05.05.10
vote, for a change.
Tomorrow, May 6th, is election day. Finally, the debates, the arguments, the manifestoes, the smears, the Twitter backlash, the floods of Facebook links, the increasingly desperate tabloid front pages; they all collapse from uneasily co-existing probabilities into concrete certainty, as the ballot boxes are opened and the votes are counted.
You should vote. No, more than that. If you give a damn in the slightest about your country and how it is run, about the huge issues which touch on your life and the lives of everyone around you; if you want to have the right to ever open your mouth again in a discussion about politics, or government, or society; then you must vote.
Why? Because tomorrow is the single most important election that has happened during my lifetime. I was born in 1981, which makes me terribly old to some of you and laughably young to others, but also means that by the time I was born, Thatcher was firmly established. The Conservatives would rule Britain until I was 16 years old, to be followed by a landslide victory for the Labour party, giving them rule lasting until now – when they look likely to be kicked out of power, and I stand uncomfortably close to my 30th birthday.
Not a single one of the elections that happened in the meantime – 1983, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2001, 2005 – actually mattered a damn. In 1997, the tired, worn-out Conservatives, hated and reviled after too long in power, passed a landslide majority to Tony Blair’s New Labour; what seemed like a victory, back then, looks in retrospect like a torch simply being passed from hand to hand.
Labour and the Tories are not the same, of course, but from the perspective of the public, they share one thing in common, one thread which runs through the entirety of British politics from before my birth to the election which looms tomorrow.
At no point in the entire almost-30 year span of my life has a majority of the British voting public actually wanted the party in charge.
Not in one single election did any one of those Prime Ministers – not even Thatcher or Blair – command more than 50% of the vote. Thatcher’s “landslide” in 1983, which gave her a gigantic majority and gave the Conservatives the inertia to command the country for the following decade and a half, came off the back of 42.44% of the vote. Blair’s huge win in 1997, which gave him an even bigger majority in Parliament than Thatcher had enjoyed, came with just 43.21% of the popular vote.
Consider that next time you see anyone making a wisecrack about the American voting system which allowed Bush to win the presidency without winning the popular vote. No British government in my lifetime has ever won a genuine majority of the popular vote.
So why is tomorrow’s election different – or at least, potentially different? Because simple mathematics shows that there’s a chance – not a guarantee, but a chance – that for the first time in decades, the election isn’t going to give an overall majority to any party.
That’s something which the British system is designed to prevent. Our system is one designed by men who believed that “strong” government was more important that democracy. It is designed to give the main two parties the lion’s share of the seats, totally out of proportion with the actual votes which are cast for them, in the hope that one of them will get a strong majority, allowing the Prime Minister to essentially do whatever the hell they want for the next few years without the other parties being able to do a damned thing to stop them.
In its pursuit of strong governments, the system crushes us, the voting public, underfoot. A huge number of us – a majority, in fact – live in safe seats, where our votes count for almost nothing. Even in the precious “marginal” seats, like the parties themselves, MPs are often elected without a majority of people actually voting for them. MPs routinely sit in Parliament having been voted for by as few as 30% of the people who turned up to the polling booth – in some cases, even less than that.
And the other 70% of the electorate, who didn’t vote for this person now representing them? Under the British system, to hell with them. Having failed to back the winning horse, they’re now “represented” by a person who doesn’t share their views or beliefs, and is therefore about as capable of representing them on the national stage as Stephen Hawking is of performing Swan Lake. Those 70% might actively despise the person now sitting in Parliament under their name, but because their votes were split between a few other candidates, this hated fellow, like a cuckoo invading a nest, ends up walking away with everything.
Once you zoom out a little and look at a wider regional or national scale, the picture is even more sickening. Successive governments have been accused, fairly convincingly, of a practice known as “gerrymandering” – fiddling with constituency boundaries to take advantage of our dishonest voting system. Under the Conservatives, areas with large Labour voting populations would be divided in half, with some voters in one constituency and their neighbours in another; thus, a region with 30,000 Conservative voters and 25,000 Labour voters could be fiddled with to return two Conservative MPs rather than one for each party. Labour, of course, did its own fiddling in turn.
