A Quick Explanation For Americans And Other Confused Persons
Batman posts have to hold off a few days I’m afraid…
The one-line summary for Americans is that we’re reliving Bush vs Gore, and Ralph Nader has been asked to choose.
In the election this week, no party got an overall majority – this is roughly the same as not being filibuster-proof in the US system.
There are three major parties in the UK – the Conservatives, the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats. They came first, second and third, respectively, in the election, but none did well enough to form a government. The Conservatives and Labour hate each other even though there’s not really very much difference between them, so definitely won’t work together.
The Conservatives could form a government with Liberal Democrat support, and have a majority. The Labour party could form a government if it got the support of the Liberal Democrats *and* the Nationalist parties (there are parties that want Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to become separate countries. They all hate the Tories and have effectively agreed to this even without being asked) *and* the single Green MP.
The Liberal Democrats are probably closer politically to Labour than the Conservatives, but not by very much (we’re more different from either of them than they are from each other). Most Lib Dem members and voters *HATE* the Conservatives, but just dislike Labour, but some feel the other way round.
However, the Conservatives did far better than Labour in the election, and it may well be politically impossible to support Labour, because it’s clear that nobody likes the Labour government,and people *LOATHE* Gordon Brown.
However, most of *OUR* supporters probably prefer Labour to the Conservatives, and would feel betrayed by supporting the Conservatives (including myself unless we got an *astonishingly* good deal).
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, though, is rumoured to be closer to the Conservatives.
One of the most important things we’ll be arguing for is a fairer voting system. The Conservatives *won’t* let us have this. Labour *might* – but they’re after a different system instead, which we don’t like. The Nationalists etc would side with us on this.
Nick Clegg can’t make a deal without the agreement of both the Federal Executive of the party *AND* the MPs – if he doesn’t get that agreement then he has to call a party conference to decide.
We’re not, however, a very large party compared to the other two, so don’t have a lot of room to manoeuvre.
Interesting times lie ahead. Whatever happens, a lot of people are going to be angry. Probably including me.
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…
A Beginners’ Guide To The Election Part 2 – What The Parties Stand For
A bit later than I thought, here’s the second part of this. Before I start, some people were interested in exactly what happens in a balanced parliament situation – here’s a report from the Hansard Society (pdf) that sets it all out.
I’m going to try here to set out what all the major parties in the UK General Election believe, as simply as I can. I’m going to try to avoid words like ‘socialism’ or ‘capitalism’ because I want this to be useful to as many people as possible – I genuinely know quite a few people who don’t know even what the most basic ideas of what the parties stand for even at this late stage. It should also, though, help my foreign friends understand things a bit better. If you’re a member or supporter of one of the parties listed and you think I’m being unfair or inaccurate (within the very simplistic way I’m doing this) please leave a comment.
The Conservative Party are the simplest party to explain. They believe that, more or less, the way things are is the best way they could be. They think that the people with power at the moment (not just politicians, but religious leaders, business leaders, banks and so on – ‘important’ people) are the people who should keep power. This also means that even though it’s not actually their policy, a lot of them think that middle-aged white straight men deserve more power than anyone who isn’t a middle-aged white straight male, though some individual Conservatives, including their current leader, don’t think that. The Conservatives are also called the Tories, and over Britain’s history they have been in government most of the time. Their leader is David Cameron.
The Labour Party are the hardest to explain. They used to believe that working people deserved to get a better share of the money than they do, and that government should make sure of that, but that otherwise it would be better to give people more freedom. Labour governments brought in the National Health Service, created the Open University, ended capital punishment (hanging) and legalised homosexuality and abortion. (Many of these were Liberal ideas originally, but Labour brought them in). However, after the Conservatives were in power for eighteen years, the leaders of the party decided that people didn’t want a government like that any more, and Labour became more-or-less identical to the Conservatives. There are some slight differences – they brought in the minimum wage and civil partnerships for gay people – but otherwise they have behaved almost exactly like the Conservatives (increasing the gap between rich and poor, supporting the Americans in illegal wars). Many Labour *members* though still hope the party will go back to the way it used to be. Labour have been in government for the last 13 years, and their leader is Gordon Brown.
The Liberal Democrats are both Britain’s oldest and newest party, being formed in 1988 from a merger between two other parties, the Liberals (Britain’s oldest party) and the Social Democrats (a new party formed by some ex-Labour members). We believe in freedom – that the government should not interfere in you doing what you want with your life. We realise, though, that you can’t be free without enough food to eat or somewhere to live or medicine if you’re sick, so we think the government should do what it can to make sure everybody has those things, even if it means interfering a bit with rich people’s freedom (by taking some of their money away) to make sure poor people have them. We also think it’s worth making sure we have a better environment for everyone, because the freedoms not to choke on fumes or to have your home not be flooded by dangerous weather are also important. We also want a fairer voting system, to give everyone the freedom to have a say in how they’re governed.
