The SNP are threatening legal action if they are not included in any Party Leader election debates.

The reality is that once it was proposed that the LibDems and Nick Clegg be included in any election debate this was inevitable.  Who else?  UKIP?  The BNP?  The Monster Raving Loonies?

Nick Clegg is a fantasist in believing that he has a serious prospect of being Prime Minister.  I know it.  You know it.  And the public knows it.

People are interested in seeing a debate between the two serious contenders for the job.  Anyone else there is an irrelevance.  What is more it will detract from the real debate that people want to see happen.

If the debates are to happen, the objective has got to be to enable the public to hear directly from the Leaders of the Labour and Conservative Parties – and nobody else.

Does this undermine the expectation of broadcasting impartiality?  No – because it gives people the opportunity to examine the stance of those who are in serious contention to be Prime Minister (and not the fantasists).

If there is any doubt on the matter, perhaps the two main Parties in Parliament should agree a simple piece of legislation that puts the issue beyond question.   Let’s have “The Party Leaders Election Debate Bill” and stop all this nonsense from the LibDems, the SNP and Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all.

No sooner had I finished my previous post on the dilemma that David Cameron has over Europe and the Lisbon Treaty than I discover that Mayor Boris Johnson has spoken out, skilfully prodding the sensitive skin over David Cameron’s carefully nuanced position on the issue.

Who says ambition is dead?

I’m sure David Cameron will be OK.  Old Etonians are taught how to watch their backs.

The next week will present a crucial test to David Cameron and the Conservative Party.  The issue will be one that has bitterly divided the Tory Party for the last twenty years: Europe.

Now that the Irish have voted so clearly to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, the pressure will be on for the Tories to clarify their position.  As I understand it, this is their evolving position.  Two years ago, they were unequivocal: there would be a referendum and the Conservatives would campaign for a “No” vote.  Now, the position is more “nuanced”: if after the General Election (and if by some mischance they find themselves in Government) and if the Lisbon Treaty has not by then been ratified by all EU member states, then a Conservative Government would “suspend” the UK ratification, call a referendum and campaign for a “No” vote.

And if the Treaty has been ratified by every EU member state? Well that’s the nuanced bit.  Essentially it boils down to accepting the Lisbon Treaty as fact, but having a bit of a whinge about it.

Of course, even the “easy” bit is actually quite complicated.  Now that Ireland has voted.  There are only two member states that have not yet completed the ratification process.  In both of those instances, their Parliaments have voted to ratify.  The Tories seem to be pinning their hopes on the President of the Czech Republic stalling long enough to give them a chance to “suspend” the UK ratification.

But what does “suspend” mean?  UK ratification is a fact.  It is an Act of Parliament that has received the Royal Assent.  No Prime Minister has the power to “suspend” an Act of Parliament.  A new Act of Parliament would be required to undo the ratification.  More legislation would then be required to enable there to be a referendum.  It would all take at least a year – probably more.  And what’s going to happen while all of this is going on?  The rest of Europe is not going to sit still.  Even the President of the Czech Republic is not envisaging holding up ratification beyond next June (by which time even with a May General Election the British Parliament will only just be sworn in …).

So what are the options for David Cameron?  If he wants to show real leadership, he should stop nuancing.

He has two options: either he should tell his Party Conference this week that the Lisbon Treaty is now a fact (and will be past the point of no return by the time of a General Election) or he should admit that the Conservatives want to withdraw from the European Union (with all the dire economic consequences that that would bring) and that the Tory manifesto will commit to calling a referedum to do just that.

That’s why the poll of Conservative Party members in ConservativeHome is so significant.  Only 16% of Tory Party members are in favour of accepting ratification of the Lisbon Treaty as a fact.  (Iain Dale rather innocently seems to think that this finding is such dynamite that it should have been suppressed.)  The real reason this poll has been released now (and Tim Montgomerie has acknowledged in a comment to Iain Dale that it would have been suppressed nearer the time of a General Election) is to PREVENT David Cameron showing that leadership.  There was clearly a fear that he was going to tell the Party that it had to accept Lisbon and the publication of the poll was intended to preempt that.

The effect is to raise the stakes.  If David Cameron were to go ahead and say to his Party Conference, despite the ConservativeHome poll, that the Tories will now accept the Lisbon Treaty, he would be showing some real and genuine leadership.

So has he got the cojones?  We’ll see.  But don’t hold your breath.

