The Election
As the worm of politics has been introduced, I’d like to record my thoughts and feelings, which have been crystallised by reading “So Who Do We Vote For Now?”, an excellent account of the current situation by John Harris, published by Faber at £7.99 - read it before you make the cross on that ballot paper!
To cut to the chase, he concludes that tactical voting on a constituency by constituency basis is the only answer to our current situation. His premise is that the worst result possible is a Tory victory; his spur for writing the book is the appalling record of Blair’s Government in three significant areas, and the need to administer a kicking to New Labour in order to reinforce the traditional centre left party that we’ve all supported and to which we’ve (often) belonged, those issues being: Iraq and the peculiar relationship between Bush and Blair; creeping privatisation (PFI, outsourcing of chunks of the NHS and State Education); and Tuition Fees and the acceptance of the meritocracy as the model for society.
He interviews many of the major figures who will be involved in the election outside of the Tory Party and New Labour, including Lib Dems, Trades Unionists, Greens. Scots and Welsh Nationalists, Roy Hattersley and even Gorgeous George Galloway.
As an appendix to the book he publishes a list of Labour MPs’ voting records on his three key issues: the invasion of Iraq, Foundation Hospitals, and Tuition Fees. (I was really pleased to see that Ian Gibson voted against the government on all three; unsurprisingly Charles Clarke was for them).
George Galloway (and I was surprised by his eloquence) sums up the reasons for giving New Labour a kicking quite succinctly: “To allow ...(these issues).... to go unpunished would be merely to encourage more blunders. If people on the centre-left continue to vote for the New Labour project, however right-wing it becomes, why should it stop becoming right wing? If it’s guaranteed the votes of centre-left people because they don’t want Michael Howard in, why should it stop where it’s stopped? Why shouldn’t it march endlessly into wars and more and more privatisation? Unless centre-left people make a stand, there will be no centre-left.”
The conclusion the book arrives at is that you should vote on the record of your sitting (Labour) MP, bearing in mind that we don’t want a Tory government. Plaid Cymru and the ScotNats are real and worthwhile alternatives in those countries, but unlikely to make much impact. In constituencies where Labour has a huge majority vote tactically to reduce that majority. If the SDP candidate has a chance of displacing Labour as the runner up in a seat like ours, vote SDP.
What seems to me clear is that I should not vote Labour in our safe Tory seat; the only outcome of doing so is to add my admittedly puny endorsement to the illegal war in Iraq; to support creeping privatisation of public services and the setting up of creationist Academies by loony fundamentalists to replace perfectly decent state schools; and to endorse the imposition of tuition fees by a Government which promised just four years ago not to introduce them.
This is not an easy decision for me; I’ve never not voted Labour. And there’s a tendency to “never lose the hand of nurse, for fear of finding something worse”. But I was at the anti-war march in 2003; I saw the whole of the centre of London brought to a standstill by nearer 2 than 1 million people, the largest political protest ever in this country - around 3% of the entire population of the UK; and I heard Blair, at his most nauseously messianic worst, say on TV after the event “I respect their opinion, but they should respect mine.” And we went to war. I can’t forgive that. Nor can I “draw a line under it”.
If, as is obvious, all political parties’ manifestos are largely propaganda, if manifesto promises can be reneged on so easily (tuition fees again), then we must vote on the record of the government, and on what the other parties said in that parliament. So I want a return of traditional Labour values, and I don’t think that we will achieve that by returning a New Labour government with the same size majority. Many Labour people want a small majority or even a hung parliament, and Blair to be forced to go this year. I’m with them. The second worst possible result is perhaps the most likely one: fewer than 50% of the population bothering to vote, and Blair returned with a majority of more than 100 (which he would regard as a ringing vindication of all his actions). But I live in hope.
Sorry to be so serious (and so prolix), but I think these are serious times. Traditional loyalties may get us into worse trouble.
posted by John McCartney @ 10:27 am
4 Comments:
I was thinking about how our next generation will vote. Ed has an easy choice - the Greens have a really good chance in Brighton Pavilion, but James will have to decide between a sitting Labour candidate with a small majority and the Tory getting in. I guess he'll stick with Labour if he votes; I'm sure Ed will vote if he remembers and gets home in time!
Wow - didn't even know you read this, Ed! Sorry I was cheeky. You're right, of course, but the people who will try to prevent electronic participatory democracy - a referendum on every major issue - are those who have a vested interest in the system as it is; that's to say all current political parties and politicians standing for election and hoping for a slice of the pie and a nose in the trough, and all those who support them and (often) pull the strings - what is often called the military-industrial complex I suppose. But who am I to tell you this?
I knew a bloke in Stevenage when I was first involved with CND and the Labour Party in the 1960s who used to write on every ballot paper "Workers of the World unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains". More effective than what he wrote (since no-one at the count gives a toss and they just get counted and binned) were his efforts to get everyone else to do the same. A really big heap of spoilt papers in any one constituency would be reported on, though you might have to alert the press to what had happened. So here's to the memory of Irish Sam from Stevenage - and I won't presume to second guess you again, Ed!
I too have had to search my heart before this election as to the best course of action - I know I come across as a bit 'my party right or wrong' sometimes. But this is because, while I take the points about responsiveness and the provisionality of decision making now in the age of rolling television,the long view says to me that Labour is so much important than Blair. The Labour vote has been such a fragile constuction for too much of my life to turn my back on it now.
The amazing thing is that we're all agonising, we're all at least partially right, and I'm not sure anyone has finally made their mind up yet. Bet the diehard Tories aren't agonising! "Don't like Howard, talks like a foreigner, not really sound, no bottom, rubbish as a leader, not prepared to do down the great unwashed, won't do much for the country. Yes, of course I'm going to vote for him."
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