Who's Jack Voting For?


Might as well put this up.

I consider it a moral obligation to vote against the current coalition, and to maximise any impact such a vote might have… which is why, despite the fact that I loathe and despise the Labour Party, I would vote Labour were I in a constituency where such a vote might conceivably contribute towards a Labour victory. 

As it happens, I live in a constituency that has been a solid Tory seat for generations.  Really, where I live they’d elect a dog turd if it had a blue rosette stuck on it.  In fact, when I look at the robotic, empty-headed drone and waste of clothes who currently ‘represents’ me in Parliament, I think they did.

The nearest possible challengers to the Tories in my constituency are the Yellow Tories, whom I am proud to say I have never voted for in my life, not even tactically, not even in 2010 when lots of ostensibly left-leaning useful idiots tried to bully me into voting LibDem, saying (ludicrously as I pointed out at the time - something which I have since very much enjoyed being proved right about) that doing so would block the Tories.

So I shall be free to vote some non-Labour, non-coalition option.  Green probably, since they’re usually the only thing on my ballot paper that looks even vaguely left-wing (despite my issues with their lack of connection to the working class or unions, and their record of selling out workers the moment they acquire even the sniff of power).

I would be perfectly within my moral rights to abstain from voting given this depressing scenario.  Even what I feel is my moral duty to vote anti-Coalition doesn’t fool me into thinking that my vote will mean anything.  Like millions of people who have been effectively disenfranchised by our rigged system and its varigated monopoly of neoliberal parties, I would be accused of ‘apathy’ by assorted finger-wagging smuggos if I abstained.  But abstention is a morally defencible option.  It just isn’t one I feel I can take at the moment.

So I shall hold my nose, vote Green (probably) and then go home and vigorously wash my hands in scalding hot water and bleach, feeling simultaneously dirty and relieved that I managed to do what I consider to be the least possible amount of evil.

Ain’t democracy inspiring?


Anonymous 4 years, 1 month ago

Deducing that a Liberal vote won't block the Tories from a single election whose electoral mathematics yielded a majority for a Conservative-Liberal coalition and a minority for a Labour-Liberal coalition doesn't really seem like a fair test. The effects of a vote (if you don't live in a safe seat) are surely probabilistic, depending on how the greater election goes. Tipping seats from Conservative to Liberal could have blocked the Tories, if we were lucky. (Or at least, this isn't disproven.) But too many seats went blue, so we weren't.

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SpaceSquid 4 years, 1 month ago

All of this.

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Larry Franzon 4 years ago

You could start a movement for getting rid of the single-man constituency system and adopting the objectively better party list system that the rest of the democratic world seems to prefer.

The probability of such a movement doing an actual difference? Quite low, I'm sure, but hardly lower than the chance of Jack's home constituency voting for a candidat who isn't "a dog turd if it had a blue rosette stuck on it." So it might still be worth a chance.

Oh, and please don't blame the democracy, Mr-blogger-sir. The fault lies with the Labour party, whom have not even considered changing the obviously rigged "anti-change" voting system because it just so happens to be rigged in their favor.

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Kit Power 4 years ago

"The fault lies with the Labour party, whom have not even considered changing the obviously rigged "anti-change" voting system because it just so happens to be rigged in their favor." - Apart from in 2010, where a shift to AV was in their manifesto, and AV+ referendum was also offered.

Of course since then we've had the disastrous AV referendum, which will ensure this broken system is perpetuated for at least another 15 - 20 years. And that is squarely at Nick Clegg's door, not Labour.

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Josh04 4 years ago

AV+ was invented at Labour's behest, and they promptly ignored it's existence for the rest of their time in power. There's no reason to think that one more term would have changed that.

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Kit Power 4 years ago

Except they offered AV to Clegg as part of their negotiations, and had in in their 2010 manifesto. Clegg turned it down, sure he could win a referendum vote, because of course two in the bush is always more attractive.

Even if a rainbow coalition had collapsed in 18 months, they could have gotten AV on the books first, which would have been a huge achievement. Instead, we got all the stability we could handle, and are about to get more. And it really is all Nick Clegg's fault.

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TommyR01D 2 years, 8 months ago

There was never any real possibility of a Lib-Lab coalition in 2010. Even accounting for how 57 Liberal Democrats plus 258 Labour MPs still wouldn't have made a majority, there's the issue of legitimacy.

In 1974 (the most recent precedent for a hung parliament in Britain) the Liberals turned down Edward Heath on the basis that they couldn't prop up an incumbent who had clearly lost his popular mandate. That was after an election in which the Conservatives had actually won the plurality of the vote. In 2010, Gordon Brown was perhaps the least popular leader in living memory and Labour had gone down to 29.0% (yes, a whole 1.7pp below what the Conservatives had gotten in their landslide defeat of 1997). There was no way that a Brown-Clegg deal wouldn't have looked at least mildly hypocritical.
Cameron had a greater popular mandate in 2010 than Blair got in 2005, so to deny him the premiership would have looked like some sort of anti-Cameron cartel, especially if the "progressive alliance" of all and sundry from the left had come to pass.

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