Net result? With 42.44% of the vote in 1983, Thatcher got 61.08% of the seats. In 1997, Blair pulled the same rabbit out of a differently coloured hat, taking only 43.21% of the vote and yet grabbing 63.43% of the seats. Things get even more ridiculous in 2005, the last election with Blair in the hot seat. With Labour’s ratings falling apart after the Iraq War, they polled only 36.91 % of the vote, yet marched back into power with 55.11% of the seats.
And that, perversely, is why your vote is vitally important tomorrow. Because tomorrow, the maths says that this might not happen – for the first time in a generation, we might be able to hang parliament.
In a hung parliament, there’s a good chance that the Liberal Democrats will hold the balance of power. I like the Lib Dems, personally – enough that they’re the only political party I have ever joined – but I don’t expect you to. Not all of their policies appeal to me, and while I think that on balance their hearts are in the right place, I don’t necessarily expect you to believe that, and convincing you of it would be a job for a conversation over a pint, not a blog post.
What’s more important, however, is that the Lib Dems have one key objective which I suspect would be top of their agenda if they held the balance of power – and that’s replacing the broken, horrible electoral system which I just described. They want to introduce something called Single Transferable Vote instead, which is a system used successfully in many countries around the world.
How it works is simple enough. Instead of one MP representing one constituency, you merge a few existing constituencies together, and have them represented by two or three MPs. Now, when voters go into the polling station, they don’t just put an X next to the name of their preferred candidate – they write numbers next to them, starting with 1 for the candidate they want most, then 2 for their next choice, and so on.
When the votes are being counted, they count all the number 1s first. If no candidate reaches the threshold for being elected, called the “quota” (this exact number depends on how many people voted and how many seats there are), then the candidates with the smallest number of votes, who have no hope of winning, are eliminated. Votes for those candidates are re-counted – but this time, it’s their No.2 votes that are counted, and added to the No.1 votes from the first round. If all the seats still aren’t filled, more of the low-scoring candidates are eliminated, and more votes are distributed around.
The net result? A few good things happen. Firstly, the MPs your district elects are a much closer approximation of how people actually voted in your region. It’s not perfect, but it’s much closer than it is today. Secondly, people who want to support smaller parties or independent candidates can do so without wasting their votes. Today, many people are forced to vote tactically – supporting a party they don’t really like simply in order to keep out one that they detest. With STV (the common abbreviation for this system), you can vote for the party you actually want, and then use your second or third preference to indicate that if you can’t have your first choice, you’d prefer the lesser of the other evils on offer.
Thirdly, and this is a big one – you get to vote for people, not parties. If you’re in a three-seat constituency, your local Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem parties will have to put up three candidates to stand a chance of winning across the board. Maybe you’re a life-long Conservative voter, but you don’t like one of the local candidates – he supports policies you disapprove of, or he was caught out being dishonest with his expenses, say. Today, you have a stark choice – vote for a man you don’t trust, abandon the party you want to support, or don’t vote at all. Under STV, however, you can vote for whichever Conservative candidates you want, in the order you want; you might even choose to vote for the one you don’t like, but as a third preference, essentially saying “I’ll take this guy if he’s all that’s on offer, but I’d far prefer one of the others.”
That’s a pretty nuanced thing to be able to say on a ballot sheet. Beats the hell out of simply putting an X next to the least worst option.
So why don’t we do this already? There are a few answers, none of them very good. Naturally, this system doesn’t really favour the existing big parties. No longer would they be able to control over 60% of the seats with under 50% of the vote. Smaller parties would get a much more fair allocation of seats, and the big parties would start having to work with one another and with the new small parties in order to create consensus and pass laws.
That’s terrifying to the kind of people who think strong government is more important that democracy, and music to the ears of everyone else. The past 30 years, if anything, are a stark warning of the dangers of “strong government”. Our Prime Ministers have become more powerful than Presidents, with few controls over their power and only a rigged, dishonest election every four or five years to reign them in. If they had to work with their parliamentary colleagues to reach consensus for the stuff they wanted to do, it would balance their power to some extent. Such a parliament would probably never have brought us to war in Iraq, for starters; indeed, most of the excesses of over-powerful leaders in the past 30 years could have been reined in.
