One Delicious Thought…
My wife is a member of the Liberal Democrats. She’s also an immigrant, and was upset that she didn’t get to vote in this election.
The rumour is that party members are going to get balloted on whatever deal has been agreed.
If so, my immigrant wife will get far more of say with her vote on the government of this country than roughly 60% of its population did with theirs.
Still like First Past The Post so much, right-wingers?
Political Music Spotify Playlist
A quick post-election playlist for you…
Common People by Pulp is from Different Class, the best political album of the 90s. This is the live version from Glastonbury in 1995 – a gig I was lucky enough to be at, and still remember with awe fifteen years later.
Hard Times Of Old England Retold by The Imagined Village is a rewrite by Billy Bragg of the old folk song. With verses complaining about the banks, Tesco and post office closures, it only needs something about potholes and it’d be a Focus leaflet set to music.
No Matter Who You Vote For, The Government Always Gets In by The Bonzo Dog Band has been proven true again this week…
Power In The Darkness by The Tom Robinson Band is a good demonstration of the Liberal and Conservative ideas of freedom:
“Freedom to choose to do with your body/Freedom to believe what you like/Freedom for brothers to love one another/Freedom for black and white/Freedom from elitism, male domination/Freedom for the mother and wife/Freedom from Big Brother’s interrogation/Freedom to live your own life” versus
“Freedom from the Reds and the blacks and the criminals/Prostitutes, pansies and punks/Football hooligans, juvenile delinquents, lesbians and left-wing scum/Freedom from the niggers and the pakis and the unions/Freedom from the gypsies and the jews/Freedom from the long-haired layabouts and students, freedom from the likes of you”
Cunts Are Still Running The World by Jarvis Cocker. Yes, they are.
Taxes, Taxes by Hank Penny is also self-explanatory…
The Disappointed by XTC could almost be written about the Lib Dems at the moment – in this case ‘the ones who broke their hearts’ are the voters who deserted in the last hours.
The Trader by The Beach Boys is a song about the evils of imperialist capitalist exploitation, by a band who are thought of as the ultimate conservative whitebread Americans but at the time had two black South African members and a Puerto Rican keyboardist.
Things Are Changing (For The Better) by Diana Ross And The Supremes would be nice if it were true, wouldn’t it? This is instrumentally a Phil Spector production of a Brian Wilson song, but with the Supremes’ vocals replacing those of Darlene Love and the Blossoms (whose version isn’t on Spotify).
This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie is here because Spotify doesn’t have any versions of The Land, the Liberal Democrat party song, and this has a very similar message.- “There was a big high wall there, that tried to stop me/The side was painted, said ‘private property’/But on the back side, it didn’t say nothin’/This land was made for you and me”.
And Tramp The Dirt Down by Elvis Costello is far, far kinder about Thatcher than I would be…
So What Happened? View From The Ground
I can’t speak for what happened nationally, but I think my experiences on election day might be useful in determining what happened.
Fundamentally, I think the Clegg surge *did* happen, but was drowned out by the larger turnout, and a squeeze message. And it was a surge we wouldn’t expect.
Normally, a truism in politics is that the young don’t vote, and if students vote it’s for Labour because of NUS organisation. People are still saying that now. It’s nonsense, with respect to this election, at least. Normally in the UK one would never, EVER queue to vote – and when I voted in my non-student-area polling station, I was in and out in seconds as always. It was slightly busier than normal, but not *exceptionally* so.
But a few hours later, I was tallying at a polling station in a more studenty area, and it was a totally different story. There were queues that at one point reached *a hundred and twenty people*. For those with no previous experience of British elections, a councillor I spoke to later said he’d once seen a queue of three people, at the 1987 election, and he’d remembered it 23 years later because a queue to vote was that unusual. And it was almost all students. And they were *EXCITED* to be voting – coming in gangs, some dressed in costumes (one as a gorilla). And they were voting for US!
After my four-hour stint at that polling station I came away thinking we’d won the election…
In the count, of course, was a different matter.
Looking at constituency-wide results, you can see that in both Manchester Withington and Manchester Gorton, both the Labour and Lib Dem candidates actually increased their votes by almost exactly the same amounts – both had an increase of 3000 in Gorton, and 4000 in Withington. But what you don’t see – and what we could see in the count – was how this split by polling district.
