Hackney elections 2010: the lowdown on the local and mayoral

Hackney Town Hall, Mare Street

On Thursday 6 May the citizens of Hackney will be voting for 57 local councillors, a mayor and two Members of parliament to represent them.

The mayoral elections

Hackney is one of only three boroughs in London to have a directly-elected executive mayor.

Following the 8 April deadline for nominations for this post, six candidates have thrown their hats into the ring: the current mayor Jules Pipe (Labour), Andrew Boff (Conservative), Adrian Gee-Turner (Liberal Democrat), Mischa Borris (Green), Monty Goldman (Communist) and William Thompson (Christian party).

The mayor is elected through the so-called ‘supplementary vote’ system which ensures that the winner nearly always has the support of at least half the electorate.

To achieve this result, voters rank-order their preferences on the ballot paper, writing ‘1’ next to their first choice candidate and ‘2’ next to their second choice.

If no candidate wins an absolute majority of first-preference votes, all but the top two candidates are eliminated from the contest, and the second preferences indicated on the ballots cast for the eliminated candidates are distributed among the top two candidates.

At the time of the last mayoral election in 2006, Jules Pipe won 44.96 per cent of first preferences votes; the Conservative party candidate placed second with 16.09 per cent of first preferences.

The other parties trailed with 10.53 per cent for the Liberal Democrat candidate, 10.10 per cent for the Green candidate, 6.27 per cent for independent candidate Hettie Peters, 6.04 per cent for the candidate of the Respect party, and 1.93 per cent for the Communist party candidate. Turnout was 34.34 per cent.

The council elections

Hackney’s 57 councillors are elected in 19 wards, with three councillors representing each ward. Each voter can vote for three candidates, and the three candidates in each ward with the greatest number of votes win the election.

There are different ways of measuring party strength in voting systems such as this; the preferred method (favoured by the University of Plymouth LGC Elections Centre) is to count the vote totals of each party’s top vote-winner in each ward.

On this basis, the Labour party won an average of 43.86 per cent of the votes across Hackney’s 19 wards, the Greens placed second with 21.95 per cent, the Conservatives won an average of 18.67 per cent, and the Liberal Democrats 17.16 per cent (the remainder of the votes having been won by smaller parties and independent candidates).

The full electoral results from the 2006 elections can be found here.

Because of the way the electoral system works, Labour’s two-in-five vote total translated into control of over three quarters of the seats on the council in 2006.

A total of 44 of the 57 seats (77.19 per cent) were filled by Labour party members, nine by Conservatives, three by Liberal Democrats (one of whom subsequently defected to Labour) and one by a Green.

The 2006 results reflect the Labour party’s ascendancy in Hackney in recent decades. Since the early 1960s, Labour has won overall control of the council in all but two elections.

In May 1968 when revolutionary movements raged across Europe, the Conservative party seized control of Hackney Council, winning 36 seats to Labour’s 32.

Then in 1998, following a fraught period in which the Hackney Labour party had split and the borough had become a by-word for civic failure, Labour won just under half of the seats, and the Council ended up with no single party in overall control .

This situation did not help the Council in sorting out its problems, and Hackney was one of the first local authorities to take the opportunity of introducing a directly-elected mayor in 2002. Jules Pipe won the mayoral contest in 2002 and then again in 2006.

In 2010, wards to watch include Cazenove, where the Liberal Democrats and Labour are neck-in-neck.

Clissold and Stoke Newington Central also look set to be close races, as the Greens are working to take more seats from Labour, whilst Labour is struggling hard to win back the seat in Clissold which they lost to the Greens in 2006.

In Brownswood and Hoxton it is the Liberal Democrats who are the main threats to Labour incumbents, while the Tories promise to give Labour a run for their money in Queensbridge ward.