The drums are calling the anti-Tory tribe to unite around the campfire and prepare to rout the eternal enemy. Their rhythm is compelling. I can feel it in my blood. The great cause of the moment – of the age, according to some – is destructive: the annihilation of the Conservative Party. Petty squabbles must be forgotten. The Tories must be beaten in every election by any means necessary. Nothing else matters.
So widespread is the emotion that “tactical voting” – going with your fears, not your hopes – has become a synonym for voting against the Conservatives. If a friend tells you she is going to vote “tactically”, you assume she means voting for the candidate most likely to beat the Conservatives. You may well applaud her: such statements are designed to draw applause for the speaker’s sophistication. But if you are serious, rather than the political equivalent of a Millwall fan, you shouldn’t be opposed to that section of the political class which has had the label “Conservative” sewn into its suits. You should be opposed to conservatism and be troubled by the following awkward facts.
At the end of its first term, new Labour is pushing privatisation into the National Health Service, state schools and the London Underground – which even Margaret Thatcher at her most imperial dared not touch. Despite having the enormous good fortune to rule at a time of peace and plenty, Tony Blair has presided over a widening of the gulf between rich and poor: according to researchers at the London School of Economics, wage inequality is greater today than at any time since the industrial revolution. Foreign policy has remained subservient to the interests of the United States. The most basic civil liberties – the right to protest without being classified as a terrorist, the right to trial by jury – have been, or are being, undermined. Blairism is Thatcherism with a simper on its face.
You may not care about the above. You may care greatly but say that, for all its faults, new Labour is undoubtedly “the lesser of two evils”; that devolution, third world debt relief, the minimum wage and the Human Rights Act are boons no Conservative government would have delivered.
I would rather have major surgery without an anaesthetic than a Tory government. But the lesser of two evils argument loses its force when, as an American wag put it during the Gore-Bush contest, “the difference between the lesser and the greater evil is getting lesser by the minute”. New Labour has triangulated with the Tories, the Tories have triangulated with new Labour. The Treasury forecasts that public spending will be £394bn in the current tax year if new Labour wins. The Tories propose a cut of 2 per cent – £8bn. The small difference would mean more if Treasury forecasts were not usually out by 2 or 3 per cent. When all the bombast of the election campaign is a sham argument within a mandarin’s margin of error, it is time to ask: what are we tactically voting for?
Tactical voting used to be justified as the revenge of the excluded on the stitch-ups of the first-past-the-post system. My youth was punctuated with wails from the righteous against the iniquity of the Conservatives winning huge majorities on a minority of the vote. The complaints and demands for proportional representation subsided when new Labour won an overall majority of 177 on 45 per cent of the vote in a 1997 election in which the turnout was so low that a mere one in three adults supported Tony Blair.
Huge majorities are obnoxious in practice as well as theory. They have allowed ministers to put saving face and bureaucratic convenience before cogent moral and intellectual objections to policy from the back benches. The most petty measures of this parliament – now, thankfully, staggering towards dissolution – would never have got through a representative Commons. The bigger the new Labour majority at the next election, the worse the next government will be.
Because a small majority or hung parliament will stop Blair doing so much damage, this would seem to be the time for someone who is concerned with social justice and is infuriated by the biases of the electoral system to organise a tactical voting campaign against new Labour.
Billy Bragg, the intermittently popular singer who unveiled his tactical-voting website in the NS diary last week, looks the man for the job. His work will be cut out because tactical voting is harder in the 21st century than it was in the 20th. The discerning voter has to vote against conservatism in both parties. Voting Tory is out of the question in most instances (although I hope that fair-minded readers in Aldridge-Brownhills would at least consider supporting the Conservative MP Richard Shepherd, who has done more to hold the executive to account than legions of new Labour backbenchers). There are also many MPs and ministers who are Labour, not new Labour, to be considered. They don’t deserve to be punished for the sins of others.
An obvious way to temper the arrogance of power is to return as many third-party candidates as possible from the Liberal Democrats and Scottish and Welsh nationalists. The Lib Dems do well on liberty and are slightly better than Labour and the Tories on equality. The old charge against them was their indifference to fraternity. They liked the working classes to remain humble and grateful for the charity of their betters and were appalled when the mob got ideas above its station and organised in trade unions.