The areas with no students – the ‘normal people’ areas – were overwhelmingly Labour. The split there was roughly 60 Labour 30 Lib Dem 10 Tory (with negligible numbers of people voting Christian, RESPECT, Pirate, Green or Socialist). The split in the *student* areas, on the other hand, was 60 Lib Dem, 20 Labour, 20 Tory – which lines up roughly with my guesstimate from what the students were saying that they were voting 80/20 Lib Dem/Tory.
It’s obvious what happened in the ‘normal people’ wards – these are traditional Labour areas anyway, and the turnout was up through fear of a Tory government – the ONLY stuff that Labour were doing was a ‘vote Lib Dem, get Tories, remember Thatcher? Ooh, scary!’ kind of thing (plus getting Eddie Izzard to go round Withington – presumably a popular-in-the-90s standup is meant to have got people feeling 1997 nostalgia, or something?). So they’re scared of a Tory government and come out and vote Labour. Simple.
The annoying thing is that Dave Page, our council candidate in Fallowfield, said students kept coming up to him all day and telling him they supported us, but voted Tory to get Labour out. They’d picked up on the national messages, and not realised that in this area the contest was between Lib Dem and Labour.
So we have a situation where people were voting Labour to keep the Tories out, and Tory to get rid of Labour, when the Tories weren’t even in the race to start with… and people wonder why some of us want STV…
One thing that NEEDS priority – from everybody cross-party, and whatever happens with voting reform – is a MASSIVE programme of education for young people about how the elections actually work. I heard – literally a dozen times – “You know, I never realised you don’t vote for David Cameron or Nick Clegg, but for your local one” (all of them, incidentally, said it that way, not mentioning Brown at all…)
And while this was not ‘the internet election’, the internet may just have saved the Lib Dems half a dozen seats. More precisely, Facebook may have. Talking with the students in the queues, I wanted to know just *why* so many students were coming out and voting (I was very scrupulous about not trying to talk to them about how they were voting or anything, just *WHY* they were voting). The more politically-engaged ones (relatively) said “Because of the debates. All my friends like Nick Clegg”. The rest said “Oh, I don’t really care about the result, I’m voting Lib Dem because my friends are. I just want to tick the box on Facebook that says I’ve voted”.
So ignorance and lies cost us votes, while apathy and Facebook gained us more. Hooray for democracy! I may go and kill myself now…
And a message to Lib Dem supporters
Lib Dem Voice got slashdotted by Graham Linehan earlier today, so many won’t have seen this:
On Saturday afternoon the party’s Federal Executive is meeting to discuss how the party should handle the Parliamentary situation. There’s no pre-set, universally supported answer to this so the FE’s discussion is going to be meaningful and important. It’s only one part of the party’s consultative process, which also includes – for example – a meeting of the Parliamentary Party. But it does mean that now is an excellent time to let the FE know your views.
Because many members of the Federal Executive are scattered around the country – sleeping, travelling back from election counts, making their way to London and so on – the FE members may be hard to get hold of and many will not necessarily be checking their emails frequently.
Therefore, in order to ensure that people have a chance to send in a view that will be read before the meeting, we’ve agreed with the Party President Ros Scott a special email address – balancedparliament@libdemvoice.org – balancedparliament.hat.libdemvoice.org.spam.com (this is spam bot hidden email address, replace .hat. with @ and remove .spam.com for the real one) – which can be used to email in your views. A member of staff will collate all the messages and make sure that they are drawn to the attention of Ros and also reported to the members of the FE in time for their discussion.
A few tips when emailing this address:
Don’t use it for an email to which you need a personal, direct reply as, given the short timescales, that isn’t going to be possible for every message sent to the address
Given the pressures of time, short and concise messages are likely to be more effective than 12 pages essays
As with letter writing or lobbying more generally, saying in full who you are and where you’re from is likely to add to the impact of the message
Please send your message as soon as possible
That’s from a post by Mark Pack at LDV.
The message appears mostly aimed at party members, but it doesn’t say *ONLY* them. LET THE PARTY KNOW YOUR VIEWS. THIS IS IMPORTANT.
Quick final message before the election
Got in only 1/2 an hour ago and have to be up in 4 hours to go out campaigning again, so an incredibly brief one today. When you go to the ballot box, just remember:
Tories Section 28. Poll tax. Criminal Justice Bill. Provoking further conflict in Northern Ireland. Sinking ships that were retreating. Destroying Britain’s manufacturing industry. Destroying the mining industry out of spite. Cash for questions.
