I know this blog has a raison d’etre of bettering the nation of Scotland but I’m going to briefly interrupt proceedings to post on London council elections. No wait, where are you going, come back! This’ll only take a moment…

The London Borough elections of 2010 saw 1,861 councillors elected to their posts. I don’t know what the expectations were for the Green Party in the UK’s capital but they returned 2 councillors which I would ordinarily have thought was a poor result but, from the little I know of how elections work here, I know infact that it was actually just an unfair result.

There is an upcoming by-election for nearby Kentish Town in the area of Camden next month and this could see the Green Party increase its number of councillors by 50% if it were to win. Labour are probably favourites and, were they to win, they would increase their representation in the city by 0.114%. A bit of a difference you could say.

Indeed, if one were to look at the 2010 election results as a whole they would see what an uphill struggle the Green Party is fighting against in a local context.

The Labour party won 876 councillors, the Conservatives 717, the Lib Dems 245 and the Greens, as I say, 2. This result was with 3,388,437 votes for Labour, 3,301,966 for the Conservatives, 2,094,530 for the Lib Dems and 443,498 for the Greens.

Put another way, Labour received 3,868 votes for every councillor position it won, the Conservatives received 4,605 votes for every councillor, the Lib Dems received 8,549 votes for every councillor and the Greens received a whopping 221,749 votes for every councillor.

All parties talk of wanting fairness, all parties talk of a new politics. So, not that I’m suggesting the local Green Party isn’t up for a challenge, but shouldn’t all the other parties just sit out this Kentish Town by-election and let an organic justice take place?

Sadly it doesn’t work that way so it’ll be an old-skool winner takes all affair in Kentish Town. Good thing the Greens believe fairness is worth fighting for because they have a battle on their hands on that score.

Source: Borough Council Election Results