Ah, say the Conservatives, but hung parliaments and weak governments result in economic downfall! Bloody nonsense. Of the 16 world economies presently rated AAA by the credit market rating agencies – the best arbiter we presently have of how stable and secure a nation’s economy is – 10 of them have coalition governments (which is what generally comes about after a hung parliament), and 12 of them use the STV system I just described.
A more pressing concern which is raised about STV is that it lets smaller parties into Parliament. Great when we’re talking about the Greens, some say, but what about the BNP? Won’t it give them seats too?
To which I say – yes, it might. I’m not convinced that it would, because BNP support in national elections is actually pretty low, and STV would give regions that have been filled with safe seats and thus stolen the people’s voices from them more flexible representation, so they’d probably be less likely to file a protest vote for the BNP. On the other hand, some people are just, well, racists. They’ll still vote for the BNP, and they might even elect a BNP MP.
Would that be the end of the world? No. We’ve had scum in Parliament before and we’ll have scum in Parliament in the future. More importantly, we’ve seen first-hand what happens when the BNP actually get elected. They stop being the outsiders, the rebels, the voices in the wilderness whom the establishment is trying to silence. They become part of the establishment, and suddenly people expect them to do something more than rant and rave about foreigners – they expect them to govern, to lead, to work for their constituencies and do things like filling potholes, interceding in planning permission requests, helping to attract business to the area, and so on.
None of those things are easily done with racist rhetoric – so in places where the BNP has won council seats, they’ve usually quickly turned out to be an utter shambles, and lost local support. In London, the BNP has a seat on the city’s Assembly since the last election; their man there, Richard Barnbrook, is a laughing stock. He’s not a Nazi stormtrooper terror, he’s a fat man in a cheap suit who’s never been good at anything in his life and thinks it’s the fault of Blacks, Jews, Gays and anyone else Different. Unsurprisingly, he’s an unmitigated disaster in the Assembly – laughed at, pilloried and mocked on a week by week basis, he’s no longer the daring underdog, and as such it’ll be a wonder if he manages to hold the seat at the next election. The BNP getting into Parliament wouldn’t be the end of the country, but it might be the end of the BNP.
I guess the logical point to end on is the question of what you should do now. There’s just one answer – vote. Vote for a hung parliament. Vote for this being the last time that you ever have to vote using this stupid, dishonest voting system; the last time that we return a parliament that simply doesn’t reflect what people actually voted for, the last time that dishonest MPs with friends in high places have been able to get shuffled into safe seats to avoid facing the wrath of the electorate, the last time that a Prime Minister without the support of the country has been able to bring us into a war we don’t want.
If you want to know the best way to vote in order to ensure a hung parliament which has a good chance of fixing the electoral system, get yourself along to Vote for a Change, a largely non-partisan website which takes your postcode, looks at the state of your constituency and figures out how best for you to vote. It’s not aiming to get any one party into power – it’ll recommend any of the major parties, as long as that vote will push things towards hung parliament.
It may, however, tell you that you live in a safe seat, and to vote with your conscience. In that case, I would implore you to vote Lib Dem – for one reason, and one reason alone. Your vote won’t change who gets elected in your seat; it’ll still be the incumbent party in power in your region on Friday morning. However, it will nudge the Lib Dems’ national percentage up – and when push comes to shove on electoral reform, the bigger the percentage the LDs have, the more muscle they’ll have for the argument that the British people deserve better representation and a fairer system. If, on Friday morning, we can point mutely at a LD vote share of almost 30%, but less than 15% of the seats in Parliament, then the unfairness will be even more plain for people to see – and for once, your vote might not be a wasted effort, even in safe seats.
But whatever you do – whether you follow this advice or not, or agree with me on STV or not – please, please vote. We may be waiting another thirty years for a chance to really shake up the government of this nation, and if it’s anything like the last 30, it’ll be a very painful wait indeed.
