It’s urgent to get people registered to vote before the election. Here are some leaflet designs that I’ve modified to add the important deadline dates. The originals were copied from https://twitter.com/sazmeister88 (I hope she doesn’t mind). I’m not proud of my edits, which were done in haste, but time is of the essence, so here they are in case anyone else can make use of them.
Your publicity says that Brexit is the most important issue facing the country. I agree wholeheartedly. I have been campaigning with you against it.
Here in Cambridge we are sure to get a passionately pro-EU MP. The only realistic candidates are both of that opinion. I think the better choice is Daniel Zeichner MP because he’s a voice of reason within the Labour Party, and as an MP he can have the most influence on the leadership. You prefer your own man. OK.
But given the scale of the disaster facing the country, the question of who gets to be MP for Cambridge is just not that important. What matters is to win as many seats as we can from the parties who are set on steering us towards the edge of the precipice. We can all do that best by directing our efforts to other constituencies.
As a Labour Party member with experience of the party’s organizational techniques, I can be most useful in a place where there is a straight, winnable fight between Labour and the forces of darkness. The obvious choice for me therefore is Peterborough. So today I have contacted the secretary of Peterborough Labour Party and volunteered my services.
I urge you to do likewise: go outside the city and direct your efforts where you can make a real difference on the most important issue. Please give it some serious thought.
Update: the excellent Get Voting tactical voting dashboard from Best for Britain supports my view. It recommends “either Labour or Lib Dem” in Cambridge (and it notes the “current Labour MP’s excellent record on Europe in Parliament”). Meanwhile for Peterborough it urges a Labour vote, and in both South Cambs and South-East Cambs it recommends Lib Dem.
Furious, yesterday evening, to see Lib Dems all over the streets of Chesterton like a rash, throwing huge efforts into — what? Into trying to unseat a passionately pro-European MP! One who is a voice of reason in the Labour Party nationally, one who cares about all the best things they care about (electoral reform, green issues, refugees, …).
Just a few miles outside this city in any direction are Tory-held constituencies where the only possible contender is a Lib Dem, and where huge swathes of the population voted Remain — where there is some chance that they could use their energies to achieve something worth achieving, to help in some small way to avert the coming national disaster.
Well, I guess they’ve achieved one small thing: they’ve prompted a moment of clarity in this muddle-headed and dithering erstwhile Labour activist. At last I have seen one thing clearly enough to know which side of the fence I’m on. Daniel Zeichner in Parliament is an indisputable force for good. If the election nationally turns out the way the polls suggest, his presence in the PLP will be even more important than it is already. We need him to help pick up the pieces and rebuild a credible opposition. Don’t mess that up, please! In Cambridge, vote Labour.
Andrew: … the weird thing, when you go to visit and actually look at what they are saying, is how moderate and reasonable the Occupy people seem to be. Most of them are only saying the same sort of things as most of the other people you hear. [As he talks he is approaching the wall with a new photo off the big printer, this one cropped to a tall portrait format.]
I: [looking critically at the new print] Why such huge margins?
Jón: [without missing a beat] Yes, that’s the kind of question they’re asking.
It’s this sort of thing that makes me glad I live in Cambridge, despite the drizzle.
… so said the weather report on the radio. And it was.
But it could have been worse. And at least now there is something definite to do: we have a referendum to win. I know it’s only for AV, but still it must be won.
AV does at least solve some of the problems with the current system: it removes the need for tactical voting—you give your first preference to the one you really want, and your second preference to the one you would have picked as the safe tactical choice—and it has the potential to lay to rest all those tedious arguments about how the voters would have supported a party if only it had been either more or less extreme in its policies: you can test the theory by putting up candidates of both flavours and seeing which of them the voters actually prefer.
And an AV system can be modified later into a true PR system. Once people have got used to the idea of preference voting, perhaps expanding the size of constituencies (so that it becomes STV) or adding top-up members (so that it becomes AV+) would seem like less of a leap into the unknown.
The next five years, or however long this coalition lasts, are going to be grim for the country, though. I haven’t forgotten the 1980s. And I went to Cambridge, and I met a lot of people like that Cameron chap, and I know how obnoxious they are when they aren’t trying to sound nice.
I find that taking part in a demonstration is not compatible with photography. This is the only usable still photo I got. I made a little video, too, where you can hear the shouting.
I’m off to London this afternoon to join in the shouting outside the Lib Dem meeting. Meanwhile I have set up a Facebook group in an attempt to get a critical mass of supporters for a protest event here in Cambridge. There are events being organized for this coming Saturday (the 15th) in several other places, so I hope we might manage one here, too.
This is the moment electoral reformers have been waiting for—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I feel inclined to do something active. I’d have been in London yesterday outside the Lib Dem meeting, shouting, if I hadn’t had a work commitment. I know that a lot of people here in Cambridge feel as I do on the electoral reform question. Can we get ourselves together and do something locally, in the way of a public meeting, rally or demonstration?
I think it is important to remind the Lib Dems that a lot of their support came from anti-Tory tactical voters who will be outraged if they sacrifice this chance in order to make a deal. The long-term health of the country will be best served by their insisting on a referendum now.
