidates. Send us any useful replies you receive from them.
This article will be filled out further as the election approaches and more info, such as manifestos and hustings, becomes available.
- Spokes Council Hustings
- Spokes Manifesto
- Candidates who are Spokes members
- Party Manifestos
- What you can do – right now register (& for postal votes)
- Election pages from local councils
- Hustings – please go along and ask questions
- How to vote!!
- Useful sites
- In particular, for all-Scotland election info, see..
- WalkWheelCycleVote – accessibility/infrastructure/investment
- CUKScotland – cycling revolutions
Spokes Hustings – Mon 28 March 7.30-9.30
Our hustings will be an online public meeting – full details to follow. Please save the date!
- Conservative – TBA
- Greens – Cllr Claire Miller
- Labour – Cllr Scott Arthur
- Lib Dem – Sanne Dijkstra-Downie
- SNP – Cllr Lesley Macinnes
Spokes Manifesto
Our manifesto is centred around 5 themes…
- Safety – Vision Zero
- Traffic Reduction – including staged programme of reduced onstreet parking provision
- Cycle Network – protected main-road infrastructure and Cycling by Design standards
- Cycle accessibility and supporting infrastructure – including bike hire + cargobikes, bike storage, pothole action
- Resourcing – maintain/increase transport 10% allocation to cycling, plus new fund for footway enhancements
Our full manifesto is here [pdf]
Also in the Edinburgh Reporter
Please raise these issues with your candidates
Candidates who are Spokes members
- We will happily add any omissions – please let us know
- We will not add anyone who joins Spokes after this point, though of course they will be listed in a future election if still a member and standing again
- It is worth noting that councillors almost always support their party manifesto, but they are also individuals with their own views, and this matters too. If a councillor is very supportive of a particular issue (e.g. cycling) they may push their party to go further than their manifesto, they may take other cycling initiatives and, exceptionally, they may even vote in a different way to their party. Conversely, if most councillors in a party are uninterested in a topic, then there’s little chance of going beyond manifesto promises, and things can even move backwards
- We do not endorse any candidates – and, of course, there are many other supportive councillors who are not Spokes members. The choice is yours!
EDINBURGH CITY COUNCIL
- awaited
MIDLOTHIAN COUNCIL ( & other Lothians)
- awaited
Party Manifestos … awaited
Overall manifesto ranking & summary table
- Tops –
- Excellent –
- Reasonable –
- Disappointing –
For a summary table of how the manifestos compare… click here. A more detailed summary of relevant content from each manifesto is below.
Key to Manifesto Details below
N Not mentioned in manifesto
++ groundbreaking + good = mixed/unclear – poor (or unrealistic) — very disappointing
Italics are direct manifesto quotes
{ } is a Spokes comment
Conservative
Manifesto…
Green
Manifesto –
Labour
Manifesto –
LibDem
Manifesto –
SNP
Manifesto –
What you can do
- Register to vote if you are not already – see the Council links below. A postal vote is easy to arrange and is particularly useful if for any reason it will be inconvenient to get to the polling station on 5 May.
- If you are on twitter, RT one or more of our election tweets … this article … Register for Voting … Report of our hustings … Manifesto comparisons … How to Vote
- Email (or speak to) your candidates. Find them (and contact details) … awaited. Get ideas for questions from the Spokes manifesto above and, particularly, from issues on your local cycling journeys. Please send us copies of any useful responses.
- Go to election hustings [not just the Spokes one] and ask questions. Again, consider putting forward any of our ideas above
- Pedal on Parliament April 23 – Loads of politicians usually turn up – a good chance to collar them, as well as helping impress them with the numbers
Election pages from local councils
Including registering to vote, full lists of local candidates, important dates, etc, etc [some of this will not appear until closer to the election]
Election hustings – please go along, and ask questions!
With a very few exceptions we will only show events in Edinburgh/Lothian. There will probably be an all-Scotland listing of important hustings and other dates on the WalkWheelCycleVote or other websites
NOTE: Some hustings include refreshments at the start. Check the links below for details, and whether the start time includes any refreshments time.
March 28 7.30-9.30 SPOKES HUSTINGS see above Tweet (please RT!)
How to vote
No – we are not suggesting who you should vote for!! And of course you will likely be voting on more than just cycling or transport issues. However, this section is about the voting system for council elections, and how to make your vote have the greatest possible effect.
- In most wards your ballot paper will have between 5 and 10 candidates (including maybe more than one from the same party) from which either 3 or 4 councillors will be elected. You have to number the candidates 1,2,3,…
- To make your vote have the maximum possible effect, do number all the candidates, not just those that you like.* So, for example, the person you least want to be elected gets the last number. There’s an excellent simple illustration of why it matters here by @hank_chief.
- ‘Tactical voting’ – you can safely forget about tactical voting, and just rank the candidates in your genuine order of like (and then dislike). Explanatory note … If your first choice is knocked out, your vote will pass on to your second choice, and so on. If your first choice has excess votes, then they will be elected and part of your vote will pass to your second choice, and so on. By the time your ‘vote’ reaches your first ‘dislike’ candidate, all your ‘like’ candidates will have been either elected or eliminated, so you will next be showing who you dislike least.
- If there are two candidates from the same party, you have to decide which of the two you prefer and number the one you prefer before the other – do not just rely on what order they are in on the ballot paper.
- If you are really interested in how the system works (the counting method is complex) there’s a full discussion here.
*A couple of people have questioned this advice. We therefore contacted the Electoral Reform Society (Scotland), who told us… The voting description you have on your site is very good. Our advice would similarly be to rank all candidates, as leaving any unranked is equivalent to saying that you rate all of those equally. While this might sometimes be the case, in reality even if there are some candidates one would hate to be elected there are usually still different degrees to this dislike.
Other useful sites & resources
- WalkWheelCycleVote We are supporting and working with WWCV – an umbrella group of organisations working to ensure a high profile for active travel, emphasising accessibility, infrastructure and investment
- Cycling UK Scotland CUK has a variety of useful materials for the elections, including their own Cycling Revolutions manifesto and a petition in support of it
- Pedal on Parliament PoP does not usually run election materials, as WWCV and CUK already do this at national level. However the big annual PoP weekend is usually shortly before the elections, and spreads influence in that way. This year Sat 23 April sees the traditional mass ride from Edinburgh’s Meadows to the Scottish Parliament
- Edinburgh Elects twitter account We have come across this account – not sure who is running it, but so far it looks useful and impartial!