We also want to make sure that *everyone* has more freedom, so we support gay people, and transsexual people, and disabled people, and other people who have a hard time at the moment, and we want to make sure they have the same rights as everyone else and can also do what *they* want to with their lives.
The Liberal Democrats have never been in government, although the Liberals were a long, LONG time ago, and Nick Clegg is our leader.
The Green Party want to protect the environment, and to share money out more so poor people have more and rich people have less. They share a lot of the same ideals as the Liberal Democrats, but we think some of the ways they want to do things won’t work properly, while they think we’re too similar to the Conservatives and Labour and not radical enough. The Greens don’t have any Members of Parliament at the moment, but are hoping to get some. Caroline Lucas is their leader.
The Scottish Nationalist Party and Plaid Cymru are nationalists – they believe that Scotland (for the SNP) and Wales (for Plaid Cymru) should become separate countries. As you would imagine, they don’t have many MPs (Scotland and Wales don’t have many people in compared to England), but they both have a lot of members of their respective assemblies (the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly). Alex Salmond leads the SNP, and Ieuan Wyn Jones leads Plaid Cymru.
There are *lots* of smaller parties in Northern Ireland, where the major mainland parties don’t stand. Roughly speaking the Unionist parties (those that want Northern Ireland to stay part of the UK, mostly Protestants) will support the Conservatives in Parliament, while the Republican parties (those that want Northern Ireland to join with the Republic of Ireland, mostly Catholics) will support Labour, but some Republican parties (like Sinn Fein) won’t take their seats in Parliament because you have to swear allegiance to the Queen. The Alliance Party, which tries to work with both communities and bring them together, are formally linked to the Liberal Democrats.
Racist UKIP The official name of this party is the United Kingdom Independence Party, but I refuse to refer to them as anything other than Racist UKIP, because I was threatened with legal action for saying they are racists. Racist UKIP’s policy is mostly centred around not liking foreigners, so they don’t want to be part of the European Union and they want to stop any foreign people coming over here and get rid of some of the ones who already are. Other than that, they’re mostly the same as the Conservatives. Their leader is Lord Pearson Of Rannoch , and they don’t have any MPs in the Commons but do have members in the House of Lords.
The Bastard Nazi Party, officially the British National Party, are a party that formed mainly to hate black people, though in recent years they have branched out and now hate Muslims too. Their leader is DickIbegyourpardonNick Griffin, and they are bastard Nazis. They don’t have any MPs at the moment, and if you vote for them you are scum.
Linkblogging For 25/04/10
Proper post tonight…
Terence Eden, who describes himself as a ‘natural Labour voter’ who went into the election thinking he might vote for them, is joining the Lib Dems. I’m quite astonished at how many people I know, respect and like, but who have previously been non-partisan, are becoming active campaigners for the party this time round. I feel like a trendsetter!
David Mitchell says David Cameron is feeling the hand of history where it hurts.
The Heresiarch has a post on PR. It’s full of unsubstantiated claims and things I disagree with, but it *does* show that it is possible to be a Tory and have a coherent argument for PR.
Via Wesley, an essay on Farmville which suggests we should call it a ‘sociopathic application’ rather than a social one.
Left Outside, like me, is tired of arguing on the internet about immigration and is doing a series of posts addressing most of the biggest myths on the subject put about by racist pricks. Here’s the first post, on population density.
Jonathan Calder thinks the election ‘turning American’ is, for once, a good thing.
James Graham tells Polly Toynbee where she can stick her clothespeg.
A Beginners’ Guide To The Election: Part 1 – The Voting System
I’ve spoken to a lot of people recently – British people who can vote, and indeed who have voted in the past – who don’t understand some very basic things about our political system. They think, for example, that the party that gets the most votes always has to form the government, or that we vote for a Prime Minister directly. Neither of these things is true.
In the UK we are governed by Parliament, which is split into two ‘Houses’. The House Of Lords is a sort of advisory body, made up of retired politicians, business leaders, bishops, and a few people who have inherited their place in the Lords from their parents. We can’t vote for anyone in the Lords.
The other House, the House of Commons, is the part of the government we can vote for. There are 650 members of the House of Commons, known as Members of Parliament, or MPs.
To select these, the country is split into 650 areas known as constituencies. In each of these constituencies, people vote for the person they want to represent them, from a choice of candidates who are mostly members of political parties, and the person with the highest number of votes wins and becomes their MP.
Note that we don’t vote for a *party*, or for a *government* – we vote for a single person. It would be entirely possible for someone to want, say, a Conservative government, but to dislike their local Conservative candidate and like their local Labour candidate. In that case, they would vote for the Labour candidate.
After the election, most of the time one party has more than 325 MPs – so more than half the MPs in Parliament, and that party gets to become the government. The leader of the government party is the Prime Minister – we don’t get to vote directly for the Prime Minister, and if the current Prime Minister resigns, or gets kicked out by their party, the party in government chooses the new one. This happens a lot – roughly half the Prime Ministers we’ve had since the Second World War weren’t the leader of their party at the election before they became Prime Minister.