For a statement of the main arguments for PR as I see them, see a piece I wrote some time ago in a quieter moment.
I’m in favour of representative democracy. I don’t have to justify that bit, do I? The bit I have to explain is why I believe it’s necessary to change the electoral system.
The system we have in Britain is called First Past the Post. However many candidates are standing for a constituency, each voter only has a single vote and must choose only one candidate to vote for. The candidate receiving the most votes wins. This system sounds superficially fair, and it’s not bad if there are only two candidates, but it is deeply flawed in the more usual case where there are three or more.
First Past the Post causes tactical voting. This happens when there is a candidate who is OK but not great, another whom you definitely don’t like, and a third one whom you really prefer, but you think has little chance of winning. (Your assessment of the probabilities probably comes from opinion polls and/or data from past elections). You will have to decide whether to vote for the just-OK candidate or whether to ‘waste’ your vote on the no-hoper. Having to make this kind of tactical decision really annoys most voters. It encourages cynicism. It means that your vote is not a clear positive statement of what you believe in. Great things have been achieved occasionally by organised tactical voting (see Billy Bragg’s report on the ‘Vote Dorset’ campaign in 2001 for example; the election of Martin Bell to parliament in 1997 was another example) but this takes a huge amount of effort that wouldn’t be necessary at all if the electoral system handled your preferences for you in a sensible way – as it easily could if we adopted a preference-based voting system such as STV.
First Past the Post gives rise to safe seats. This happens because the population isn’t evenly spread among the constituencies. Many areas contain so many people who have a general tendency to favour one particular party that everybody knows that that party will always win that seat. This is bad for several reasons:
An assembly elected by First Past the Post does not usually come out proportional with respect to the representation of parties. Political parties that suffer from this effect think that this is the most important problem. Most people don’t esteem political parties as highly as they do themselves, but still proportionality does matter. The current system delivers large parliamentary majorities based on a minority of the popular vote. The effect is an unstable ‘see-saw’ between the two major parties, with smaller parties having no real influence.
The incentive this gives parties to stay large at all costs is immense. A party that splits into factions is completely sunk. This gives rise to dishonesty in politics because parties have to pretend to be united when they aren’t. A proportional system doesn’t reward parties for staying large, so differences in opinion are more likely to result in splits. These splits don’t hurt because smaller parties can still band together in coalitions to form governments. And they empower the voters, because each of the smaller parties can say honestly what it believes in and how it differs from the others, and the voters can express through the electoral system exactly which nuance of opinion they prefer.
Fortunately there are superior systems, so we don’t have to live with these problems. They are practical, they’re easy to use, and they work. For information about these better alternatives, consult the Electoral Reform Society. I joined the ERS following the 1987 General Election. In Cambridge the Tory had been in the lead with the second and third candidates neck-and-neck. I’d found it very difficult to decide how to vote, and this is what started me thinking about the whole issue.
I joined the Electoral Reform Society in 1987 and have been a member ever since. I’ve also been a member of the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform since soon after I joined the Labour Party. I serve as Regional Representative for LCER. I also signed Charter 88 in response to its first ever newspaper advertisement.
After the 1997 General Election, all of us who wanted electoral reform were hopeful that it would happen soon. In anticipation of the need for a coordinated ‘yes’ campaign to swing into action once a referendum was called, a new umbrella organisation called Make Votes Count was set up. A group of us immediately stepped forward to form a local group in Cambridge, which was active for a couple of years. I served as Secretary to this local group.
It turned out that the first battle that had to be fought was within the Labour Party, and our local group’s main achievement was in training and supporting those of its members who were also Labour Party activists, so as to provide guest speakers to Labour policy forums in and around Cambridge. I myself, as a result of this, went through the training course that the ERS organised for Make Votes Count and became authorised to speak on behalf of the organisation at public meetings. We were successful in our objective in that all the meetings to which we sent speakers were persuaded to vote in favour of reform. It now appears, however, that the hoped-for referendum is not going to happen in the near future. Because of this, our local group is not currently active.
The main focus of my interest in reform has always been the electoral system, but I’m also in favour of reforming British political life in various other ways, for example by introducing a written constitution, increasing the amount of free speech and free information, and replacing the house of lords with an elected second chamber. In some ways my views on these issues look rather similar to those of a typical Liberal Democrat. People in the Lib Dem party have sometimes sought to convince me that I’m in the wrong party. But they don’t understand. I agree with them on some questions about how society should arrive at its collective decisions, but I differ on the more important question of what we need to decide and why.
We’re all in this together. It’s not possible to create a satisfactory life for just yourself. John Donne said it best in 1624:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
So, for example, the introduction of the National Minimum Wage is unlikely ever to affect me personally and directly – I expect to be able to get work that pays more than that anyway – but nevertheless it improves the quality of my life because it improves the quality of the society in which I live. So I’m proud to have taken part in making it happen, by working to get a Labour government elected in 1997.
I do accept that the Labour Party has some faults. Joining a political party is always a compromise, but it’s the most effective way to change things. I support most of Labour’s policies, and I’m part of campaigning groups within the party to change some policies with which I disagree.