Regional forecast

If John Prescott needed an easy-to-read précis of the Electoral Commission’s findings on all-postal ballots, published last week, a brave civil servant could have given it to him in four words on a Post-it note: ‘Whoops, not enough fraud.’

The Commission was expected to report widespread hanky-panky in June’s pilot all-postal Euro-elections — especially among Labour activists in the West Yorkshire Asian community, who were alleged to have saved their neighbours the bother of walking to the post-box by collecting their voting papers, helpfully completing them, and delivering them in bundles. Prescott and his ministerial sidekick Nick Raynsford used this rumour as the excuse for postponing all-postal referenda on regional assemblies for the north-west of England and ‘Yorkshire and the Humber’, but decided a poll should go ahead in November in the north-east, where no significant irregularities had been suspected in June.

In fact, the Commission concluded that all-postal ballots are generally a bad idea, but found much less abuse than the rumours had suggested, resulting in a ‘low’ number of prosecutions in Yorkshire and the Humber and no more in the north-west than would have been expected in a conventional election. Nevertheless, since it was the fraud stories that were used to justify the postponements, those of us who like living in Yorkshire might be inclined to raise a glass of local bitter to our Bradford brethren for their vote-gathering initiatives, real or imagined, and on however small a scale. Inadvertently, they seem to have saved us from a wholly unwelcome local government upheaval, in which our counties and districts would be rehashed into ‘unitary authorities’ subordinate to a new regional centre of power.

But only for the time being. Regionalism is a many-headed beast, impossible to kill. Prescott’s decision to postpone these two referenda had nothing to do with supposed electoral chicanery, and everything to do with the fact that he knew he was going to lose them.