Hamish Macdonell: Meet your new MEPs – whether you vote or not

Published on Monday 11 May 2009 21:25

'WHY don't we hear more about it? Why isn't there any coverage?" he asked. The questioner was at a European hustings event last Friday that kicked off the European election campaign in Scotland. There were 20 or 30 people there to hear three MEPs and one would-be MEP appeal for their votes.

The questioner was right; there has been little coverage of the European elections in Britain and that position is unlikely to change – for one simple reason: no-one really cares about the European elections at all and the media, in this case at least, is reflecting the prevailing view of the electorate at large.

As a general rule, people turn out to vote when the result of the election matters to them and they believe they can make a difference. Neither of these applies as far as Europe is concerned.

Academics have spent a lot of time and money worrying about falling turnouts in Britain over the last 20 years or so and while it is true that fewer people vote now than was the case 30 or 40 years ago, people will still turn out if they believe their vote counts: turnout will go up if the electorate feels it has a stake in the result and this is the central problem of the European Parliament and its elections.

A total of 736 MEPs will be elected from 27 member states to sit in seven Europe-wide loose political groupings, but you could send a team of researchers with clipboards around Scotland for the next month and you would be hard pressed to find a single person who could name even one of these groupings or what they stand for.

What this means is that those few who vote on 4 June this year will not be electing a government or voting to remove one from office. They will not even be able to show their displeasure at the performance of their local MEP because there are no local MEPs (all are elected on a proportional, Scotland-wide basis).

The electorate has nothing at all at stake in this election and this is the real reason that no-one really cares about it.

So, if this election is not about government or local accountability, what is it about? Struan Stevenson, the Conservative MEP at last week's hustings, was clear: next month's election would be a referendum on the failings of the Brown Labour Government in Westminster.

George Lyon, the Liberal Democrat hopeful, agreed, also taking the opportunity to stick his not inconsiderable farmer's boots into the Labour Government at Westminster in the hope that it would help his chances.

At least they are being honest. They want it to be a test of the Prime Minister's popularity because that will galvanise voters more than ordinary European issues.

If proper European issues were all the electorate had to go on, turnout would hardly climb into double figures. Voters would have to choose between different approaches to the European Working Time Directive, competitions policy or the future of fishing quotas – and, even for political anoraks, that list is hardly inspiring.

Where does that leave us? We have a European election no-one really cares about because nobody has any real stake in its outcome. We have a set of political groupings that nobody can identify and that take decisions on issues that could send a Professor of European Politics to sleep.

We have opposition politicians who are not even trying to hide their efforts to turn the election into something it is not and we have absolutely no local accountability.

One answer is provided by the UK Independence Party (UKIP). Get Britain out of Europe, it says, and all these problems would be solved.

It is not a solution most would favour but at least UKIP is standing in this election on a definite European policy.

UKIP has never done very well in Scotland. The party secured just 1.27 per cent of the Scottish vote in 2004 compared to 16 per cent in the UK as a whole.

The SNP won't like the comparison, but there is a distinct similarity between the two parties: both want independence from a union they don't like and stand on a platform of autonomy and local control.

Maybe, with one pro-independence party already in the mix, Scots just have not got the time for another. Or maybe, with Scottish independence the top constitutional issue in the country, there is just no place for discussions about the UK's place in the continent.

Either way, UKIP will not fare well in Scotland next month so its solution to the European problem will not be up for discussion.

As for the main candidates from the leading parties, they will play the game and take part in hustings events, debates and campaigning tours but it will all be a bit of a show.

Like a football team that knows it is not going to be relegated, however badly it plays, Mr Stevenson for the Conservatives, Ian Hudghton and Alyn Smith for the SNP and David Martin and Catherine Stihler for Labour know they are going to be re-elected because that is the way the proportional system works.

Mr Lyon, for the Liberal Democrats, does not yet know whether he will get the sixth seat, but he is likely to do so. He will only lose out if the Conservatives do particularly well and their second candidate, Belinda Don, gets herself elected for the first time.

So if we boil it right down, we already know the identity of five of the six MEPs Scotland will elect next month (and we can be pretty sure of number six).

The only way to make the European elections a proper contest is to bring back constituencies: make the MEPs fight for their jobs.

That way, the electorate could kick out the under-performing ones, which they can't do at the moment and they would, at last, have a stake – a small and local one maybe – in the European elections.

It would be a start, a tiny step, towards making the European elections mean something to the voters, which they clearly don't at the moment.