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Democracy Bulletin, 14th May

Polling station sign pointing to a doorway of the polling station. A woman stands in the doorway, leaving the building. The s

Welcome to the post-election edition of the Democracy Bulletin,

This email is a weekly roundup of activities from across the democracy sector, including a summary of updates, job listings (at the bottom!), news and even the odd bit of gossip from our Thursday meetups.

Please do share your ideas, feedback and any questions you might have about the Democracy Handbook, meetup and newsletter via our survey or send us an email.

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We’re now tracking jobs, events and funding opportunities across the democracy sector. Check out active roles, upcoming events, grants and add any we’ve missed out below:

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What you need to know

  • This week a coalition of civil society orgs urged the government to drop Voter ID. 17 organisations came together this week to urge the Prime Minister to abandon plans to implement Voter ID in upcoming elections.
  • Two new by-elections. By-elections are due to be held in Chesham and Amersham and Batley and Spen in coming months.
  • Councillors across England renew calls to allow online meetings. As the emergency legislation ran out last week, online council meetings are no longer allowed. A high court action by Hertfordshire Council was rejected and the government pledges a consultation on the issue.

Elections

2021 Chesham and Amersham by-election. Following the passing of local Conservative MP Cheryl Gillan early last month, a by-election will be held in the near future. The two main contenders for the South Bucks seat, the Lib Dems and Conservatives have selected their candidates, Sarah Green, and Peter Fleet.

By-election called for Batley and Spen. Tracy Brabin MP stands down to take up their new post as Mayor of West Yorkshire, triggering a by-election. Jo Cox’s sister Kim Leadbeater announces her aim to stand for Labour in the seat.

Conservative Party refuses to sign joint pledge against abuse and intimidation of election candidates. In a rare intervention, the Committee on Standards in Public Life wrote a report detailing its “concern” at the government’s failure to respond to its earlier recommendations written in the wake of the murder of MP Jo Cox. The 2019 review made a range of recommendations to clean up politics and keep candidates safe, but two years later, the government still says it is considering the report.

UK-wide elections break records for female representation and diversity. The Scottish election produced the most diverse parliament ever. Pam Duncan-Glancy becomes first wheelchair user elected to Holyrood. Natasha Asghar is the first woman of colour elected to the Senedd. Hina Bokhari, Marina Ahmad and Sakina Sheikh are the first female Muslim London Assembly Members. Jill Mortimer is the first female MP for Hartlepool. Tracy Brabin is the first female metro mayor. Liverpool elects Joanne Anderson, the UK’s first directly elected black female mayor.

Paltry turnout figures across England and Wales. Besides Scotland, voter turnout across England and Wales last week was pitifully low, a cursory google search of “local election turnout” will reveal stories from local papers up and down the country reporting on dismal turnout figures — Bradford, 37% — Bristol, 40% — Isle of Wight, 36% — West Northamptonshire, 29%. As the Bristol Cable report, these average figures across an area hide the range of turnout, often mirroring inequalities. In Bristol for example, turnout fell to 20% in Hartcliffe and Withywood, to 57% in Westbury-on-Trym and Henleaze.

Record number of rejected ballots in London elections. 114,000 first preference votes were rejected in the London Mayoral ballot last Thursday, a significant increase on the 49,871 rejected votes recorded in 2016’s mayoral vote. A confusing ballot paper design is being blamed for the record rejection. Speaking to the BBC, Mary Harpley, as the Greater London Returning Officer reports it was necessary to split the ballot paper in this way to accommodate the record 20 candidates on the ballot.

AEA calls for a new Electoral Administration Act. In response to this week’s Queen’s Speech provisions for Voter ID and the abolition of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, the Association of Electoral Administrators makes recommendations to ensure Voter ID does not add additional load and financial burden on councils and local election officials, that local ID schemes are funded by central government and schemes run by local authorities. AEA also strongly opposes the proposed reduction of the current 25-day general election timetable, as recommended by the Joint Committee on the Fixed-term Parliaments Act.

Democracy Club doubles their userbase with record stats. With 2,087,285 postcode searches recorded on Democracy Club’s database during election week, double that of both the roughly 1,000,000 searches polled during the 2019 local and EU elections. Democracy Club also recorded their best ever data coverage on the polling station finder tool WhereCanIVote, with 90% of councils sending in data.

