Two maps of London

Two maps, one a ward-by-ward view of how London voted on Dismayday 2008 (original source), the other a ward-by-ward map of deprivation in the capital (source). Who says political affiliation isn't about class any more?

Election analysis: they won, we lost

One of the joys of no longer being a full-time working political journalist (or activist, for that matter) is that I don't have to wait around for election results and then knock out what passes for sophisticated analysis. So I'm off out now to make the most of London avant le deluge. (Actually I've got a hot date with my daughter's cooking and the last two episodes of Heroes.)

For anyone passing this way who was hoping for that election analysis, here it is. They won, we lost. This is largely because they got more votes than we did.

Every failure to vote on 1 May is a vote for the BNP

I bumped into Ken Livingstone this morning, canvassing for the May elections at the Nag’s Head shopping centre, on Holloway Road, with my local MP Jeremy Corbyn. On a day when all the headlines were about Ken’s ‘secret’ kids and Boris Johnson’s teenage drug-taking (neither of which was actually ‘news’ or, to most people, surprising), Livingstone was raising a more important issue – and one that may prove to be of the most lasting consequence when the votes for the London Assembly are counted.

This is, quite simply, ensuring the biggest possible turnout on 1 May to prevent the British National Party from gaining representation in the government of London.

As Ken Livingstone’s campaign declared today, ‘One of the things at stake in this election is London's future as a united diverse city, where all communities and individuals feel they belong. The British National Party is a direct threat to that unity ...

‘We have to get across one simple fact: there’s only one way to stop the BNP, which is by actually going out to vote against them. A low voter turnout will help the BNP get elected. For the fascists, success means getting 5 per cent of the total London vote. The higher the turnout the harder it is for them jump the five per cent hurdle.’

Earlier in the week, at the London Evening Standard hustings, when asked to sum up his message in 60 seconds, Livingstone devoted most of his allotted time to an appeal for voters of all parties to turn out to stop the BNP. ‘Vote for me, Boris, Brian Paddick or Sian Berry, but don't let the BNP get a seat,’ he said.

It’s not exactly a revolutionary appeal from the one-time author of If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It, but it’s none the less important for all that. The BNP’s attempt to make racism respectable has enjoyed more local successes, including in parts of London, than any far-right party since the second world war. Even one of their number obtaining a platform at City Hall would be an advance to top all that they have achieved so far.

No excuses, then, my anarchist friends: every failure to vote on 1 May must be considered a vote for the BNP.

Zimbabwe: hasn't anyone got a calculator?

I don’t think I’ve ever been so gripped by the outcome of an election as by the drip-drip release of results from Zimbabwe. And if Robert Mugabe is finally defeated – and, more importantly, that defeat is accepted by Zanu-PF, the police and armed forces – I’ll be celebrating along with my Zimbabwean friends who’ve had to wait for such a moment for far too long.

But I’ve lost faith over the past 72 hours or so in the ability of either the Zimbabwean opposition or the western media to provide me with an accurate account of what has actually been happening in this election.

On Monday, Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change was claiming a 60-30 per cent victory in the presidential election for its candidate Morgan Tsvangirai. The Guardian website headline proclaimed an electoral ‘massacre’ for Mugabe. The percentages have changed over the past couple of days until the outcome has turned into a cliffhanger. But even now, as I write, the Guardian is still reporting, as it has been all day, the MDC’s claims that Tsvangirai has won by 50.3 per cent to Mugabe’s 43.8 per cent, with 7 per cent for Simba Makoni.

‘Those figures would mean Tsvangirai had taken enough votes in the first round to win the presidency,’ reports the Guardian.

Indeed they would. But you don’t need to be one of Mugabe’s ballot-riggers to spot that those figures add up to a little over 101 per cent. And if you check the MDC’s own figures on which these percentages are based (1,169,860 for Tsvangirai; 1,043,451 for Mugabe; and 169,636 for Makoni), you come up with 49.09 per cent for Tsvangirai, not the claimed 50.3 per cent – which makes the difference between an outright first-round victory and the need for a second run-off ballot.

The BBC, among many others worldwide, has also been using these same, self-evidently inaccurate figures all day. Hasn’t anyone got a calculator?