I had already moved to Boston by the time of the 1997 election. Of course the election didn't warrant any significant coverage by the main US TV channels, but I did manage to watch the BBC election night coverage that was being rebroadcast by the C-SPAN cable channel (the US equivalent of BBC Parliament). Since I was determined not to allow cable TV into my apartment (how could a simple British mind raised on three and then four channels possibly cope with more than a hundred?), I was using my laptop to view the C-SPAN feed over internet. Being 1997, the height of technology I had access to was a dodgy 56k dial-up connection and an early version of RealPlayer. Hence I saw one of the defining moments of that election - the newly elected Stephen Twigg MP attempting to stiffle a broad grin as Michael Portillo's suprise defeat was declared - in a postage stamp-sized window containing a highly pixellated image that could just about to be made out if I squinted appropriately. I was so excited by the prospect of significant political change in my home country, that I was prepared to put up with this inconvenience for over five hours.
Now eight years later, and with the opportunity to vote on UK soil for the first time since 1992, why am I less enthused by the prospect than I ought to be? It's taken me most of the campaign to figure it out, but here's my take.
(1) The electoral system
As everyone knows, the election really comes down to a few hundred marginal constituencies. And within those, the high-tech electoral databases used by the major parties are able to identify the likely swing voters, be they 'hard-working families' (the image this phrase conjures up for me is of parents toiling in the fields, grandparents sweating in the cotton mills, the teenager daughter a servant for the local lord, the seven year-old stuck up a chimney and the three year-old working 16-hour days for an internet startup), or like me, work-shy single gay men. All the policies, all the rhetoric, all the spin is aimed at changing the minds of this incredibly small minority, the votes of whom effect a disproportionate influence on the outcome of the election. Evidence of this in my safe Labour constituency: during the entire campaign, I've seen only seven posters for the Labour candidate, one for Conservative and no others.
This, of course, is the consequence of the first-past-the-post electoral system and it's becoming increasingly ludicrous. For example, for the Conservatives to simply get more MPs than Labour, they need to be about 7 percentage points ahead in the national share of the vote; for them to have a majority, they need to about 10 percentage points ahead. Meanwhile, Labour can still be 1 or 2 points behind the Conservatives in the national share and retain an overall majority. (Play with the
BBC's seat calculator to see the effect.) Of course, this doesn't even start to cover the inequities suffered by the Liberal Democrates. They wouldn't even be the largest party if they should poll 40%, and on a more likely share will still be incredibly under-represented by MPs. Finally, minor parties like the Greens need a miracle (such as they're hoping for in Brighton and Hove) even to get a single MP.
I've always been in favour of proportional representation, but seeing how it effectively disenfranchises any voter in safe seats, and any voter in any seat who supports a minor (or even 'third') party, I think it's a major cause of why so many people feel disconnected from the political process.
In my fantasy electoral system, there would be proportional representation (almost any system), but there wouldn't be national general elections: instead every six months (on a fixed date, not chosen by the government), a tenth of the seats (spread evenly around the country) would come up for election. This would avoid the concentration of political process and accountability around the time of a general election, and minimize the opportunity for pre-election 'feel-good' budgets and other policies. The ballot would still be secret and secure, but simple to access: voters could chose to go to a polling station, send in a postal vote, use the internet, send an SMS (and perhaps even press the red button).
They'd also be Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and English parliaments, all with equivalent and real powers (similar to the Scottish Parliament today) that would handle defined policy areas, such as education, health etc., devolved from the national parliament. And the seat of that national parliament would no longer be Westminster, but somewhere well away from the South East: perhaps Glasgow, Newcastle or Swansea.
(2) The end of ideology
It's perhaps a measure of the impact of New Labour on political thought in this country that there's been a return to 'concensus' politics much as the parties would probably deny it. There's an amazingly broad agreement on a range of policies, and it's just the details - whether or not to increase public spending by a further £35 billion in six years time, what formula will be used to calculate the the council tax discount for pensioners - that are the battleground for the election. As John Cole suggested on Radio 4 this morning, we're really being asked to choose just a style of management.
Part of this is surely down to the focus on the swing voters in marginal constituencies. As one psephological pundit pointed out yesterday on BBC News 24, these swing voters that the parties are targeting are by their very nature unlikely to identify with any of the ideologies represented by the parties. So the parties don't promote their ideologies, they just entice these voters with easily-stated headlining policies that are at best short-term.
For me, however, it's the ideology that matters. Realistically I won't get an opportunity to change the government for another four or five years, so I want to be comfortable that a party's ideology will guide them to make appropriate decisions in three years time on topics and issues that we haven't necessarily even thought of yet. It matters less to me what they will do in the next six months to control MRSA in hospitals or whether they are willing to give a 'promise' not to increase taxes.
I don't think any of the parties have clearly articulated their ideologies. I suspect they either don't have a coherent one, or, if they do, are ashamed of it. But without a clear, meaningful and distinctive statement of what a party stands for, how can they expect anybody to get excited about voting for them?
So that's it: a voting system where my vote (in a non-marginal seat) won't really make a difference, and a political system where no party has excited me with its vision for the future. However, I am still going to vote tomorrow: there are few things that anger me more than someone saying that they're not going to vote because "politicians are all as bad as one another". What's different for me this time is that I genuinely don't know how I'm going to vote. A surprise outcome for me on the
Who Should You Vote For? website, which
Chig kindly brought to my attention, has made me reconsider some of the assumptions I've had for many years.
And at the risk of sounding a boring, retentive idealist with nothing better to do (all accurate), I may even find time before Desperate Housewives to skim the manifestos before I finally make up my mind.
