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Perhaps I just have more respect for my vote than you do. I believe that voting tactically is dishonest and more of a wasted vote than an "idealistic" vote.
With respect, that's a silly statement. One cannot vote honestly or dishonestly, unless possibly one votes Conservative and immediately convinces oneself that one has actually voted Labour. One can vote in a way that is not true to one's principles, for a number of reasons. One can be dishonest when asked for whom one voted, if one so chooses. But a vote that is dishonest simple is an incoherent concept. Likewise, I'm not sure exactly what a wasted vote is, except perhaps a vote for a losing candidate. Even then, the vote has an impact - it is added to the number of people who voted for each party, which then helps to define what is and is not popular, it affects how one thinks of oneself and how others, if you are honest about your voting, think of you, and so on.
So, voting. One votes to achieve certain aims. One of those aims might be to reflect your own ideology, but it need not be the only aim. Another might be to prevent the victory in your constituency of ideologies more hostile to your own than the idologies you vote for. For example, a rabid Europhobe might decide to vote Conservative rather than UKIP because he feels that the Conservatives, although not as sympathetic to his personal ideology as UKIP, are more likely to be able to _enforce_ an ideology that is more sympathetic to his ideology than, say, New Labour. That's tactical voting, and it demonstrates some of the weaknesses of Ray Fawkes' analysis - most obviously, that it is based on a purely binary electoral system, which we do not have.
So. It seems perfectly reasonable to say to oneself "Self, I am reasonably confident that the Conservatives will not win this General Election. However, whereas the Green Party most closely reflects my own ideology, in this particular instance I find the idea of adding a vote to the number of people who voted for the Green party in the knowledge that they have no chance whatever of winning the seat they are voting in is a less pressing good, in my opinion, than my desire to ensure that the message is given that the Conservative's platform of racial hatred and hostility is a doomed one, and in order to do that I will vote for a party that is less reflective of my own pure political ideology, but more likely to achieve an aim that I feel is more important when contrasted with its achievability, by beating the Conservatives. What say you?”
So far, so good. Therefore, if your primary aim is to ensure that the Conservative party receives as few seats as possible, in the hope that it will lead to the abandonment of policies that you feel would if they entered the political mainstream be ruinous, and if you lived in a marginal seat, it would make sense to fulfil that aim to vote for the party in your estimation most likely to defeat the Conservative party. Nothing wasted about that vote, except if you feel that it is wasted if it fails to achieve that end, in which case a vote based on principle would also be wasted, if the aim was to advance the success of the party one is supporting on principle rather than simply to feel good about oneself for having supported noble principles. Nothing wrong necessarily with either of those aims – citizens are given the vote to do with as they will – discard it, use it to feel self-righteous, use it in support of a party whose political goals match their ideology, use it to frustrate the ambitions of a party whose ideologies are considered so repellent as to compel the subordination of the desire to use the vote to express one’s own ideological preferences, and so on.
Now, what’s interesting is that there are clearly a lot of people, many of whom have traditionally voted Labour (often tactically in the sense that Labour was the political party most likely to succeed whose ideologies most closely mapped to their own), who are now profoundly unwilling to vote Labour because of their personal antipathy to Tony Blair and also because of the single issue of the handling of Iraq. Now, very few of these people are going to transfer their vote to the Conservatives, so that is not an issue. Some will not vote, some will vote for parties closer to their ideological basis despite the low chance of victory (Green, SWP, RCP and so on), and some will transfer their vote to a party which might be a serious contender for a seat (in most cases the Lib Dems, a defection to whom therefore counts double in seats poised between Labour and the Lib Dems). Cumulatively, these may have an impact if not on the simple win/lose result of the election, then on the form and numbers of Parliament after the election. What does Mr. Tony do about this? He can’t tell people to stop thinking about it, because clearly some still do. He cannot admit that he knew there were no WMDs, say, because if he did he would then have to step down immediately and throw the party into chaos. So, he is having to offer what are in effect ideological sops to that constituency, in the hope that they will hold their nose and vote Labour – the promise to foreground fighting HIV and AIDS in Africa, the abolition of European farming subsidies, tighter control of the arms trade. Whether that will work, or whether Iraq has made the departure of many non-negotiable is one of the things we’ll find out, but deciding for ideological reasons not to vote Labour is something that affects the election, as does deciding for pragmatic reasons to vote Labour in a straight Labour/Conservative marginal. |
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