East Worthing and Shoreham Labour Party

It’s your Decision: Vote Liberal and Lose Electoral Reform…the Law of Unintended Consequences

It is, as we are constantly reminded, our decision. Vote with your conscience. We should vote for what we believe in. Or should we? Isn’t it right, sometimes, to try to prevent a greater evil by voting for the candidate we think might have a better chance of winning? Yes, but the problem is that we have no mechanism for tactical voting. This is the great fallacy in the call for tactical voting. Our system does not allow for a tactical vote to be taken into account.

Take our constituency of East Worthing and Shoreham. To unseat the conservative MP, over 70% of the entire Labour or Liberal vote would have to be swapped. This is not ever going to happen. Frustrating for many, many people.

A salutary story played out gruesomely in the American state of Oregon where self-indulgent ‘left’ voters went for Ralph Nader, blind to the consequences. They split Al Gore’s vote, and let in George Bush. Those voters voted with their ‘hearts’, but not with their ‘heads’.

In the French Presidential Election, angry ‘left’ voters split the Left’s vote with their ‘heart-felt’ choices, eliminated Jospin, the Socialist candidate and front-runner, and sent the far-right National Front Candidate Le Pen into the final round. The shock was extreme. In the next round, almost the entire electorate of the Left voted for Chirac, the candidate of the Right. They voted with their heads.

The French system is played out over two rounds when no candidate has more than 50%. You can vote with your heart and your head; out of conviction, and in your best interest. In the British system, there is no mechanism to reward or recognise tactical voting.

All the analysis shows tactical voting to have had no significant effect in the British system.

In the British system of First-Past-the-Post, the winners take all. But do they? Not really. The proportion of the vote that a Party gets is also a measure of its moral authority. Their historically low proportion of the popular vote has undermined both Labour and the Conservatives. The Liberals are underpinned and legitimized by their share, which is far greater than the number of seats they won.

In this period of disaffection with the political process, ignorance of its workings, distrust of its representatives, we now have the best chance in our lifetimes to change and modernise the electoral system, at last to give the millions who have been effectively disenfranchised by the system the right to vote with their conscience, to vote with their heads, and to see their choices fairly represented.

The Liberals can’t, the Tories won’t, only Labour has the courage and the means to bring about Electoral Reform and renewal of our Democracy.

(See also, Tony Blair’s demolition job on the Liberals: ’General election 2010: Tony Blair says don’t vote tactically’