New international best practice for vote counting from South Norfolk. Election staff in the region produced this energetic guide for vote counts.

Democracy Meta

EquipHer. Activate, along with Elect Her and Glitch UK are creating Equip Her, a project to support a wider pipeline of politically active women from under-represented communities with the knowledge, skills and resources they need to get elected. EquipHer is supported by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.

Updated Twitter List of MSPs. Vonnie Sandlan, Comms Manager at Equality and Human Rights Commission (Scotland), has created a Twitter List of all members of the Scottish Parliament and updated it with 2021 additions.

UK rurality and deprivation dataset published. Alex Parsons’, Researcher at mySociety, has completed their work on a UK-wide rurality and deprivation dataset. As Alex explains, devolution in the UK means that some core datasets are produced separately by the statistics authorities in different nations. The new unified dataset brings together a complex arrangement of thresholds and definitions, providing a key resource and benchmark for UK-wide services such as mySociety. Alasdair Rae updates their UK Constituency Deprivation chart based on this new data.

Unlock Democracy supporters “angry”. With the government mired in corruption scandals, moves towards a ‘digital police state’, the criminalisation of protest and dissent and a Queen’s Speech outlining new ways to make it more difficult to vote, Shaun Roberts, Head of Campaigns & Digital at Unlock Democracy, reports that UD members and supporters are angry, with a marked uptick in engagement across their activities.

Polimonitor to launch ‘virtual hansard’. Sam Cunningham, CEO of automated political monitoring platform Polimonitor, details plans for a new ‘virtual hansard’ tool. The new feature for the Polimonitor platform will provide Hansard information in near-real time, compared to the often long waits for Hansard data and transcripts for committees and activity away from the parliamentary floor.

Prototype policy impact and news aggregation platform in the works. This week Josh Russell secured funding for a prototype news aggregation platform to be used by people researching the impact of government policies. They’re hiring — see jobs section below for more info, or Josh’s post on Democracy Club Slack, here.

Neal Lawson calls for Labour to be re-founded. The party is trapped in an industrial era mindset and must burnish itself with a new name, a new identity and form the core of a progressive alliance, Lawson argues in the Guardian this week. The refounding, they say, will require a deliberative, intentional process and could involve a citizens’ assembly of the public, building new foundations for a party based in the vitality of the networked 21st century.

New micro-local community building course. Village in the City are offering a new village builder course starting later this month. Facilitated by Mark McKergow, founder of Village in the City, the course explores six key elements for the successful development of micro-local communities, including Asset Based Community Development.

New briefing paper on constituency boundary reviews. Published by Neil Johnston at the House of Commons Library, the paper summarises current rules and procedures for boundary changes and how they’ve changed over time. It also gives an overview of how the number of MPs has reached the current level of 650.

Democracy Alliance. Liz Crosbie of Reboot GB is working on getting the Democracy Alliance community to commit whether or not it wants to actively collaborate on a Progressive Alliance pro-democracy campaign between now and the next general election.

Funding Democracy

Democracy Handbook launches new funding tracker. James Moulding and the Democracy Handbook team are now tracking grant funding opportunities, in addition to jobs and events. Click here to add a grant, jobs and events to the Democracy Handbook database. Check these out and more on the UK Democracy Handbook.

Koreo delivering Government Kickstart Scheme placements. Does your project or organisation require additional resource? The Government’s Kickstart Scheme creates placements for those aged 16–24 on Universal Credit and at risk of long-term youth unemployment. Apply now for a government sponsored placement in your organisation via Charityworks.

Reforming Democracy

Coalition of democracy orgs urge government to drop Voter ID. With the news that polling stations will now require a form of photo ID to vote in future general elections to ‘prevent electoral fraud’, a group of 17 organisations have urged a rethink on the issue. Signatories included the Electoral Reform Society, Fair Vote UK, Stonewall and Operation Black Vote. Almost 3.5m voters have no passport or driving license by the government’s own estimate, with the Electoral Commission recording just 164 cases of electoral fraud in the 2019 General Election, out of 47m registered electors. Former Scots Tory leader Ruth Davidson makes their views clear on the issue.

