Foot’s a bit better today,, but since this was the half written post I referred to, here’s the finished version. A bit shorter yet more meandering than intended, but here you go.
The first time I could vote in a general election… I didn’t.
Yeah, that feels weird writing that. Because there’s not been one general election since where I’ve not voted. Even when I’ve considered the candidates available to me from the ‘main’ parties to be disqualifyingly bad, I’ve still voted. Even when the candidates from the main parties have seemed to me a choice between shit, shite and shitty, I’ve still voted,
Occasionally, it’s been as a protest vote, to lend my vote to someone else almost as a ‘thank you for standing’. More often, recently, on such occasions, I’ve taken to giving my vote to someone specifically to try to assist in getting them ‘over the line’ so they at least retain their deposit.
(In the UK, it costs to run for election; you have to pay an amount of £500; if you get 5% of the vote, you get the deposit back. If not, it goes towards the costs of running the election.)
But no, I didn’t vote in that first general election, the one in 1983. The reason? I was at Manchester Polytechnic and I hadn’t bothered to register for inclusion on the electoral register where I lived. Nor had I applied for a postal nor proxy vote.
So, yeah, I could have jumped on a train to vote, but seeing as I was coming up to the end of my first year exams, and my brother was in hospital with a life threatening medical condition, and… and… and…
Look, to be honest, I couldn’t be bothered. I lived – in Manchester – in a ‘safe’ Labour constituency, so what was the point?
(I’m still not entirely convinced by all the arguments most people give for ‘the importance of voting’ when you live in a safe seat, but that’s a separate point.)
As it was, more than a few people seemed to agree with me in the 1983 election, since Labour got hammered in the election, which was exactly what was expected. That they got hammered quite so hugely wasn’t expected by everyone, but that they’d get hammered? Yeah.
In fact, it was the worst result for Labour until… well, until two years ago, in December 2019, when Labour got their worst result for 100 years or so. And the one election that Labour’s 2019 result got compared to again and again and again on election night? Yeah, 1983’s.
I currently live in the safe Labour seat of Westminster North. For anyone who’s followed me over the past few years either on here or on Twitter, however, it won’t come as a surprise that even had the seat been a ‘balanced on a knife edge’ marginal, I wouldn’t have voted Labour. Not for a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn.
I like my MP, on the whole. She seems nice, and she has views which would under normal circumstances make me pleased to vote for her.
But as I’d said publicly, I would not vote Labour under any circumstances, for any elected position, at all… while Jeremy Corbyn was leader. I left the party the day he was elected (after an admittedly short membership) and I can’t ever see myself joining Labour again. Ever.
Sidebar: Oh, and the ‘…but you vote for your local MP!’ argument doesn’t stand up for two reasons:
1) yeah, in theory you do… but in practice, no. Most people still vote for the candidate of their favourites, and research by Stephen Bush of the New Statesman suggested that in London, only 6% of voters votes for the candidate not the party.
2) the leader of the party with the most MPs gets to be Prime Minister, whether or not an individual MP is a supporter of the leader. I’m wasn’t, and am not, going to vote for a candidate that’ll make an antisemite… Prime Minister.
Simple as that.
Oh, and you’re responsible for your vote; you’re responsible for who you vote for. You’re not responsible for not voting for someone else.
But leaving all of that aside, something occurred last week that made me think about when it’s important to vote ‘the right way’, and when it really doesn’t matter.
For a start, all such judgements are subjective. Of course they are, how could they not be? People who vote in the Eurovision Song Contest do so because they… think it’s important. I may think such a vote is unimportant, just as I do all of the talent shows that infest our tv schedules.
But I wouldn’t tell them that their vote is unimportant. because to them…. it’s not.
Elections for representatives, however, are votes that I do consider important, even if roughly 40% of the electorate, going by turnover numbers at general elections, disagree with me.
I thought it was important to vote in the two national referendums we’ve had in the past decade: the one to decide the electoral voting system; I voted to change the voting system; the other side got more votes and won. And I voted to remain in the EU; the other side got more votes and won.
Yeah, I don’t have a great record.
But both of them were, to me, important votes and I cast them happily.
As I have every general election, and every by-election I could vote in, and every council election.
The 2016 by-election in Richmond Park constituency (where I then lived) was an election that was marginal. Lots of by-elections are – as they’re often taken by the electorate, and the media, as a popularity poll on the government of the day – but this one was especially so. I voted cheerfully. Who I voted for, however, that I voted reluctantly, one of the very few times I’ve voted against someone. I loathed how that made me feel.
But going back to last week. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY: D) voted against the infrastructure vote in congress.
One of her supporters explained her vote (She herself explained her vote here) by saying that she had problems with the measures, specially its decoupling from a larger reconciliation package, but stressing that AOC knew the measure would pass without her vote, so her vote was merely a protest vote… but that had her vote been needed, she’d have voted with it. (It’s notable that AOC did not say the latter part.)
There’s a danger with that attitude. And it’s sheer arrogance for anyone to not only hold it, but to say it. (Which is why I suspect AOC didn’t, and left it for her supporters to say it.)
That danger? Well, what if it hadn’t passed?
What’s that you say? Of course it was going to pass.
Well, ‘of course we were going to stay in the EU.‘ The Brexit vote was a 52% : 48% win for the ‘Leave’ side.
And what was noticeable afterwards (mainly I suspect because the news programmes actively searched for it) was the number of people who claimed ‘oh, I voted to leave because I wanted to express my anger and upset at the government… but I knew we’d remain, I knew my vote wasn’t needed.‘
It’s dangerous to assume that your vote isn’t going to be needed.
I’m not saying that every vote counts. How can it? In my own constituency, Labour won in 2019 by 10,759 votes.
So one could argue that 10.758 Labour votes didn’t ‘count’, or maybe that no one else’s (other than Labour’s) vote counted.
But certainly, without doubt, beyond peradventure, one vote, my vote, didn’t make the slightest difference to the result.
So, why did I vote? Because I’m old fashioned enough to think that the actual act of voting is what counts.
(If you’re interested in the usual ‘reasons for voting’, why they’re wrong and what what I think is the single biggest reason – in theory – for voting is, check here. The author said it better than I ever could.)
But I think the best reason for voting – whether or not you feel is counts – is that it makes you feel part of the process. And that’s never a bad idea.
Some time ago, I wrote a piece on voting before the 2015 general election.
I finished it with the following words;
So, vote. Vote because you think it’s important, not because anyone else tells you it’s important. Vote because you want to, or you need to, or just because you’ve nothing better to do.
But vote.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Oh, before I forget, one more link. Every so often recently, someone will bring up the idea of a “Progressive alliance”. Three months ago, I expressed a fairly jaundiced opinion on the idea because of several reasons I laid out. If anything, over the past few months, my views on the subject have curdled even further.
See you tomorrow, with… the usual Thursday ‘something else’, one that will be written for a very special purpose.
Sixty-one days. Sixty-one posts. One 2022 slowly approaching.
I’ve signed up to ko-fi.com, so if you fancy throwing me a couple of quid every so often, to keep me in a caffeine-fuelled typing mood, feel free. I’m on https://ko-fi.com/budgiehypoth
This post is part of a series of blog entries, counting down to the new year. You can see the other posts in the run by clicking here.