Greater Manchester Future: Turn Out Just Over 30% So Far

David Ottewell has produced a canny graph of Transport Vote turnouts following disappointment from the chief returning officer. Ranging from 23.2% in Manchester to 37.3% in Tameside. With a week to go in effect. Because Manchester and Salford are the biggest electorates in this exercise the overall turnout so far is rather lower than the average of these ten bars. Comments (5) at the time when I began writing this post were mostly from foaming-at-the-mouth NO voters, with just the one more sensible NO voter in the shape of blogging Cllr Iain Lindley. Iain points out that we're already getting towards local government election turnouts in this part of the world:

I don't have time to trawl through all the figures at the moment, but I suspect that those figures already broadly reflect the turnout at the last set of local elections. Salford's local election turnout in 2008 was 31.3% across the City.
Of course what those figures [i]don't[/i] show is the voting differentials [i]within[/i] each borough. In Salford the local election turnouts ranged from 42.1% in Worsley and 40.3% in my ward of Walkden South to 23.4% in Ordsall and just 20.6% in Irwell Riverside ward.
Boothstown & Ellenbrook, Cadishead, Claremont, Eccles and Irlam all turned out above 35%. Of the old Salford CB wards only Claremont and Kersal broke 30%.
If this pattern is repeated in the referendum then it is likely to be bad news for the YES campaign. We will, of course, never know the figures broken down by ward or by area.

On the other hand, in reference to this last remark, if we buy the argument that there will be more committed curmudgeons voting NO early there is some reassurance for the YES side that it's still all to play for.

For the uninitiated the requirement for the referendum to be binding on all ten authorities is for an overall YES vote AND also YES votes in at least seven of those authorities.

The massive muppetry of the other six commenters at the time of beginning this post was particularly demonstrated by 1. Sean of the Dead Cocker who famously poo poohed health chief figures for the life saving potential of reduced traffic and 2. Cllr Muppet O'Neill of Salford. Both these utterly stupid comments appear to have been removed. Presumably the word came down from Andrew Simpson in his bunker somewhere? Trying to call the shots without further reputational damage for Peel holdings and The Trafford Centre.

Sean of the Dead Corker: Suggested that the low turnout was because the vote was "So near Christmas".

What is he on about? A low vote is extraordinarily unlikely to favour the YES campaign as whatever the issue research shows that NO wingnuts are more exercised and far more likely to express themselves than those who are more relaxed about the issue.

So why would the YES people contrive to have a ballot near Christmas if that was going to hurt turn out?

Cllr Muppet O'Neill: States that the whole thing "is a shambles" but seems unable to offer any arguments to go with his assertions.

Does anyone know the one about the newly elected councillor from Salford? Who was refused a personal one-to-one audience with Howard Bernstein who for some reason did not fancy 650 meetings with Greater Manchester councillors? That was Martin O'Muppet too.

Muppet O'Neill is son of Joe O'Neill who stood and was beaten for the Salford Lib Dem Group leadership.

The pair of them are outcasts, out of step with Libdemology nationally and locally, even accused of being closet Tories.

CORRECTIONS: 1. As Cllr Iain Lindley points out in comments Salford has drifted down to mid-table in terms of electorate size. Though barring Stockport the top five are in the 20s while the smaller five MBCs are in the 30s.
2. The muppety comments have not been removed, they are on an earlier post here.

CALCULATION 23:29: LOL calculations show that the overall turn out at the time of this report appears to be 30.32% or thereabouts.