Unlock Democracy, Electoral Reform Society and Fair Vote UK publish their own version of the Government’s ‘Electoral Integrity Bill’. The alternative bill demonstrates a potential alternative approach, they say.

New paper on the women members of Parliament. Richard Kelly at the House of Commons Library, has produced a research briefing and list of all female members of Parliament who have ever been elected. A similar paper was published back in February covering the Lords.

Number of appointments has ‘undone progress’, says report. Much of the substantial progress made by the House of Lords in reducing its size has been undone by recent appointments, the Lord Speaker’s committee on the size of the House has concluded.

Safeguarding Democracy

Who Targets Me publish large dataset of UK political Facebook advertisers. Sam Jeffers, Founder of Who Targets Me, has published an open list of more than 5,000 UK political Facebook advertisers, tagged by party affiliation, in addition to several thousand non-party affiliated.

Fair Vote UK develop strategy to take on the Online Safety Bill and Electoral Integrity Bill. If anyone is interested in engaging with either of these, speak to Kyle Taylor at Fair Vote, they are developing a coalition around the bills.

Participatory Democracy

The People Vs Climate Change. A new BBC documentary about the UK Climate Assembly, supported by Involve, mySociety and Sortition Foundation, is now available on iPlayer, Asha Pond from mySociety reports.

Devolved Democracy & Local Government

Councillors call for online meetings to continue post-pandemic. As previously reported several weeks ago in this newsletter (and in greater depth), the emergency legislation allowing the move for council work to move to remote meetings has now run out, ending on 6th May. Councillors have taken to the High Court to see if existing law would enable them to continue meeting online, but their attempt has now been dismissed with judges saying MPs need to pass a new law to allow remote council work to continue. The government has launched a consultation to look at “next steps”.

Local Government explained. Jessica Studdert unpacks the structure of local government and councils in England in this new series by New Local. This piece is a must-read refresher for democracy wonks and serves as a reminder of how power is exercised throughout local government structures.

Towns Fund reports on their work in Boston. The £3.6 billion towns fund is aimed at ‘levelling up’ towns and cities across the country. The delivery team for the Town Deal for Boston report a palpable sense of optimism.

The Scottish Independence Library is looking for volunteer librarians. Hosted by Commonweal and the Scottish Independence Convention, the online library aims to build a repository of published material and expertise from across the Scottish independence movement, in preparation for a new independence referendum. For more info, speak to Becki, Common Weal’s Communications Officer.

Media Democracy

TikTok has launched a new campaign, #FactCheckYourFeed. Media Literacy charity The Student View and BBC’s Dan Walker are two of those involved in promoting the campaign to users, alongside celebrities and high-profile Tik Tok users.

Good Reads

Democracy requires organised collective power. Asha Pond, Fundraising at mySociety, recommends this academic article on a democratic power approach to institutions, looking at how procedures and outcomes take together have effects on the organisation of power in society.

Irish far-right activity on Telegram has real life consequences. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue publishes a new report on the activity of the far-right on Irish Telegram and how this form of organising and propaganda distribution is impacting on real life in communities across Ireland.

Active Job Listings across the Democracy Sector

View the full database of active job roles & add new job roles & paid internships here.

Unsalaried job listings

Other paid roles

  • Josh Russell is building a prototype news aggregation platform to be used by people researching the impact of government policies. They’re looking for people with cloud dev skills (Python, Node, etc, on Google Cloud / AWS), scaling db skills (graphQL, noSQL, etc), and can build a web admin interface for searching etc, likely using React — for more information, get in touch with Josh here or on their website here.

That’s all for this week, if you’ve found this useful, please forward it on to your colleagues. They can sign up for these emails here. And you can set up a recurring calendar event for the Democracy Meetup. Add it to your calendar here.

We’ve been experimenting with the format of this email and the accompanying meetup, if you have any feedback we’d be glad to hear it.

These documents are open all week. If you can’t make our weekly meetup, you can always drop in to the meetup document of the current week and add to it by going to democracymeetup.org.uk.

See you next time,

James, Molly and the Democracy Handbook team