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I have designed my own website for tactical voting. It is the only way to punish the Tories
Published 23 April 2001
The postponement of the local elections had allowed me to put off deciding how to vote in the coming general election, but a visit from a neighbour set alarm bells ringing. She knew my politics, she said, but she was wondering whether I would be prepared to go out canvassing for the Liberal Democrats. I gripped my tea mug and stared pensively out into the rain. Since moving down from London 15 months ago, I have contemplated long and hard how best to use my vote. Dorset West has long been Conservative, with Labour coming a distant third behind the Lib Dems. A Labour vote here would be wasted, particularly because the Lib Dems were within 2,000 votes of winning in 1997. Voting Liberal Democrat became even more attractive once I realised that the sitting MP was Oliver Letwin, the ardent Eurosceptic and rising Tory star. He was campaign manager to John Redwood during his leadership challenge and is credited with inventing the poll tax. It was Letwin's promotion to the opposition front bench last year that finally tipped the scales in favour of tactical voting.
Being a troubled Labour voter like myself, my neighbour had decided to take the plunge and do everything she could to rid us of the Tories. But tactically voting Liberal Democrat is very different from knocking on doors on behalf of Charles Kennedy. If only I lived a dozen or so miles to the east, in the constituency of Dorset South! There, Labour needs only a tiny swing to oust the Tories. There, it is the Lib Dems who come a distant third. Then it hit me: what if I could find a like-minded Liberal Democrat in Dorset South who was willing to vote Labour in exchange for my vote going to the Lib Dems? Together we could send a message to William Hague about the xenophobic direction in which he is leading his party. But how to find such a person? I contemplated walking along the front at Weymouth, wearing my appeal on a sandwich board; or perhaps placing a cryptic ad in the Lonely Hearts column of the Dorset Echo.
Speaking of walking along the front: it doesn't look like the foot-and-mouth horror stories have put off too many people coming to the countryside. The beach is thronging with people taking in the sea air, flying kites in the breeze and playing football in the car park. Doesn't all that noise disturb you, ask some of the more sensitive locals. Frankly, it's no worse than growing up next door to Barking Park. Our garden backed on to the boating lake, so the sound of people enjoying themselves is for me an integral part of summer.
The British-based site www.tacticalvoter. net is currently mounting a nationwide campaign to bring together tactical Labour and Lib Dem voters and pair them off in order to maximise the anti-Tory vote. Just 20 minutes spent searching the site confirms that, outside of Bournemouth, there are no really safe Tory seats in Dorset. The good people at www.tacticalvoter.net will have their hands full matching voters from all over the country. What was called for here was a more focused campaign.
Friday morning found me sitting in a cafe in Bridport with a couple of young net-heads I have never met before, but who have been recommended as having experience in website design. After outlining the politics involved, I explain to them what I want: a simple, single-page website that automatically pairs Labour voters with Lib Dems and vice versa, and is designed in such a way that the format is easily available for adaptation by like-minded activists around the country. On Saturday, I rented some web space and registered the name www.votedorset.net. After my brother and his wife and their kids had left on Monday evening, I tried to contact my pair of boffins, but they had gone to a party. That seemed like a good sign. On Tuesday evening, we finally got together to put the site online. They have come up with a wizard method, whereby all that happens is when you submit your details you automatically receive the e-mail address of a mirror: a voter in the other constituency who is interested in reciprocating your vote for his or her party with a vote for the party of your choice. We celebrate with slices of pizza and pissy American beer.
What will the local Liberal Democrat and Labour Party machines think of this initiative? I don't know. Does any of this matter if Labour is going to win anyway? I believe it does. After the election, the Tories will regard the number of seats they have gained as a measure of how well their Little Englander rhetoric has gone down in the country. Tactical voting will punish the Tories for their lurch to the right.
My invite arrives for the last night of Henry V at the Barbican. Last year, the Royal Shakespeare Company asked me to write some songs for the soldiers to sing as they marched towards Agincourt. It was during this campaign that the English army wore the Cross of St George for the first time and, writing the songs in the weeks after Euro 2000, it seemed appropriate to draw parallels between Shakespeare's carousing characters and the football hooligans who ran riot in Belgium.
On Sunday, I will be taking part in a debate that the RSC is hosting at the Barbican to address issues raised by the company's "This England" series of history plays. But does Shakespeare even belong solely to the English any more?
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