However, some times no party gets more than 325 MPs, and then we have what is usually known as a ‘hung parliament’ (though some people prefer to call it a ‘balanced Parliament’). When this happens, the different parties have to discuss between themselves what to do about forming a government. Sometimes this ends in a ‘coalition’ (two or more parties working together in government, with the leader of the bigger party being Prime Minister but members of the other party being Cabinet Ministers). At other times it leads to a ‘minority government’ where the largest individual party gets to form the government but has to try to persuade members of the other parties to vote for any new laws it wants to bring in.
Now this is a simple system, but it’s not particularly fair. To see why, imagine we have three parties, A, B and C, and two constituencies.
Now, in constituency 1, party A gets thirty thousand votes, party B gets twenty-nine thousand votes, and party C gets one thousand votes, so party A gets an MP. In constituency 2, party C gets thirty thousand votes, party B gets twenty-nine thousand votes, and party A gets one thousand votes, so party C gets an MP.
When this happens, party B has got twenty-eight thousand votes more than the other two parties, but it has no MPs while the others have one each. As you can see, this is not fair.
Most people, most of the time, either don’t know about this unfairness or don’t think it matters, because the system we have *sort of* works – at the last election Labour got most votes and most MPs, the Conservatives got second-most votes and second-most MPs, and the Liberal Democrats third most votes and third most MPs, so it sort of looks more-or-less fair until you look at the shares properly.
But this upcoming election might be different. Because of the way the different parties have different levels of support in different parts of the country, and the way the polls are at the moment, it is entirely possible (not likely, but very possible, say a one in four chance) that the Liberal Democrats will get the most votes, the Conservatives second and Labour third, but that Labour will get the most MPs, with the Conservatives second and the Liberal Democrats third.
Many political parties (most of the smaller ones, and the Liberal Democrats) want to change the system to make it fairer. People have suggested many different ways of making the voting system fairer, and these are all collectively known as ‘proportional representation’ systems. However, there are big differences between them. The system we use for European elections, the d’Hondt system, is horrible, as I explained here, and is why the Bastard Nazi Party got seats in the European Parliament.
The system the Liberal Democrats want is called Single Transferable Vote (STV), and I talked a little bit about it here. It is both simple and fair. (Fixed – Tez Burke corrected my stupid error here).
When politicians talk about ‘proportional representation’ leading to corruption or to Nazis getting in, they are usually talking about systems like d’Hondt, not systems like STV, and lots of them are deliberately confusing the two – or outright lying – because they benefit from the current system. STV is fair to everyone. You may prefer the current system after they’ve both been described, but please do so for the right reasons, not because of lies people have told about ‘proportional representation’ as a whole.
I hope this helps – any questions?
(ETA, have corrected a misstatement of fact after Tez Burke and Andrew Ducker called me on it in the comments.)
Quick Statement Of Intent For Next Fortnight
I have been very consciously trying to balance the content of this blog recently, because I know I have readers who come here for a variety of different things – some of you like Doctor Who, others my music posts, others the comic posts, others my views on politics or science, and so on.
But with what may be the most important general election of my lifetime going on, it’s hard to do that. And on Thursday I got an email from a comic blogger I respect (won’t say who, as it was a private email) saying (in part) ” fuck keeping the blog balanced or politics free – I want to know what you’re thinking about all this,… Your blog will still be a great music/comics/who blog once the election dust has settled – in the meantime, why not kick up a storm with the politics side of it, because I for one would love to hear what you’re thinking.”
And a couple of other comics bloggers since then have echoed that so, with apologies to everyone who isn’t interested, this is going to be a politics-dominated blog until at least May 7th. (Though there will still be posts on whatever comes into my head).
To begin with, today and tomorrow I’m going to do two “Beginners’ Guide To The Election” posts. These will partly be to explain our system to my foreign readers, but mostly to explain for British people. In the last *week* alone, I’ve had to explain our voting system three times – once to a couple of people at work, once to my sister, and (and this was the thing that made me decide to write these posts) on Thursday to the person sat in front of me at a gig. My sister and I were at Rufus Wainwright’s gig at the Apollo, and I was explaining the voting system to her, and the person in front of me turned round towards the end and asked me to repeat the explanation, as she’d never understood what a hung parliament was properly, and the asked many more *basic* questions.
None of these people were unintelligent, and none seemed particularly ill-informed by general standards, but they’d never been exposed to anything telling them the basic rules by which our ‘democracy’ works, and didn’t even know where to look.
So today I’m going to do A Beginners’ Guide To The Election Part 1 – Our Voting System, and tomorrow I’m going to do A Beginners’ Guide To The Election Part 2 – A Guide To The Parties. These will establish a common basis for discussions on this blog for a couple of weeks, but I hope they’ll be useful for anyone wondering “what *IS* First Past The Post?” or “What *do* Racist UKIP stand for?” Please feel free to link them to anyone you think might be intersted, and I’d be delighted if lurkers asked questions.
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