LabourStarting illegal wars, killing a million or more. Restriction of the right to protest. 28-day detention without trial. Indefinite detention without trial for personality disorders. Two beds closed in mental health wards every day between 1997 and 2007. Collusion in torture. Flipping second homes. Dropping the 10p income tax rate. The Digital Economy Act.
Liberal Democrats None of the above.
You know what to do
Tactical Voting – An (Unsuccessful) Attempt At A Non-Partisan Guide
I’ve not been in any state to blog recently (as those of you who saw the rather embarrassing linkblog the other day will know) because a roller-coaster is nothing to an election campaign. The human body simply isn’t built to withstand the constant adrenaline shocks to the system – “Oh god, we’re 1% down on a poll whose margin of error is 2%!” “Wow, two friends of mine i always thought of as not especially political just decided to join the party!” “Oh Christ, Gordon Brown just gave the speech of his life!” “Hooray! Neil Innes has decided to vote for us!” “FUCK! Cameron might try to take power with a minority government, going against constitutional precedent!” “YES! We’re 2% up in a poll whose margin of error is 2%!” and so on. Examining everything for signs and portents, despite the inherent impossibility of predicting what is the most chaotic election in British political history.
(In some ways it’s been easier being a Lib Dem in previous elections, where we’ve definitely been coming third – you know your efforts matter, because you’re building support and playing the long game – and had the party not spent decades doing the groundwork, building local parties up, getting council seats, we wouldn’t be in a position to affect the result now – but you also know you’re coming third before you start. This way is infinitely more nerve-wracking.)
Then there’s the physical exertion. My day job is as a software engineer, and my principal hobby is blogging. This means my life pretty much entirely consists of sitting in one place, moving only my hands, with occasional breaks for sleep. I was delivering in Yorkshire yesterday. Did you know that Yorkshire is entirely made of hills? And not only are the roads all hills, sometimes they have special bits where every single house gets its own small extra hill. And don’t get me started on letterboxes.
So for at least the last few days I’ve been in some kind of hallucinatory daze, and certainly incapable of talking sensibly about anything, but there’s one post I want to get out of the way, and that’s the tactical vote one.
Now, I believe that all major political parties have a rule that no party member can advocate a vote for another party in a seat in which they’re standing, so you’re *never* going to see complete honesty on this from a partisan blogger. Every party member knows of at least one incompetent buffoon of a parliamentary candidate who’s standing against a principled opponent, but they have to endorse that candidate or not talk about it. So can we take as read that my advice is that you should always, in all circumstances, vote Liberal Democrat? OK. Now on to what you should actually do if you’re considering tactical voting at all. I’m going to try to phrase this as honestly as I can given that I’m a party member. And I’m assuming here you’re voting for your preferred type of government – you might have a great candidate for your non-preferred party, or you might want to vote for a nationalist party who won’t form a UK government.
Weirdly, my honest attempt at impartial advice does come out as ‘in almost all cases, vote Liberal Democrat’ – but you might want to see my reasoning, and see if you agree…
If you’re Tory Well, actually, I suspect my blog has very few Tory readers. However, if you are one, David Cameron has *INCREDIBLY* stupidly ruled out any form of coalition with the Lib Dems in a hung parliament, so this won’t be of much use to you…
If you actively want a balanced (‘hung’) parliament for whatever reason, then Hang ‘Em is a campaign to get just that. It lists candidates who ‘have a chance of winning’, are either third-party or independent (but not BNP) , or are major party MPs with a long history of rebellion. In practice, more often than not, this will mean voting Lib Dem – and in fact that would be a good rough heuristic – but you might have other options which might appeal.
If you’re Labour then you do want to vote tactically. Labour have so destroyed their own base that their only hope for government is a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Frankly, even that’s a slim hope – most of us are furious at Labour’s record, and I think a coalition with *either* major party in their present forms unlikely – but it’s *possible*, while an outright Labour win just isn’t. Lee Griffin and the Daily Mirror (pdf) both have guides on how to vote tactically for a ‘progressive’/'anti-Tory’ majority – by which they mean a Labour-led coalition with the Lib Dems.
If you’re a smaller party supporter then the chances are very small that your preferred candidate will get in, pretty much by definition. My argument has always been that in this case you should vote Lib Dem in the hope of getting a fairer system, and I do think that’s the only way of getting any smaller parties into Parliament in significant numbers in the near future, but feel free to disagree.
