Democracy Seen in Action in Cambridgeshire. A Glorious Bank Holiday Trip and BBQ

Friday LibDem Joy at Southcambs Victory

The Lords have now defeated the government peers 10 times on different aspects of the EU withdrawal bill. Paradoxically, rather than Britons making decisions for Britain, the Lords are now decried as traitors and EU sympathisers for in effect saying, 'hold on a minute, parliament needs to have a say in the final Brexit decisions'. The noisy hard brexiteers have also been trying to put pressure on the Prime Minister to drop her preferred option of a special customs partenrship with the EU.

In the meantime, There is the threat of President Trump deciding not to renew the approval of the existing Iran Nuclear deal. All the other partners, Russia and the EU countries, feel that the deal though flawed, is working. In a sign of the UK's special relationship, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson flew to the US, to meet with the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to push the case for the US to stay within the agreement. Boris made his case directly to the President in his own state rooms, by appearing on the president's favourite news channel, Fox News. A sure sign of the seriousness and weight the UK will hold in future UK-US trade negotiations after Brexit.

There was a local ray of light with last weeks local government elections. I was able to attend the Ballot Count for South Cambridgeshire District Council as a counting agent for local councillor and neighbour, Hazel Smith. My role was to watch the counting of the ballots. I was not alone. The ballot counters were arranged in groups of eight on one side of the benches at different counting areas in a school hall. Opposite them were all the counting agents and candidates who watched every single ballot paper be sorted.

The counting proceeded as follows:

• For example, for Milton and Waterbeach Ward, there were three councillor posts to be elected but 13 candidates. We had three liberals and three Conservatives as well as several Labour, Green, and Indendent candidates.
• Initially, the ballot papers were placed individually into baskets arranged by the block votes (all Labour or all Conservative or all Green or all LibDem.)
• Ballot papers where too many candidates had been ticked or where the mark made in the voting boxes was unclear at first glance; these went into a separate tray.
• Ballot papers where the three votes were spread across two or more parties were placed in their own tray of mixed votes.

Once all the ballot papers had been sorted in this way, The mixed ballot papers were counted using 'Grass Skirts'. The basic mechanism is as follows:

• Ballot papers are arranged horizontally on a pre-prepared large white board in batches of 25, with only the voting boxes showing.
• The votes across a row, corresponding to those of a particular candidate, are counted.
• The total number of votes for that candidate are recorded.
• The process is repeated row by row until all the total votes for each candidate have been counted.
• Not everyone voted for three candidates.
• Therefore the columns of every ballot paper on the board were checked and the number of unused votes in that column was recorded.
• The accuracy of the count was then checked by adding the total sum of unused votes to the total sum of actual votes. This should be 75 if the count was correct.

In the meantime, Some of the counters were collating the block votes into sheaves of ten ballot papers with paper clips, and then into blocks of 100 votes using rubber bands.

 There is a good video here demonstrating the principle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwPlhwiI418.

The whole counting process was overseen by eagle eyed counting agents who would immediately call out any errors in placing votes into the wrong basket, point out mistakes in the grass skirting, and checked that there ballot papers were being collated into tens and hundreds.

This apparently cumbersome process does however guarantee the accuracy of the counting and also protects the counters from undue influence or attempts to rig voting, An extreme example quoted was that of criminals trying to influence the voting by holding a counter's family to ransom. Because the counters were scrutinised so heavily, they could not influence the vote.

It was an exhausting and exacting process for counters and counting agents. But the fact that errors were spotted and corrected quickly was a fantastic demonstration of fair democracy in progress.

However, excitement was gradually mounting as the Returning Officer announced the results for the elections for the different wards as the counts came in. The Lib Dems had been hoping to turn the Conservative majority into a hung council at SCDC. As the day wore on, the LibDem wins gradually overtook those of the Tories and crept to the break even point. Then they broke though to a clear majority!. The Conservative MP Heidi Allen and many of the conservative supporters had disappeared by the latter stages. Local Newspaper, Radio and TV reporters realised that something momentous was happening and the LibDems were becoming ever so much more ecstatic and loud in their celebrations. Having gone to the count with Hazel, expecting us to be finished by lunchtime, we stayed on till all the counts were done by 5pm.

The tension and euphoria had not stopped democracy continuing. The votes for certain Parish Councils were still being counted, though by late afternoon, the quiet dedication and perseverence of the counters continued unnoticed in the background. Some of them had been involved in the counting of the previous night and had then been counting in the hall all day today. They deserve applause and recognition.

Personally, the past week or so had its ups and downs. 

Jane and I were outraged when a design prepared for an organisation was dramatically altered without consulting us. An apology was made to us for the error and the altered material was taken out of circulation.

On the plus side, four books are finally in print, making our workload more manageable.

With the promise of a warm and sunny bank holiday, we made a sightseeing trip to the village of Oakham, by Rutland Water on the Saturday.After a light lunch in the gardens of the Garden Cottage cafe/restaurant, we wandered through the back streets and visited the castle there. The Main Hall of the castle is really all that remains of the buildings, dating from the 1180's . The inside is covered with giant horseshoes. It is a tradition that visiting peers of the realm leave a horseshoe at the the castle. The earliest one on display is from Edward IV in 1470, after his victory at the Battle of Losecoat Field. The tradition continues to the present day! On our way back, we stopped off for an ice-cream and tea near Normanton Church, which was being used for a wedding on this glorious sunny day.

Sunday, we pottered about, with me doing some baking. I started off making a Pommesmoille. This is a mediaeval rice pudding with apples which I found in the book Pleyn Delit (Plain Delight). Ali Naylor from the Demowbrays Retinue gave us an excellent talk on the roles of the different people in the retinue of the Duchess of Norfolk back in Elizabethan times. Ali plays a variety of roles in the Demowbrays Retinue as they travel around the UK and in Europe, from noblewoman to camp cook. She recommended the book and I wanted to try out one of the recipes for the following day. I also made a cheese cake following the recipes first tried out in February (see earlier in Blog). This time I did mix the whipped egg-white into the cheese mix again. The cake turned out perfectly without a falling centre as it cooled. I had placed non-stick paper around the inside of the baking tin and this allowed the cake mix to contract evenly on all sides on cooling.

Today we had the Hall End Barbecue,.This used to be a regular fixture in our street when our children were younger, but we missed a few years due to bad weather. This Monday was glorious and all the neighbours brought out their chairs, tables, sunshade umbrellas and of course food and drink. The younger children coerced some of the adults into get soaked by crawling though a water filled play-tunnel, or played volleyball, football and play-fights with water-pistols. We started setting up at about 12:30 for lunch and had only finished packing up by around 7:30pm. It was an enjoyable, if tiring end to a bank holiday weekend.