The criticism has, to say the least, lost its force. After all we’ve been through, I don’t think that, say, a Blairite moderniser as fabulously hip as Lorna Fitzsimons will have the nerve to present herself as the champion of the organised proletariat in the Labour-Lib Dem marginal of Rochdale – although I may be underestimating her.
The left parties – the Greens and the Socialist Alliance – haven’t a hope of winning a seat, but, like Ralph Nader in the United States, present a more telling challenge to embittered Labour supporters. More than anyone else, they make you ask what you’re voting for.
The Socialist Alliance – a collection of Trots and refugees from new Labour which is standing in 100 seats – is far less of a fringe movement than it appears. The Alliance saved its deposit in the past five by-elections and has, as John Curtice of Strathclyde University noted, “easily the best record for the far left in postwar Britain”. It says much about new Labour’s achievements that it has persuaded some of the country’s best civil rights lawyers to join the Alliance’s ranks. In Hornsey and Wood Green, Louise Christian, who works for the most wretched asylum-seekers, is standing against Barbara Roche, the Home Office minister who has allowed the supermarkets to steal the change from the handful of vouchers she forces asylum-seekers to live on.
In Blackburn, Jim Nichol, the solicitor who worked for 15 years to clear the innocent men convicted of the Bridgewater murder, is standing against Jack Straw, whose record speaks for itself. You do not need to be a moral philosopher of genius to distinguish between the lesser and the greater evil in these instances.
Although it has tried to overcome the hopeless sectarianism of the British left, there is a residual pettiness about the Socialist Alliance. It has failed to form a pact with the Green Party – although red-green alliances are the best and only option for the left – and is running against perfectly decent Labour MPs such as Harry Cohen and Brian Sedgemore. But the real objection is the one which was spat at Ralph Nader last year. In many marginals, a Socialist Alliance/Green vote of 5 per cent or so will let the right in.
Nader’s reply works as well here as it did in America. “A funny thing is happening in the Democratic Party,” he said. “Every time they win, they say it’s because they took Republican issues away. And then when they lose, they say it’s because they are not appealing to the Republican voters. We want them to say they lost because a progressive movement took away votes.”
Like the Clinton Democrats, new Labour believes it can offend its supporters without fear of the consequences; its sole concern is being outflanked on the right. The party can whip through policies that the most cynical fantasist would have dismissed as inconceivable as late as 1997, because the left has “nowhere else to go”. It can justify any stratagem by saying that the Conservatives would be worse.
The lesser of two evils argument is perfectly sensible in many circumstances, but the longer it is deployed the more its basic immorality becomes apparent. “I may be evil, but I’m not quite as evil as the Tory” is not a campaign slogan that will sway voters who don’t want evil in any of its manifestations. If an abused woman threatened to leave a violent man, you would think her feeble if she were persuaded to stay by the protestation: “I know I can’t stop beating you up, but your last boyfriend tried to kill you.”
In the leaked memos from Downing Street last summer, you could see Blair frantic with worry about his failure to win over the Daily Mail. He ordered gestures on crime, asylum and the family to woo his coy love. At no point did he stop to fret that the stunts he demanded would be unacceptable to his supporters – their role was to accept batterings without complaint. Not a sentence of the supposedly populist politicians betrayed a desire to earn popularity by, for example, renationalising the railways.
This government does not shift to the right out of grubby electoral necessity, but out of conviction. Liz Davies put it well when she resigned from Labour’s NEC to join the Socialist Alliance: “My criticism of the new Labour government is not that it is going in the right direction too slowly, but in the wrong direction too quickly.”
A few years ago, I had an argument with one of Blair’s aides about that direction and the speed with which it was being taken. “The problem,” he said, “is all we feel is pressure from the right. There are no countervailing forces on the left.”
It strikes me as a reasonable tactic to balance the forces. Politicians are no different from the rest of us. They respond to pressure.
And if you don’t apply pressure in an election, you have no right to complain about four more years of being ignored.
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