If you’re a Liberal Democrat DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES vote tactically. Not this time. Vote Lib Dem even if you’re in a Lab/Con marginal and you know it’s keeping in the bastard Tories/torturing authoritarian arsehole Labour. The reason is simple – we need to come either first or second in the popular vote if we want to be able to *lead* a coalition – or to convincingly set terms by which some sort of deal can be cut. Our biggest, most important policy – the *SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT GOVERNMENT COULD EVER DO* – is to fix our voting system. We can only argue convincingly that we have a real democratic mandate to that if we can point to all the people who voted for us in seats where we *didn’t* get in. This is the first time *EVER* that the Liberal Democrats have had a real chance at getting power, in order to give the power back to the people – but we need to show that enough of those people support us, and not just in tactical voting areas.
If you’re still undecided Vote Lib Dem because I said so. You like me, don’t you? I like Batman. You like Batman. We have something in common! Vote Lib Dem. Or if that’s not good enough for you, and you think I may not be the most impartial of sources, try Votematch – a completely impartial system that asks you what your views are and then tells you which party has views closest to yours.
All this talk of tactical voting upsets me though – *no-one* should *EVER* have to even think about voting tactically – you should be able to vote for the party you want. As Millennium says:
Mr Balloon warns against “voting tactically”, but ONLY the Liberal Democrats want to change the system so that you NEVER have to vote tactically again.
Mr Balloon says that the current voting system lets you throw out the government. Well tell that to a voter in Richmond (Conservatory majority: 17,807 – where 40% of the voters have NO SAY AT ALL
The Conservatories idea of “change” is to redraw the boundaries in their own favour, to cut the number of MPs who might hold their government to account. (Reducing the number of MPs without making the system more representative just makes more and bigger safer seats.)
Will the Liberal Democrats do better under a FAIRER voting system? Well YES, but that doesn’t make it WRONG.
Greens and Libertarians and Christian Democrats and Monster Raving Loonies and Animal Rights Campaigners and Pirates and Cornish Separatists and Socialists and yes even the fruitloops from UKIP will ALL do better under a fairer system.
And above all YOU will do better out of a fairer system, because whoever you vote for, you’ll have a better chance of having your voice heard in Parliament. You will do better from a system that doesn’t EXCLUDE voices, that doesn’t FORCE all the politicians to SOUND THE SAME just to appeal to the swing voters in the key marginals.
I really didn’t want this to be a partisan post when I started, but when I try to think about things as clearly, rationally and fair-mindedly as possible, I always end up clearly, calmly and rationally advising a vote for the Liberal Democrats. I don’t know if that says more about the Lib Dems or about me…
Linkblogging For 29/04/10
Music post shortly. For now, here are some links
Alex Wilcock reviews the CD version of Genesis Of The Daleks given away with today’s Torygraph.
David Mathewman on talking about immigration. The more this campaign goes on, the more I want to grab *EVERYONE IN THIS FUCKING COUNTRY* with the exception of a few people like Mr Mathewman, by the throat and scream the actual truth about the appaling, inhuman way we actually treat immigrants in this country, until they *SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH THEIR HATRED*. David’s recent “Why I Am A Liberal Democrat” series is essential reading, too.
Leonard Pierce on the South Park Mohammed controversy .
Andrew Rilstone talks sense on ‘bigotgate’.
General Election – Give The Lib Dems (And Yourself) A Chance
I’m trying not to make this blog be overly political at the moment, but this General Election is looking like it may be the most important in decades. It’s certainly the first one in decades where your individual vote might make a difference.
Currently, for the first time in the party’s history, two-and-a-half weeks before the election, the Liberal Democrats are in second place in the polls, ahead of Labour. More incredibly yet, they’re the only party of the three major parties that anyone seems at all enthusiastic about.ETA, since I wrote this, a couple of hours ago, another poll has come out which has the Lib Dems in FIRST place, although it’s well within the margin of error.
I live in a constituency which has had a Labour MP for a hundred out of the last hundred and four years – other than a blip from 1931 to 35 when it went Tory, this has been a Labour seat since nine years before the First World War. The last time a Tory won here, my great-grandmother was eleven. The last time a LIBERAL won here, Queen Victoria was on the throne.
Yet walking down the road to the shop before, I counted in windows:
Two RESPECT posters
Five small Labour fliers and
FIFTY Lib Dem posters, ranging from small ‘winning here’ diamonds to gigantic banners.
(There were also two Tory posters, but they were both in advertising spaces, and one had been defaced).
