I am going to do something this week I swore I wouldn’t do many years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I joined the Liberal Party when I was 15, actually as a result of reading the manifestoes of the various parties at the time and deciding that the Liberals had ideas I could get behind, which was prompted by my school holding a mock election, in which I stood for the Liberals and, to much surprise, won. When I left University and returned to my home town, I became active in local politics as a Liberal; the SDP came along, and the Liberal-SDP Alliance, and I got elected to a local council seat at a by-election, which I managed to hang on to through four elections. That was one of the few times when I voted for someone not from my own party \u2013 they were from the SDP, and he got elected too;\u00a0 there were vacancies at Town and District level, and he got District, but only served one full term. I won the seat at District level the next time… It was also one of three times I have voted for someone other than myself who has won (one of the others was when, for one term, my running mate from the LibDems was also elected).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The two parties\nmerged, becoming the Liberal Democrats, and from the 1970s to the early 2000s,\nthat was the way I voted, and that was the party I paid a subscription to. In\nconscience, I only let the subscription lapse because I couldn\u2019t afford it in\n2005 onwards, but I was hugely disappointed by Nick Clegg\u2019s coalition with the\nTories from 2010. I really couldn\u2019t see any sensible identity of interest\nbetween the Liberals I knew and Cameron\u2019s Tories, and my worst fears were\nconfirmed when none of the policies the LibDems wanted actually happened (and\nClegg\u2019s pledge on University tuition was broken), apart, that is, from the Fixed\nTerm Parliaments Act. In 2015, the Tories selectively targeted LibDem seats\npretty much on the basis that if you were going to vote LibDem you were going\nto vote for them anyway, and were talking to LibDem voters who were as\ndisappointed as I was…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Throughout the 50 years since that school mock election, I have railed against a phenomenon I have seen time and time again when canvassing; people said they would like to vote LibDem, but they didn\u2019t stand a chance of being elected (and yes, they said that to me when I was a sitting councillor and clearly HAD been elected previously) and, when quizzed how they were likely to vote, generally said that they would vote X because otherwise Y might get in (the X and Y could be Labour or Conservative interchangeably). I\u2019d estimate that at least 50% of people were claiming they were voting the way they did as a negative<\/em><\/strong> vote, i.e. not because they liked the party they were voting for, but because they hated or feared \u201cthe other\u201d party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is, of course, what \u201cfirst past the post\u201d voting gives you \u2013 a system in which you vote against<\/em><\/strong> people and policies, rather than for <\/em><\/strong>them. I vowed that I would not fall into that trap, and would always vote positively…<\/p>\n\n\n\n Incidentally, my preferred voting system is single transferrable vote \u2013 you rank candidates in order of preference, and the one with least first preference votes is eliminated and their second preferences are counted, and so on until someone has an absolute majority. This is not a proportional representation system, as such, although it does yield far more proportional results than first past the post (in which a party with 34% of the votes cast can get a really solid majority, almost a landslide, given that there are quite a few minor parties on our ballot papers). However, it allows you to vote positively rather than negatively, it does elect people who have the support of over 50% of the voters, even if some of those are second or third preferences, and it allows you to vote for an individual to represent you, not just a party, and that can include independents, who I think are in general a good idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As another aside, the other time when I voted for someone other than myself who won was in the Euro elections earlier this year \u2013 I voted LibDem, and due to us having a regional list system for Euro elections (mandated by the EU), we did elect one LibDem MEP, together with one Labour, one Green and (to my shame) three Brexit MEPs. I don\u2019t like regional list particularly \u2013 it gives a lot of power to the political parties (who choose the order in which their candidates get elected, so you can\u2019t necessarily vote for an individual) and it tends to eliminate individuals, who typically can\u2019t get on the ballot paper at all, having no national or at least regional party behind them (there\u2019s usually a cut-off for the size of parties), but on that occasion is did give me a positive vote which counted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, this election I am going to break the vow I made to myself. I\u2019m going to vote negatively, against the sitting Conservative MP, and while I\u2019d have naturally gone back to my allegiance of 50 years, the LibDem candidate doesn\u2019t stand a chance of unseating the current MP, and the Labour candidate just might (the constituency was actually held by Labour from 1997 to 2005, but then had its boundaries radically altered which favoured the Conservatives a lot). I think this particular election is so important that I\u2019m prepared to do this, against my better principles.