Monthly Archives: March 2011

Jim Devine goes down for 16 months

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Ex Livingston Labour MP, Jim Devine, was sentenced to 16 months in prison for his expenses claim fraud.

This brings to a close a very sorry tale of incompetence and deception.  To find out more about the actions of this man, I suggest you read Caron’s report from when he was found guilty.

When I see a number of excellent politicians fighting for their careers, it still  annoys me that in certain parts of the country it doesn’t matter a jot who you are or what you can do.  If you stand for a certain party, you are a shoe-in.

There is a chance to make a start to change this, by saying Yes to Fairer Votes.

Linlithgow Constituency 2007 Results

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The wonderful @PeatWorrier posted a link to a positive data bomb of election results which you can download yourself at http://www.scotlandoffice.gov.uk/scotlandoffice/files/updatedversionJune08.xls

The detail is quite extraordinary. Not only has a constituency breakdown for regional and consituency votes, it has a box by box count of votes per party, the boxes linked to the postal district. It also gives an incredible useful Cross Paper Combination of Regional Candidate by Constituency candidate so you can see how many SNP voters, for example, voted for Liberal Democrat, or Green or even Labour in their second vote.

So detailed is it, that I know that for my postal district that the SNP outvoted Labour, the Conservatives outvotes Liberal Democrats, and Margo polled better than the Greens.

My constituency is Linlithgow in the Lothians region. The boundaries have changed for 2011, but it ranges from Whitburn in the south, Winchburgh in the east and Linlithgow in the north.

Here are the constituency results :-

Mary Mulligan, Scottish Labour Party 12,725
Fiona Hyslop, Scottish National Party 11,565
Donald Cameron, Scottish Conservatives 3,125
Martin Oliver, Scottish Liberal Democrats 2,232
Majority 1160

Now look at the Regional Vote by Constituency Candidate (click to enlarge) :-

The most faithful votes are from the SNP where 78% of people who voted for Fiona Hyslop voted SNP on the regional list. The least faithful are Martin Oliver’s voters, only 55% of voters for Martin Oliver voted LibDem on the list. Not called Liberal for nothing.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the biggest gainer of votes from the constituency candidates was the Independent, Margo MacDonald. She picked up nearly 5% of the list vote in the Linlithgow constituency. After their own Party, Conservative, Labour and SNP constituency voters were mostly likely to vote for Margo.

The exception was the Liberal Democrats who were more like to vote Green (13.9%) than Margo (8.1%). This might actually be Green voters voting LibDem because they didn’t have a choice of voting Green. The Green vote was actually very evenly split between Labour, SNP and the Liberal Democrats (310,307,310).

There are few other surprises. Both BNP (of which there were 490 in the constituency) and UKIP voters where more likely to vote Conservative and Socialist voters were not likely to vote Labour; 3 times more voted SNP and indeed, just as many voted LibDem.