My webmaster (a grand title for a really nice guy who is also really good on sorting out websites for novices like me) has been cyber-squatting but for a sound political purpose.  He has demonstrated that the new European Conservatives and Reformists Group – the strange alliance that the British Tories have joined in the European Parliament – has no web presence.  So he registered one for them: www.ecrg.info.  More than three months later, there is still no official ECRG web presence.

It does highlight what a nonsense (albeit a damaging nonsense to the UK’s prestige in Europe) the Conservative Party’s stance in the European Parliament has become. 

Iain Dale has been banging on about how wonderful the Tories’ new online strategy is going to be.  If it is so good and so expert, you might have expected them to make sure that their presence in Europe also reflected this expertise.  But then again, perhaps the UK’s largest market just doesn’t matter to them.

Technology Guardian reports that the London Assembly has agreed that the votes in the 2012 Mayoral and Assembly elections will as in the three previous GLA elections be counted electronically.

I have to admit that I am rather ambivalent about this.  There is something that brings home the reality of the electoral process with traditional manual counts: the ballot boxes being opened up and emptied in front of observers appointed by each of the candidates; the ballot papers being unfolded and counted to verify that the number of papers issued matches the number in the box; the separation of the papers into piles for each candidate; the piles being counted into batches of fifty; the batches for each candidate being placed together on trestle tables; the adjudication of disputed papers; the candidates and their agents being summoned by the Returning Officer; and finally the declaration of the result itself.  It looked and felt transparent.  The votes themselves were tangible and real.  The process was being scrutinised and checked: the result becoming clear as the bundles piled up and when it wasn’t clear the wait for the final tally (and possibly the request for a recount).

Electronic counts do not feel the same.

I remember my count in 2000 in a sports hall in Harrow.  The promise had been that the electronic count would be quicker – with results declared three or four hours after the polls closed.  I remember the count dragging on – and on – and on.  There was nothing to do.  The machines churned away, but you couldn’t see the ballot papers themselves, as they went through the machines face down.  By 2am, the heating had gone off.  By 3am the refreshments (only tea, coffee and biscuits anyway) had run out.  By 4am most people had gone home – leaving a small core of supporters around each candidate.  At around 6am the Returning Officer summoned the candidates and agents to say:

“When I press this button, we will find out who’s won.”

I had been confident throughout (although having by then been up for 24 hours I was virtually catatonic as well).  It wasn’t until much later that I discovered that my agent had notified Party headquarters eight hours earlier that, on the basis of the turnout and canvass returns, her assessment was that I had probably lost.  In the event, I was elected – but by a margin of less than 1% of the electorate.

It also turned out that the Brent and Harrow count had been the quickest of the fourteen GLA divisions.  The final results (and therefore the Mayoral result and the outcome of the top-up list) took another six hours: ten hours later than predicted and fully fourteen hours after the polling stations had closed.

Four years later, I instinctively knew that I had lost.  The count was held over until the Friday and I spent the morning packing up my office in City Hall.  Again the Brent and Harrow count took about eight hours (although inexplicably the machines in some of the other divisions seemed to run rather more quickly this time, so my result was not the first).  As before, there was nothing to do and nothing to see.  (The count – along with those for two other divisions – was held in Alexandra Palace, so at least there were refreshments this time.)  If anything, the process was even more anti-climatic than four years earlier.  No button was ceremonially pressed.  Instead, the Returning Officer simply appeared with a print-out in his hand – and this time the margin was less than 1% of the electorate the other way.

I wasn’t present at the 2008 count.  I gather this time the machines were programmed to produce running tallies.  While these were not publicly announced, the net effect was to remove whatever dramatic tension there might have been.  The turnout was higher, so the counts took even longer than in 2000 and 2004.  I think the Brent and Harrow count took about eleven hours and the final Mayoral result was not available until nearly midnight – 26 hours after the polling stations had closed and rather beyond the bedtime of the youngest children of the new Mayor who had been kept up to watch their father’s acceptance speech at City Hall.

Electronic counting is – as I have described – not any quicker than traditional manual counts, provided enough tellers are engaged.

In my view, electronic counting is less transparent.  Everyone has to take it on trust that the machines are scanning the ballot papers accurately – if the machines were programmed (or hacked into) to count every fortieth vote for candidate A for candidate B, it would not be apparent to those present and would be hard to detect.

I want to emphasise that I am not for one moment suggesting that this might ever be the case.  However, the point is that in an electronic count there would not be the army of people, like those who are involved in and take part in scrutinising a manual count, to ensure and be seen to ensure the electronic count’s transparency and accuracy.

Above all, some of the election drama is lost by electronic counting.  And that drama is itself – at least as far as I am concerned – an essential part of the democratic process.