General Election 2001
 | 'In moments of crisis, or when seeking reassurance, it was always to Mandelson that he turned. Colleagues as senior as Gordon Brown had warned him. John Smith, his predecessor as leader of the Labour Party, went further - he exiled Mandelson to the back benches and made it indelibly plain that he did not trust the man. But Blair would not see it, not even when the evasions and the dissembling over his home loan from Geoffrey Robinson made it obvious that 'Bobby' was fatally, irredeemably flawed.'
Tim Luckhurst in the Herald, 25 th January 2001. |  |
The 2001 Westminster Election in Scotland
New Labour - the people you know you can't trust!
The election results have been declared in all 72 Scottish constituencies. In what was a truly disastrous day for democracy, the only winner was apathy. Although Labour was returned with another massive majority, only one in four of the Scots electorate (25.13 %) actually voted for them. Turnout at the 1997 election was the lowest since 1935 and the 2001 turnout crashed even further by an enormous 13.2 %. On the 7 th June 2001, just 58.1 % of Scots bothered to vote. This was the lowest in any Westminster election since 1918 when women did not have the vote and many people were unable to vote due to military service.
Democracy in the United Kingdom is in a state of crisis and the blame can be squarely laid at the door of the politicians who have treated voters with utter contempt. Politicians in general and the government in particular are viewed with distrust by the public. There are many hard working and selfless constituency MPs but they are swimming against a tide. The Westminster Parliament is rarely consulted by the Executive with the country being ruled directly by the Prime Minister and a few, often unelected, cronies. MPs have taken £1,000 bribes to ask parliamentray questions and £1,000,000 donations have resulted in the reversal of government policies. A Parliamentary Ombudsman has been appointed, but the conclusions of her investigations are either overturned or ignored. Hereditary Peers have been ejected from the House of Lords, only to be replaced by labotomised party hacks, has-beens and never-beens who will obey the wishes of the Prime Minister without question. What was once known as the Mother of Parliaments is now seen by the public as the Houses of Corruption.
Another reason for the low turnout is the totally outdated first past the post voting system, a disgraceful affront to any country which believes itself to be a modern democracy. This system is a relic from the days of Patronage and Rotten Burghs when Edinburgh had just 33 electors. It produced another totally anomalous result for the Westminster elections with the Labour party winning no less than 55 of the 72 Scottish seats (76 %) with just 43 % of the vote.
Under the present system, it takes just 18,203 votes to elect a Labour MP, 37,886 votes to elect a Liberal Democrat, 92,863 votes to elect a Scottish National Party MP and 360,658 votes to elect a Tory. Do Labour really wish us to believe that their Scottish MPs are so ineffectual that it takes twenty of their Toom Tabards to be the equal of a single Tory? Is it at all surprising that voters have proclaimed 'A plague on all your houses!'
The 93,471 Scots who voted for other parties including the Scottish Socialists and the Scottish Greens were effectively disenfranchised. Had a truly proportional electoral system been in place, the results would have given Labour 31 MPs (down 24) the Scottish National Party 15 (up 10), the Liberal Democrats 12 (up two), the Tories 11 (up 10), the Scottish Socialist Party two (up two) and the Speaker one seat.
Only one Scottish seat changed hands since 1997, Galloway & Upper Nithsdale, which the Conservative, 'Blue' Peter Duncan, won from the Scottish National Party by 74 votes. In Duncan's victory speech he said 'I'm delighted that we have turned the tide against the corrupt power of nationalism.' Duncan, who could become Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, may soon prove to be a thorn in the sides of David McLetchie and Annabel Goldie who are waging a campaign to persuade the electorate that the Tories can be Scottish first and Conservatives and Unionists second.
The Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, held his seat, which he had held as a Labour MP in 1997, while Labour also regained the seat of Renfrewshire West where Tommy Graham had been expelled from the Labour Party and sat as an Independent.
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