Tactical Voting and the Electoral Dark Arts

The news in the Times this week that Labour had been sending ‘campaign improvement boards’ - groups of ‘experts’ from headquarters to check up on and advise local party organisations ahead of these elections - didn’t come as any surprise, given my experience of student politics in in the 1980s.

Back then, we sat at the feet of officials sent out by the Labour Party’s youth wing to to explain to us exactly how to set up tactical voting for student union elections (a complicated business before the widespread availability of personal computers to do the number-crunching) and just how far a smear campaign could go without breaking any rules.

Those of us who expressed concern about some of the methods being advocated in the workshops were offered plenty of reassurance; our actions might be morally dubious, they said, but when faced with the urgent necessity of removing Margaret Thatcher and preventing the Tories damaging the country further, we were acting in the greater good, the end clearly justifying the means.

IThis was in the days of Red Wedge, where the purchase of a concert ticket automatically enrolled you in the Labour Party; this was hailed as a great success, although, in fact, it was the Party’s subsequent claim that the rapid and vast increase in membership was evidence that the people were spontaneously turning against Thatcher which put the final nail in the coffin of my faith in it as an institution.

Those who were less hampered by moral scruples and stuck with the Party despite the dishonesty and the prevalence of what later came to be known as ‘spin’, must, by my reckoning, be old enough to be in senior positions by now either at a local level or as part of the higher structure; perhaps some of them may even be among the visiting improvement board members who advised the local parties this time round, still peddling their strategies to do down their opposition at all costs.

Back in the days of a two party system, there was a simple progression; in the common version of an often misquoted (and frequently mis-attributed) saying, ‘if you are not a socialist at 20, you have no heart: if you are still a socialist at 40, you have no head’. These days, when misguided and self-indulgent youth is prolonged beyond all previous limits, many more former Red Wedge supporters must have found a political home in the Liberal Democrats.

There is certainly an air of familiarity in Ed Davey’s complacent acknowledgement that tactical voting could work in the next election, along with the local leaflet his party sent out some weeks ago recommending applying for a postal vote to bypass the photo ID requirement at the polling station. Where the Lib Dems go, the other parties will doubtless follow to avoid being placed at a disadvantage.

It seems odd (but somehow inevitable) that, with more knowledge at our fingertips than ever before, we are at risk of being reduced to a nation of low information voters (see previous post), our votes - the precious reward of years of campaigning and struggle by our ancestors, male and female - no longer truly our own but simply fodder for the ever more complicated tactical machinations of our political masters.

(A tip of the tricorn to AK Haart and the much more elegantly laconic post which inspired this ramble: https://akhaart.blogspot.com/2023/05/turned-away.html)