OK, forget tax for once. Politics simultaneously attracts and repels me, but watching from a safe distance the current campaign unfold, and contemplating what is at stake when we go to the polls tomorrow, I have been driven to an in-depth analysis of the current state of politics in this country. This is, I emphasise loudly, a very PERSONAL view of the situation, and does not reflect any corporate view of Simpson Burgess Nash.
1. Negativity doesn't play well
It is easy to be negative. much more difficult to be positive. I have already complained about the lack of clarity about the parties' response to the economic crisis, and still key figures in the major parties insist on rubbishing the opposition instead of trumpeting their own virtues. Worst offender to my eyes has been Ed Balls, whom I suspect of costing Labour significant numbers of votes with his relentless, at times almost childish, knocking of the opposition. But he is not alone by any means. I don't think this works any more; the electorate's view of politicians is negative enough as it is without them contributing further.
2. We are not electing a President, we are electing 650 MPs
I despair of the media in this country, and have for some time. If a country gets the media it deserves, we must have done something pretty awful. Everything has to be simple (enough for the journalists to understand it, perhaps?) and black and white rather than shades of grey. So everything appears to be focused on the party leaders, whereas last time I looked we were voting for an MP in our own constituency, not a President. But then 650 little elections don't make easy copy in the way that one big one does.
3. Opinion polls are a waste of time
Because this is 650 elections, not 1, and local factors play to some extent in every seat. national opinion polls are of rather limited use. Remember the 1992 exit poll fiasco. Only one poll matters, and it is happening tomorrow. If media organisations want to waste vast sums of money commissioning them that is fine, but I fail to see what they add to the sum total of human understanding.
4. Voting is a post code lottery
This much over-used phrase is often used about the NHS or education, but seems to me to apply most clearly to general elections. Even in the depths of 1997 the Conservatives held on to around 170 seats, and the gloomiest prediction of Labour meltdown tomorrow does not suggest them falling below about 230 seats. Add in a eighteen to a couple of dozen safe Lib Dem & nationalist seats, and we have about two-thirds of the (non-Irish) seats on the mainland that are realistically never going to change hands, which presumably means that about two-thirds of us are pretty much wasting our time voting (on an individual rather than a collective basis, obviously). Is this good for democracy, discuss?
5. There is no plurality for any one party
The Labour party won a comfortable absolute majority in the last election with 36 - 37% of the votes cast (of those who bothered to vote). Even the Labour landslide of 1997 (43.2%) and the Conservative landslide of 1983 (42.4%) failed to deliver anything like 50% of the vote to the winning party. Subject to 3 above, the opinion polls suggest that no one party is going to get more than about 36% of the vote this time either. So should our electoral system normally deliver an absolute majority of seats to one party?
Indeed go beyond that. Is it not the case that there is a majority against each of the major parties? In my view certainly the Conservative party, and to a not much lesser extent the Labour party, polarise opinion among voters, and if you don't love them there's a pretty good chance that you hate them. And the Lib Dems are hardly in a position to point to empirical evidence that they are significantly better off from this point of view. There is a lot of negative voting around, which brings me neatly to my next point.
6. Tactical voting is a natural response to the electoral system
Given the prevalence of negative voting, and the effective disenfranchisement of large chunks of the electorate, the natural ingenuity of the voter leads him or her to find ways to make their vote count. Tactical voting has been around for a very long time, usually to the benefit of the Lib Dems, and might be seen in that context as an antidote to the bias in the electoral system against the third party. It ill behoves the Conservative party in particular to bemoan the prevalence of tactical voting when it benefits so massively from the first past the post system. On the other hand, tactical voting arguably takes us right back to the Presidential model of UK politics, voting the big picture rather than the local one, and is essentially a negative rather than a positive response to the political system. But then MPs have only themselves to blame if the electorate has a negative response to the political system.
7. Labour's sudden conversion to electoral reform / tactical voting is cynical in the extreme, and rather presumptuous to boot.
Not having noticed the Labour party being averse to the first past the post system in 1997, 2001 or 2005, I do feel that their Damascene conversion to electoral reform and tactical voting is extremely cynical. Yesterday the Daily Mirror was urging Labour and Lib Dem supporters to vote for each others' parties in a list of key seats. Apart from the fact that they were arguably focussing on the wrong seats (some that Labour will lose anyway and some that the Lib Dems will win anyway - journalists again!), this makes some rather sweeping assumptions.