<\/em><\/strong> Might I have voted Labour anyhow, given that the more I read the gospels, the more I think that Jesus would have thoroughly approved socialism, and I flatly disbelieve most of the tales peddled by the media about Corbyn (including that which has been picked up and repeated by the Chief Rabbi)? Possibly, though I still have some reservations about the good sense of Labour elected representatives, and I prefer the LibDem approach to Brexit, which is just to cancel it, while being disappointed by Corbyn\u2019s equivocal stance on it \u2013 and read below…<\/p>\n\n\n\n Firstly, Brexit\nmust be either stopped or a FAR better trade deal than the one which Boris\u2019\nagreement signposts must be available. There is a huge chance that Boris\u2019 deal\nwon\u2019t go through anyhow, and we will be left with a \u201cno deal\u201d Brexit, and I am\nabsolutely convinced that this would damage the country\u2019s industry and its\nfinances for many, many years \u2013 and in either case, we would be left having to\nnegotiate a trade deal with the US, whose basic negotiating posture is that US\ncompanies should have access to everything (including the NHS) and that they\nshould also be able to sue the government if it legislates in a way which might\ndamage their profits, such as environmental legislation, food and trading\nstandards, animal welfare and potentially employment security (look at TTIP<\/a>\nif you doubt this). Corbyn might manage to negotiate something like a \u201cNorway\u201d\ndeal, which is something I could live with… and he will give us a say again\nin a referendum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That, however,\nis not all. Unless a very<\/em><\/strong> beneficial form of Brexit, i.e.\nsomething like Norway\u2019s arrangement \n(which, incidentally, includes most of the things people have complained\nabout with membership of the EU, but without any representation or veto over\nthe rules they are subject to), can be reached, the spending plans of either\nLabour or the Conservatives are going to be impossible to meet, and while I\u2019m\npretty sure Labour will at least try, the Conservatives are the ones who have\nimposed austerity over the last 15 years and crippled services in the process.\nThe NHS, social care, police, education, libraries… the list is endless. The\nchances of them turning over a new leaf if, as all reputable economic sources\nindicate, we have far less money to spend following Brexit are, I think, zero.\nThey also propose to demolish human rights legislation, taking us out of the\nEuropean Convention on Human Rights, and their manifesto includes pledges to\nstop the courts having power over administrative decisions and to remove the power\nof parliament to bring a government to account. And, of course, their whole\ncampaign has been lies piled upon lies. They absolutely cannot be trusted to\nrun the country \u2013 I wouldn\u2019t let them run a local cricket club…<\/p>\n\n\n\n The result would be a government which gets elected at a time chosen by the previous government (the Fixed Term Parliaments Act is to go) and then is responsible to no-one \u2013 not parliament, not the courts and certainly not the public \u2013 until it decides it\u2019s time to have another election, hopefully still with 5 years as a longstop. With no checks and balances on them, I think the term \u201celective dictatorship\u201d is not too strong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I put Brexit first because I doubt that the negative effects will be able to be reversed at all easily \u2013 and some of them won\u2019t be reversible. Even if we were to apply for membership again after a few years lapse, it is beyond belief that we would get as good a deal as we have now, with multiple derogations from various EU programmes (including Schengen and the Euro) and a substantial rebate on the cost. Maybe a TTIP-style trade deal with the US which was forced on us could be rescinded, but I think the fallout from that would be very nasty, and a lot of the damage (for instance to the NHS) might not be repairable; the likely environmental damage almost certainly wouldn\u2019t be. I also fear that the effects would be so unpleasant (think food and medicine shortages, for instance) that the people would not wait for another election to take action, and I am very much opposed to revolutions…<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, a Tory\ngovernment for 5 years would be a very nasty thing in and of itself, but\nassuming that we did manage to avoid a revolution, I note that among 20-30 year\nolds, support for the Tories is below 25%, and that age group and younger\ngenerations will increasingly be in a majority as time passes. There is a reasonable\nchance that in that department, any damage will be relatively short term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taking the two together, though, I think that electing the Conservatives with a working majority poses an existential threat to the Britain I know and love. Electing them as the largest party and so the one expected to form a new government would be bad enough, and I can\u2019t see Corbyn managing to get more MPs than Johnson \u2013 but I can live in hope, and I\u2019m not scared of a Labour government any more, particularly one which needs support from one or both of the LibDems and the SNP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am going to do something this week I swore I wouldn’t do many years ago. I joined the Liberal Party when I was 15, actually as a result of reading the manifestoes of the various parties at the time and deciding that the Liberals had ideas I could get behind, which was prompted by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1604"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1605,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions\/1605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}