The FishTank

There’s an awful lot about tactical voting in the media today: Labour telling people to vote Labour (or Lib Dem) to guarantee the Tory doesn’t get in; the Lib Dems saying people should vote Lib Dem to keep the Tories out; the Tories saying that people should vote Tory to get the Tory in… it goes on. Most of it is bound up in the myth of the ‘anti-Tory vote’ – an idea continually peddled in newspapers like The Guardian and gleefully lapped up by Labour.

The truth is that if there is an anti-Tory vote it is mostly amongst people who have already been fooled by Labour propaganda. Labour have, for the last thirteen years, been conducting an ongoing smear campaign, an attempt to characterise the previous Conservative governments as an evil as bad as Nazi Germany, not because they genuinely believe it – after all, they wouldn’t have stolen Conservative policies to get into office in 1997 if they’d thought them evil – but because they believe that making the Conservatives unelectable will, by extension, make them the only possible rulers in a one-party state. In 2007, when the Conservative vote was at a low ebb, it was a gleeful Labour Party who proclaimed the end of the Tories. David Cameron’s speech without notes killed that idea, and forced Gordon Brown to cancel the election he’d hoped would increase his majority and extend his term in office. Now, again, it is Labour who are peddling the idea of a ‘progressive alliance’ against the Tories and, again, it’s based not so much on ideological belief, but electoral calculus.

Why can I be sure that this ideological schism doesn’t exist? Well, the truth is that any major party tends to be divided inwardly, and some of these inward divisions are larger than those between the parties. The Blairite right of Labour – the ascendancy that garnered victory in 1997 – are the Labourites whose policies most resemble those of the Conservatives, with a free-market ideology, belief in private involvement in public services, light-touch regulation of finance and so on and so forth. Had Brown not been Blair’s chancellor, they would undoubtedly have coupled the above with a lower tax regime as well. It is the left of Labour that believes in the unalloyed power of the State, the duty to engineer society by wealth redistribution and the ‘mother knows best’ attitude that has come to be called the nanny state.

The Liberals, too, have their divides. Social Liberals bear a strong resemblance to the left of Labour, whilst Free-market Liberals more closely resemble the right of Labour and the Conservatives. The Conservatives don’t have a left-right divide in this way, but they do divide on specific policy issues, most notably on Europe – although the party as a whole has become more Eurosceptic since 1997.

Given that the people consistently voted for Blair’s right-leaning policies in 1997, 2001 and 2005 and it is only under Brown that the party’s prospects have become so dim, it would suggest far from an anti-Tory vote in the country, there is an actively pro-Tory vote and Labour fears that, if the Tories garner that vote, they will win the election. Labour’s landslide in 1997 was not a reaction against policies, but against a party, and now that the pendulum has swung the other way, Labour fear that they will similarly be driven from office and into the wilderness. To rub salt into the wound, this time there is, at a casual glance, a chance they could become the third party, as the Liberals did in the 1920’s.

Only, of course, it won’t work that way. The Electoral Commission has seen to it that boundaries are drawn in such a way that there is a chance – if only a slim one – that Labour could lose the popular vote and still win the most seats. Even if the Lib Dems overtake them in the popular vote, they are still likely to come third with only about half as many seats as Labour. If Labour can take votes from the Lib Dems in Lab/Con marginals, they may be able to shore up their vote enough to come first and the easiest way to achieve this is to convince Lib Dem voters that voting Labour will somehow be maximising the anti-Tory vote and ensuring the progressive agenda.

It’s a similar trick in Lib-Dem/Con marginals. Here, votes against the Conservatives are what counts. The Lib Dems will not, in Labour’s view, have any chance of getting enough seats to come first, so depressing Conservative seats increases the chances of coming first for Labour.

And if it works and Labour comes first? Talk about electoral reform is, of course, the carrot. Here’s a poorly guarded secret: it’s a lie. Anyone who honestly thinks that Gordon Brown, holding half the seats with a third of the vote is going to enact a policy that would require him to get 50% of the vote to keep the same degree of power is either mad or deluded. He knows that coalition means less power for him, that other European leaders would kill to have as much authority as a British Prime Minister. If you vote Labour in the hope that it gives Nick Clegg ascendancy and sweeps aside the old politics, then you’re going to be very disappointed.

Assuming, of course, that it’s not Labour who are disappointed. Because whatever the Labour spin machine have done to demonise the Tories, they have done almost as much, if not more, to tarnish their own brand. Axing the 10% tax rate, eroding civil liberties, starting illegal wars, branding people with genuine concerns about immigration as bigots, all of these contribute to an anti-Labour vote. We don’t know how strong it is, but Labour’s continued poor showing in the polls suggests there are quite a few people out there who hate Brown as much as they’ve been told to hate Thatcher. And Thatcher’s not running this time.

So, if people hear Labour politicians telling them to vote Lib Dem to ‘keep the Tory out’, whilst the Tories continue their message about voting Clegg and getting Brown, the penny might actually drop. People who are disenchanted with the tyrant Brown and who wish him brought down might consider that a different type of tactical voting is in order – one where they vote Lib Dem in Lib/Lab margins and Conservative in the Lab/Con ones. One which might, despite the Electoral Commission’s gerrymandering, deliver a real change in our politics, the first shift in the tectonic plates in ninety years. Obviously, I can’t guarantee that a Lib-Dem official opposition will be quite as wedded to the idea of electoral reform as they claim at present, but having both a new government and an opposition who can’t simply be dismissed as the cause of all the problems would be a much stronger combination than a squabbling coalition or a discredited wreck of a party clinging to the vestiges of power for a little longer. And, looking a little further down the track, it’ll be worth keeping an eye on those internal party divides. Because those might just be the first signs of a much more significant realignment of politics to come.

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