Now that the 'new Labour' experiment appears to sleeping deeply, if not actually dead, we can perhaps assume that the traditional alignment of British politics has re-asserted itself, with the Lib Dems in the middle ground, as opposed to on the left, where they sometimes found themselves in the Blair years. Whilst it might be a reasonable assumption that the only logical place for a Labour tactical voter to go is to the Lib Dems, the reverse assumption is much more questionable. The Lib Dems have a right wing and a left wing, like any party, and the former would presumably be more inclined to the Conservatives than Labour, so I see the Mirror's analysis as deeply flawed. If the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats were interchangeable they would not be separate parties.
8. If the first past the post system is so good, how did we get into this mess?
Give or take a couple of spells in the 1970s, we have had no hung parliaments in this country since the 1920s. Thus, if you believe those who prophesy doom and gloom if no party wins an overall majority tomorrow, this almost uninterrupted 80+ years of majority government must have led to a golden age for the UK. Or perhaps not..........
Is it not conceivable that 'two heads are better than one', and that combining the talents of two of the three major parties (or even all three - see my previous post) might have a beneficial effect on the quality of government in this country? And that politics as a co-operative exercise might prove to be more beneficial than politics as an adversarial exercise? Or are our politicians so steeped in the politics of the 20th century that they cannot come to terms with the new politics of the 21st?
9. Two nations
To my mind the fundmamental problem of the first past the post system is that it leaves a massive chunk of the electorate effectively unrepresented by the government. The fox hunting debate led to widespread claims that Labour did not understand the countryside, and why would it, as you search in vain for a rural Labour constituency? Equally vain would be the search for city centre or inner city Conservative seats (I trust you will forgive me the truly exceptional case of the Cities of London & Westminster in this respect). So the current system gives absolute power to a party that has no connection whatsoever to a big proportion of the electorate. Ironically, the only party that has both inner city and rural seats is the Liberal Democrats, but that very spread of support is their undoing under the first past the post system.
Would it not be a good idea to have an electoral system that required any party that aspired to absolute power to engage fully with all sections of the electorate? The current system is an incitement to laziness and complacency on the part of the two main parties, both in terms of the need for them to attract the votes of a majority of the population and to win seats of all kinds in all parts of the country. If they had to win 50% of the vote to wield absolute power, they might take governing in the interests of all rather more seriously than they sometimes do at the moment. "We don't need to worry what they think, because we won't win seats there anyway" is a very dangerous thought for any government to fall prey to.
And would it not also be a good idea to have an electoral system that represented the views of the significant minorities who vote for the Greens, UKIP and the BNP, for example. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is a famous quote wrongly attributed to Voltaire, but however odious a particular view might be, a true and robust democracy would reflect any political view that has enough adherents to justify such reflection. We may get one Green MP in Brighton Pavilion at this election, and we may get a UKIP MP in Buckingham, but then again we may not, and the risk of denying significant numbers of voters a platform to express their views is that they seek alternative, less legal and formal ways of getting their point across. Plus, given Nick Griffin's stumbling performance on Question Time, I rather like the idea of the poverty of his political insight being exposed in the House of Commons.
10. Be careful with the Irish issue
Whatever you think of Tony Blair, which caters for a wide range of opinions, he succeeded where many had failed before him in producing a working solution to the woes of Northern Ireland, which I suspect will be the most positive aspect of his political legacy. The thought that it might not be a lasting solution is pretty much unbearable. Thus I react with great concenr to newspaper reports this morning that the Conservatives are considering a pact with the Unionists to bridge the potential gap between them and an absolute majority in Parliament. I can only hope that this is newspaper fantasy, becasue if anything would be calculated to wreck the ongoing peace process in Northern Ireland, it would be one of the political parties in the province wielding power at Westminster. You can. I am sure, imagine the Catholic reaction to such a development, just as you can imagine the Protestant concern if Sinn Fein and/or the SDLP ended up in a Labour / Liberal Democrat coalition. I cannot believe that the Conservatives would be unwise enough to consider such a course of action; even to do so would in my view render them unelectable as a government.
Summary
I believe that this election campaign has demonstrated that we need a new voting system, that the old model of two-party politics has broken down, that negative campaigning will no longer be tolerated by the bulk of the electorate, that our political system has become increasingly presidential, that the media cannot cope with the complexity of the new political landscape and has put aside any pretence of political impartiality, that minority parties continue to grow in strength and that old political allegiances are now much more fluid. I believe it will demonstrate that the Opposition can no longer assume that it need only wait for the Government to do something stupid to assume that it will be elected in its turn. And I believe that winning this election could be a poisoned chalice, given the emergency surgery needed on the economy over the next few years. As Peter Hain says, use your vote wisely!
Mark Simpson
5 May 2010
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