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Two features make this election more difficult to predict than any predecessor. The polls are usually pretty good predictors but got a bloody nose last time. So they’ve changed their methods. MORI continues with good old interviews, others have switched to cheaper phone surveys. A couple have gone to even cheaper email polling which is better at displaying trends rather than predicting results. So there are wide variations from a l0% Labour lead to a l%. The old trick of averaging them out won`t work because you can`t average different methods.
The Tories enjoyed the benefits of an electoral bias to them for yonks and pretended it was something from God to recognise their natural superiority. Now there’s a bias to Labour. Our constituencies are smaller by 5-6000 than the average Tory seat. So even if we’re neck and neck in the polls Labour will still win with a good majority. Don`t let that news get out because it takes all the horse race excitement away.
Result: Boredom. As well as uncertainty. Labour should win. The Liberals, currently hovering around 20% but likely to improve their position in the election as thy have done at every past one. So they should do better than they did last time - always assuming Charles Kennedy can stay awake long enough to seize the great historic opportunity of the open Tory goal that lies before him.
Beyond that nothing is clear. Except that the election would be more interesting if it were conducted on a basis of proportional representation. That makes the argument over what percentage vote each party gets crucial because that is translated into the same percentage of seats. It`s fairer, better, more democratic and less likely to produce a boring Labour landslide such as we had last time.
All of which makes it ever more incredible that the Tories, who would be the main beneficiaries from PR, and better able to see off the Liberal challenge with it, are so flatly and totally opposed. Whoever called them the stupid party was clearly thinking of that, not their campaigning strategy. Which has been brilliant at making summat out of nowt. But then it`s done by an Australian.
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`Im amused by the hypocrisy of the campaign building up against the new rules on postal voting. The Tories, who supported it in principle, are now totally against it. The newspapers who never thought about the issue before are now portraying it as the biggest threat to democracy since Oswald Mosely. The bottom dredgers are ringing my office, with posh accents of a type never heard in Grimsby since Tony Crosland died, posing as Grimsby electors anxious to know if I can fiddle them a postal vote or 3,000.
The Labour Party has traditionally been very bad at getting postal votes and now it`s got so few members that it`s going to find difficulty in cheating even if it knew how. The Tories have always won more postal votes than anyone else because they`re so well organised and their people go away more often. The Liberals are fewer on the ground but up to any tricks that are going. Liberals are such total hypocrites that they`re always right.
In any case, there’s nothing wrong with making postal votes easer to get. We are a more mobile society. More people work away from home and we go away more often and the old rules were far too tight.
So I strongly support the principle of easy postal votes because it will improve the turn out by allowing people to vote who otherwise might not do so. The hue and cry against them is largely racist and the faults in the system could easily be remedied if the parties were kept out of it altogether, bulk job, lots of votes were refused, and electoral officials were required to do random checks on the votes. Quad Erat Demonstrandum, as my old maths teacher used to say at Bingley Grammar School.
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While I`m thinking about fraud and whether we should embark on more of it to make the most boring election ever just a little more interesting, it would be dangerous to think we’ve always been pure in the past. There’s a nice story in David Butler’s 1950 British General Election Book of the attempt by the Nationalists to clean up voting in Northern Ireland. That year they put in scrutineers in key polling booths. At one the tellers, who arrived a quarter of an hour after the polls had opened, found that two whole streets of Catholic voters had suddenly and mysteriously all voted in the first quarter of an hour.
They were able however to prevent a whole series of other impersonations until the closure of the poll. B that time an angry Unionist mob had gathered outside to lynch them. The scrutineers and the ballot boxes both had to be taken out by armoured car. Ah, the good old days.
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Are you thinking what I’m thinking - or is it drinking what I`m drinking If you are you’ll be thinking that the squalid Tory campaign of raising grievances that occur under any government, and which they never did anything about when they were in power, is clever but hardly a programme for government.
What they need is another period in opposition to do what we did in the great process of reform under Kinnock, Smith and Blair. Move to the middle ground. Think out a policy which hangs together. Develop a coherent philosophy, not a collection of boil squeezings.
It`s even difficult these days to think what the Tory party stands for. It`s not “do nothing and ask your grandma” conservatism. They’re a party of raving radicals. It`s not paternalism because they believe in the market and hate welfare. It`s not a class born to rule because these days they’re all garagists and arrivistes; people see breeding as a leisure pastime, not the kind of hand polishing public school chaps got. They`re not even the natural party of government any longer. Their first instinct now is to wreck the world Labour builds and repeal every treaty this country has ever signed: the Convention on Refugees, the Treaties of Rome, Maastricht and Nice, and the Schengan Agreement. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? It would be chaos. But interesting. |
