“It’s not me, it’s you” is a faintly caddish way to approach a breakup.
The Labour Party is, it appears, still perfectly capable of twirling its moustaches.
Concerned about low turn-out at election, it has decided the fault lies with the electorate. The plebs aren’t doing their duty and trooping off to the polling booth, making even politicians (not renowned for their self-reflection) think unpleasant thoughts about their own legitimacy.
We can’t be having that so the government is, it is reported, “considering” (the government is doing a lot of “considering” at the moment, some “mulling” too, and a bit of “pondering”) making voting compulsory. Properly compulsory. Those who do not partake in our periodic performance of democracy will be fined.
This may be new in our politics, but it is not unique. Australia is the case most commonly cited and it does seem to work. Turn-out is generally about 90%. How much of this is explained by the law and how much by the free sausages at the election barbecues which are a cultural staple is, however, unknown.
My own relationship with voting is simple. I generally don’t. I have voted in two of the General Elections at which I have been eligible – 1997 to tick the box of having ticked the box, and 2019 to “Get Brexit Done”. On other occasions, I have been out of the country on the day, or I have just not deemed it worth my time.
The last election, however, was a bit different.
Looking at the plans the parties put forward, none of them, in their economic policies, struck me as remotely plausible. They weren’t equally bad, but, being informal, they ranged from the fantastical to the borderline delusional. And I wasn’t alone. The IFS reached similar conclusions about the viability of the platforms outlined, but couched them in slightly more temperate language.
The late comedian Bill Oddie tweeted before the 2019 election, “Please vote for truth, honesty, compassion and other virtues. Please don’t vote for deception, corruption, dishonesty and arrogance.” Oddie was, I think, a bit of a bearded Leftie, so he and I would probably disagree about which party best fits his rule of thumb, but as a way of approaching the issue, it seems a reasonably good one.
Applying it to the last election, however, gave me a bit of a problem. If I didn’t believe any of the manifestoes were reality-based, I could hardly pop off to the polling booth and vote for truth. Those who were standing on those manifestoes either shared my analysis or they did not. If they did, it didn’t say much for their honesty, if they didn’t, their belief that the laws of economics would not apply to them spoke to a certain arrogance.
Applying the Oddie Filter led me to conclude that the best move was not to play.
People have, as always gets trotted out at this stage of the discussion, died for my right to vote. People have also died for the right to keep slaves, turn Greece into a colony of Persia and, currently, to make Ukraine part of greater Russia. Failing to “honour their sacrifice” is not, I think, a moral failing.
In fact, to my way of thinking, voting at the last election would have been a moral failing. I would be casting a ballot for something I believed to be untrue, thereby making myself complicit. If legitimacy depends, at least in part, on realism, voting for a fantasy would dip my hands in the blood.
Perhaps in deference to this, the government is talking about introducing a “None of the Above” option. A few countries already have these but they are almost always symbolic. If “NOTA” wins, the candidate who comes second is generally given the victory; the process isn’t re-run to reflect the outcome. Whether a system in which the loser wins is more democratic or less, I leave to you.
Still, at least I have a way of expressing my preference.
Well, of course, I already have that. I can do what I did and refuse to participate. And this creates an asymmetry.
If you wish to vote for Reform, you have to go to the polling station (or fill in a postal vote). You are accepting a burden, because there is a chance of getting a result you want. Under the proposed law, I would be forced to bear the same burden to bring about a result I don’t want. That is not the sort of investment proposition many people would deem attractive.
It may be this that means the policy, if it moves on to the statute book, doesn’t have the desired result. The proposed fine is £10. You don’t have to be billing City lawyer rates before the value of the time it would take you to go to and from the polling station is less than the cost of the fine in which case the rational response is just to suck it up and write them a cheque.
Not everyone will, of course, see it this way. Some people will grumble and troop off to the polling station. And some of them will probably, once they are there, decide to take the whole process seriously and actually vote for a candidate. There is quite a lot of evidence that people will often just plump for the first name they see. It would be darkly humorous if, in this day of narrow margin five party politics, the main outcome of the proposed policy was a permanent electoral majority for the party with most candidates whose surnames start with the letter “A”.
There is, of course, a simpler way of solving the turn-out problem. Give the electorate something to vote for. Something realistic. Something with a fair shot at actually coming to pass.
But that would require politicians to accept that the problem is them, not us.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
(UKR)