Now, this is not the most scientific of samples (and the fact that one of the RESPECT posters and one of the Labour fliers were sharing window space with Lib Dem ones suggests a certain lack of understanding on the part of someone), but it is indicative of a mood. I don’t think *ANYONE* is enthusiastic about either a Tory or a Labour government. At least *some* people are enthusiastic about the Lib Dems.
Another anecdote (I know, the plural of anecdote isn’t data, but bear with me) even before Nick Clegg so comprehensively won the leaders’ debate, a friend was asking on Twitter how one would go about volunteering for a political party because “the one I support looks like it might even do something this election, which would be a nice change”. She’s now volunteering for Lynne Featherstone, after I pointed her in the right direction.
The point being that the Liberal Democrats now actually have a small but real chance of even *WINNING* this election. And there’s a much better chance that there’ll be a hung parliament – and the larger the number of Lib Dems, the more influence we’ll have over the resulting government.
And I honestly think that most people reading this would prefer a Lib Dem government to either a Labour or a Conservative one – we’d stop detaining children while their asylum cases were progressing, we’d cancel the ID database, we’d get rid of the DIgital Economy Act, we’d invest in green technology, not replace Trident, scrap university tuition fees, restore a huge number of rights that Labour have stolen from people, and redistribute from the rich to the poor. If you’re (say) a Green, we might not be your ideal government – hell, we’re not *MY* ideal “in a perfect world” government – but that list must be a hell of a lot more appealing than the other two parties.
But under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t try to persuade people to vote for anything other than their preferred party, and nor will I do so now for the council elections. Vote for whoever truly represents your beliefs the best, not just the party most likely to win. Vote Green, or RESPECT, or Pirate Party or Libertarian or whoever, and good luck to you. I want all those parties and more to get representation, as well as us increasing ours.
But when it comes to the national elections, I’m going to ask you, just this once, to give the Lib Dems your vote.
If we don’t get a massive increase in representation – possibly a partnership in a hung parliament – then next time, vote for who you like, knowing the system is so rigged it doesn’t matter. If we *do* get into power and you don’t like what we do, vote for whoever you want to kick us out, as we’d deserve.
But right now, for this election, if you support *ANYTHING* other than the corporatist, managerialist, authoritarian consensus that is pushing our government steadily towards fascism, then supporting the Lib Dems in the General Electin will help your party.
Because one of the things we have insisted on as a deal-breaker if we form a coalition – and one of the first things we’ll bring in if we actually win – is electoral reform, ideally SIngle Transferable Vote. This is a voting system in which every seat has several members of parliament, and people can rank their preferred candidates in order.
At the moment, in the current system, say you’re in a Tory/Labour marginal, as many people are, but you’re a supporter of, say, the Greens. You don’t want to vote for either Labour or the Tories, but at the same time you know your vote for the Greens won’t get the Green candidate in. You have a choice of either a ‘wasted vote’ or a vote for the least worst of the two main parties in your area.
Now imagine you’re in a seat where you use STV. Here there are three seats and ten candidates – a Green, two Lib Dems, three Labour, three Tory and a Bastard Nazi. Now, you don’t want the Tories to get in, and you DEFINITELY don’t want the Bastard Nazis to get in. You don’t like Labour, but you know that one of your local candidates is OK, and you think the Lib Dems are OK and they’d be your second choice. How do you vote THEN?
The answer is that you rank your favoured candidates with the Green at the top, then the Lib Dems, then the Labour candidate you like, then the two you don’t like. As each candidate either gets knocked out or gets enough votes to get a candidate, your vote goes to the one next on your list. This way, you might get lucky and get the Green candidate in (especially if the people voting Lib Dem or Labour put her next on *their* lists after their preferred candidates), but even if you didn’t, your vote would still go to one of the candidates you preferred to the Tories or Bastard Nazis.
The system has other advantages too – say you’re a Labour supporter (I know, but just imagine…) and you have three Labour candidates up for election in your constituency, and three spots to fill. One of the Labour candidates is a principled Old Labour type who does a good job and is respected locally, one is someone you know little about, and one is a New Labour toadie who voted for the war.
In that situation, even if you’re absolutely loyal to the party, you can still rank the three.You know that if you (and people like you) rank the New Labour one third, chances are she’ll not get in, but the other two probably will. You’re still voting for the party you support, but you can let the party know very clearly which kind of candidates you want.
Eventually, this system would lead to the major parties breaking into smaller ones, to parties working together rather than against each other, and to much more power going to the smaller parties – including whichever one you support.
So if you really want to get your voice heard, vote Liberal Democrat this time, and give your own party a chance next time.
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